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Welcome to Rewind & Reconnoiter. Each week, we’ll ask one of our authors to look back at an article they’ve written for War on the Rocks in light of a current news event. Did their argument hold up? Read more below to find out.***In 2017, Henrik Ø. Breitenbauch wrote “Bring European Finance Ministries Kicking and Screaming Into Geopolitics” for War on the Rocks, in which he argued that “real progress on raising European defense spending will require convincing the finance ministers and their top civil servants of the new realities of European geopolitics and the direct utility of defense spending.”  Seven years later, as NATO grapples with a war on its borders and increased threats from the likes of Russia, China, and Iran, we asked him to look back on his piece. Read more below.Photo by The White House via Wikimedia CommonsIn your article, written in 2017, you look at the issue of “burden-sharing” within the NATO alliance and the contention, held by many American politicians including former U.S. President Donald Trump, that Europeans do not pay their fair share. Has this situation changed at all in the years since? The needle has moved enormously on burden-sharing since 2017 — both in terms of billions of dollars and numbers of countries reaching the 2 percent target in 2024 as was set out as a political goal in the Wales declaration a decade before. Take, for example, my own country, Denmark, where the government supported by a majority of parliament has ramped up defense spending at an unprecedented pace. As the NATO Secretary General put it recently: “This year, we expect 18 Allies to meet the 2 percent guideline, spend 2 percent of [gross domestic product] on defense. That’s up from three [Allies] in 2014. That’s a significant increase, meaning that in total