President Donald Trump has repeatedly reprimanded NATO allies, openly praised authoritarian governments, and aligned U.S. foreign policy with Russian interests on numerous issues. Most recently, the administration implied in private letters that U.S. military support could be withdrawn if allies do not sufficiently increase their defense spending.

Trump’s narrow focus on burden-sharing has left little room for debate on NATO’s actual performance. It is past time to move the discussion past basic financial metrics and focus more on evaluating how and what NATO has learned from its decades of international crisis management. Collectively identifying strategic lessons and adapting accordingly is important if NATO is to continue providing for the security of all member states. Such an evaluation can provide insights about NATO’s performance above and beyond measuring what percentage of GDP each member state is devoting to defense spending. Organizations that learn from the past are more likely to succeed.

My new book, NATO’s Lessons in Crisis, finds that the alliance is actively learning from its current and past military operations. The alliance’s learning capacity constitutes one of many reasons for the United States to continue investing in the alliance. NATO’s capacity for change in the face of strategic problems suggests that its operations are becoming better suited for increasingly dynamic conflict environments. Moreover, the alliance brings more than a decade of experience in Afghanistan to the table. It also functions as a forum for cooperation on shared security interests (e.g. arms control, counterterrorism, cybersecurity). Choosing to participate in multilateral operations via NATO allows the United States and other allies to divide up labor, spread the costs, benefit from states’ different comparative advantages, enhance the local and international legitimacy of operations and learn from one another’s mistakes. NATO’s bistrategic command structure also provides unique infrastructure for conducting operations.

Read on, courtesy of Heidi Hardt, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, via War on the Rocks.