If they want to be treated like independent nations, why don’t they act like them?
Perhaps the closest thing President Donald Trump has to a bedrock principle is his instinctive opposition to any arrangement that favors — or seems to favor — the other guy. The notion that someone might be getting one over on him is something he finds almost morally offensive.
This ethos has lately expressed itself in ways that have unsettled long-established alliance structures. It has led the United States to broadly pursue a more extractive posture toward countries under its security umbrella, and to specifically begin threatening one of them over the newly-salient issue of Greenland.
This has sent a number of them — not just Denmark and its European neighbors but Canada as well — reeling, in fact wondering if they are now just vassals of the United States. To which one in turn can’t help wondering: what exactly did they think was the status quo ante?
Indeed, to ask the question is to answer: their material situation is unchanged; they are already protectorates of the United States and were happy to remain so as long as it was called a “partnership”. That such partnerships themselves tend toward fractiousness is inevitable. George Harrison swore for years that being a Beatle was a nightmare. Levon Helm hated The Last Waltz. But the situation here — to use another pop music reference — is increasingly more like Murry Wilson insisting he was still a producer, even as Brian Wilson gave him a fake control panel, so he could get back to mixing Beach Boys records himself.
For some years now, the unreadiness of Canada’s armed forces has been an open secret, and it presently spends more on Indigenous priorities than its military. It is due to such revealed preferences that U.S. jets have had to repeatedly respond to aerial threats over Canadian territory.
Similarly, one of the most telling headlines of the past year was: “France Wants to Build Jet Fighters for Ukraine. Neither Has the Cash.” The UK faces a £28 billion shortfall in defense (excuse me, “defence”) spending even as it commits troops to policing a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. If self-help is one of the essential features of sovereignty (and it is), these are not the conditions of countries that take that obligation terribly seriously.
Let’s allow that Trump’s behavior has been erratic and frankly gangsterish — one can easily picture a cigar-chomping Edgar G. Robinson delivering his “easy way or hard way” line on Greenland. Even as a negotiating position, this rhetoric of public intimidation is inappropriate when directed at Denmark, which has generally been a model ally (and before some administration partisan invokes the Melian Dialogue again, please note that Melos was not already a cooperative ally of Athens).
Let’s also allow that the United States already gets what it needs from Greenland, and there is little reason to think further concessions couldn’t be amicably negotiated from Denmark. By the same token, the longest undefended border in the world and strong commercial ties with a resource-rich neighbor are assets of significant value to the United States, and Trump’s bluster over Canada is foolish and self-defeating. The benefits of mistreating and humiliating friendly countries are unclear.
But as is so often the case, Trump’s contrarianism has a way of revealing political truths that were formerly concealed by the gaseous discourse of technocratic liberalism. The open disrespect he’s displayed, along with some of the blunter language from the recently-published National Security Strategy is to a large degree a more impolite expression of existing American frustration with unbalanced military commitments.
NATO itself has now outlasted the Soviet Union — chief impetus for its original establishment — by 35 years, and it has struggled to articulate its relevance throughout that time. The arguments here quickly become tautological: we care about NATO because NATO is important, and NATO is important because it is cared about. These well-worn paths of reasoning do not include any consideration about actual national interests.
This basic problem of alliance management goes back at least to the Delian League (and NATO arguably has even less of a raison d’être, seeing as the Soviet Union, unlike the Persian Empire at the time, no longer exists). Ever since the Suez Crisis, the U.S. has maintained a push-pull tendency toward its allies: please do more, but wait not too much! Protect your borders like a real sovereign court, but wait who are you selling those strategic materials to? The United States has to hope its provocations spur some of its allies to begin contributing more to collective security without, however, tipping over into competition or just general mistrust.
To quote George Kennan quoting Hilaire Belloc: “Always keep a-hold of Nurse, For fear of finding something worse.” In the Cold War scenario, we were nurse, and the Soviets were worse. Today it is no longer so obvious what the “something worse” might be. China does not pose anything like the threat that the Soviet Union did to Western Europe (and, if we’re being honest, neither does Russia). While one can argue that a Chinese-dominated word — or even one where China was at parity with the United States — would be less favorable to our erstwhile allies, this is not exactly a slam dunk claim. In the absence of clarity on this question, we Americans risk looking more like a not-so-comforting nurse — Nurse Ratched, say, or Annie Wilkes from Misery.
Nonetheless, I think the real danger is not security competition among erstwhile allies, but the further decay of meaningful political life in our world. Machiavelli described how the Roman Empire “with its arms and its greatness, eliminated all republics and all civil ways of life. And although that empire was dissolved, the cities still have not been able to put themselves back together or reorder themselves for civil life except in very few places of that empire.”
America’s allies have accepted their own subordinate status, not just in the sense of being materially weaker (itself neither remarkable nor shameful), but in the sense of becoming essentially de-politicized. The most high-stakes questions are increasingly asked — not to say, decided — elsewhere, and as a result their political sphere has been reduced to the nebulous concerns of “civil society.”
All of this worked its way from the outside in, as abdication of authority over matters of war and peace resulted in increasing loss of political identity. As Charles De Gaulle remarked to André Malraux, “The Europe whose nations hated one another had more reality than the Europe of today.” That was six decades ago; how much truer are those words today?
One has to wonder why so many nations imagined they could just indefinitely function like protectorates without ever having to acknowledge it
That the United States has contributed to this outcome doesn’t change the fact that its allies accepted it so willingly. The United States did not compel Canada to embrace a “post-national” identity, or the core EU countries to fall down on military spending while admitting millions of increasingly unassimilable migrants across their borders, or Australia to pursue policies of consistent deference toward the PRC, and so on.
In the end, one has to wonder why so many nations imagined they could just indefinitely function like protectorates without ever having to acknowledge it. And further: If they didn’t want to end up as American dependencies, why did they act like it for so long?
