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Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year.
But there is a solution. A new proposal before Congress would close this loophole and ensure these foreign investors pay taxes, just like the actual plaintiffs have to.
It's a common sense move that discourages frivolous and abusive lawsuits and redirects resources back into American jobs, innovation, and growth. Only President Trump and congressional Republicans can deliver this win for America and hold these foreign investors accountable. Contact your lawmakers today and demand they take a stand to end foreign-funded litigation abuse.
Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Toby Seeley and Tom Noonan. At a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Brussels, the US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has laid down the gauntlet. He says NATO members have to increase their defence spending to 5% of GDP and he says they have to agree to that new target when NATO leaders meet later this month.
He insists that the allies are almost unanimous in agreeing to that. But NATO may have come up with some creative accounting to keep Mr Hegseth and his boss Donald Trump happy. The Secretary-General Mark Rutter has proposed countries commit 3.5% of GDP to defence spending specifically. This would be by 2035. He says the rest of that 5% should be spent on infrastructure.
Our guest today is Jim Townsend, who used to be the US's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for European and NATO policy. And that made him key to NATO planning. So, Jim, in total, this target reaches 5%, but it's split up. Just explain why for us.
Well, that's right. And it's made up of the following 3.5% of GDP to go towards defense, military purchases and training, that type of thing. And then 1.5% should go towards infrastructure, military infrastructure, which tackles the problem that we have in Europe with what's called military mobilization or military mobility, which is how the
Militaries can move across Europe. So the German railway system, bridges going into Poland, railroad track compatibility between the West and East Europe. I mean, there's a lot of things that have to be fixed and they have not been fixed yet.
And that helps us get to the 5%, which is what Donald Trump was urging on the allies. So it was a way to get the 5% in a way that's probably a little more achievable than saying, okay, we're going to go from 2% to 5% all on military purchases.
OK, let's break it down then, first focusing on that 3.5% on hardware. Obviously, different countries are currently in different places, so it will vary. But do you think that this is a target to overshoot what members need to be spending in order to beef up NATO and make the deterrent seem overwhelming to an enemy like Russia?
Or do you think that this is just the bare minimum of what members need to get to so that they're at a stage where they're effective war-fighting nations? Well, like you said, it's hard to give a general answer because it's different for every country. But I
Certainly, we need certainly more than 3.5 percent to be spent by nations. I would say in general, 3.5 percent is not necessarily the bare minimum, but the minimum is definitely a floor. But even that 3.5 percent is going to be hard for a lot of nations to meet, including in the United States.
And turning to the 1.5% you mentioned for infrastructure, which I sense people wouldn't ordinarily think of as that important for something like NATO. From your experience, why is it now so interested in railways and bridges and so on?
Well, when the Cold War ended and we brought in these new allies and then all of a sudden, boom, things change. And we understand that the front line is no longer the inner German border. It's now further north. And we got to move forces from bases in Germany up into Poland or into the Baltics.
In 2014, there was a famous dragoon ride done by General Ben Hodges, who was the head of the U.S. Army then. He got together a group of armored vehicles and said, OK, I want you to drive to Slovakia from Germany, see how well it goes. And it was terrible because not only did the roads change,
couldn't carry that kind of weight. But, you know, they couldn't cross the border because they were military vehicles with live ammunition and you had to have paperwork and the drivers had to have a passport. And, you know, you don't think about this, but when you move a body of troops, you know, you don't want to be stopped at every border and inspected for drugs or something, you know, and they've been working on that since. And it is very slow. I think the paperwork pretty much has been done and
in terms of crossing borders, but there's the physical aspects. And that's where this money, the 1.5% will come into use is to fix these problems. So you can move a tank very quickly from Germany to Latvia. So what do you think that 1.5% needs to be spent on to overcome those problems?
Well, I mean, that's a great question. And I would say a couple of things. First is in terms of how that money would be used. I'm thinking of bridges. You know, during the Cold War days in Western Europe, all the bridges could handle a tank. The runways could handle a big, big aircraft. The rail network could handle military rail and have special offload platforms where you could offload a tank from a flatbed railroad car and
to something that could bear the weight so they could drive the tank off the ramp. So this money is going to go to roads. It's going to go to bridges. It's going to go back and look at that German railway system to look at how, if they can find areas where you can offload a tank and not have it collapse. They're going to have to look at ports in the three Baltic countries to make sure there's some ports that can handle ammunition ships that might come in there. Antwerp, the same thing.
Because time has moved on since the Cold War days. And so there's a lot of catch up in terms of infrastructure that you've got to have in place to move militaries across the continent quickly.
Jim, these targets, they're set for 2035. Now, by then, Vladimir Putin will be in his 80s and we could well be into the second term. If whoever succeeds Donald Trump, that's how far ahead this is. This feels an awfully long way off. Is this timeline that NATO's setting out fast enough?
Well, you know, again, it goes back to the threat. And if you talk to a lot of the intel people in the alliance, they'll say that they believe Russia will be ready to do some mischievous things, if you will, maybe Estonia, maybe Moldova, who knows. But he'll be ready to do that if Ukraine is out of the way in the next five years, next seven years, next 10 years.
So if we're looking at something in the latter part of the 2030s, that's a bit far off. So actually, we are behind the eight ball, as we say in the U.S. We're running behind in terms of where we should have been. And part of that is because we took a vacation after 1990, 1991, the end of the Cold War, and everybody was cutting budgets, including the U.S.,
But we realized, as the decades went on, that Russia wasn't turning into the country we thought it was going to be. And suddenly they became a threat. And now we're racing, NATO is racing, to try to catch up and make ourselves strong enough to deter him. It depends on Putin's perceptions. And he knows the time lag between getting that money from the parliament and actually getting deliveries of the equipment. And it could be five years, six years before that even arrives.
That emboldens him to do something. So it's a race against time in a lot of ways. And if between now and 2035, NATO comes to the realisation that, like you say, actually, this needs to go faster, we need to pour more money in and bring these targets forward, how quickly can defence spending be effectively ramped up and accelerated?
Well, that is a great question because I'm afraid that's a lot of the root of the problem. In both the United States and in Europe, we allowed our defense industry to get smaller. We had atrophy from where it was in the Cold War when they were pretty big and could churn out things pretty quickly. Right now, they're pretty small.
And industry responds to demand signals from countries, from governments that want to buy things. Now, suddenly, they're going from zero to 60 in terms of demand. And they don't have the plant and the equipment and the workers, specialized workers, particularly in the U.S., to produce at the scale that the demand is. So if that were to ramp up,
And we realized we needed to really get better in five years, not 15. The delivery times would be well into the future because the assembly lines, you know, they're not there. They'd have to build them in a lot of cases. They'd have to build new factories in order to produce. And it takes time to do that. So we're starting from scratch in some areas. And unlike World War II, where we were able to produce a lot of Spitfires coming off the assembly line pretty fast,
Those are basic planes compared to what we have today. An F-35 or a Jaguar or whatever can take a lot longer to get off an assembly line because it's the precision of both of its manufacturer and the munitions it carries. It takes a long time. It's not like a B-17 bomber of World War II fame. They produce one every hour. You know, that doesn't happen.
So it goes back to Putin's perceptions. Does he see that, too? And does he see that his window will be slammed shut in 10 years because by then the West will have caught up?
OK, Jim, thank you so much for your time. That is Jim Townsend, a former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for European and NATO policy. One part of military planning we didn't touch on with Jim today is nuclear weapons. Yesterday, we spoke to Matthew Kroenig, a nuclear deterrence specialist from the Atlantic Council Think Tank.
He talked about his views on a new nuclear age, and his warning is not so much about how NATO combats Russia. His bigger concern is the growing threat of China. To hear what he thinks needs to be done about it, go back to yesterday and listen to A New Nuclear Age, The Differences from the Cold War. That's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.
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Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement.
Thank you.
It's a common sense move that discourages frivolous and abusive lawsuits and redirects resources back into American jobs, innovation, and growth. Only President Trump and congressional Republicans can deliver this win for America and hold these foreign investors accountable. Contact your lawmakers today and demand they take a stand to end foreign-funded litigation abuse.