Appalled by President Donald Trump and his overt contempt towards U.S. alliances, offended national security officials, commentators and scholars have fallen prey to an overcorrection. Recoiling at Trump’s coarse world view, they over-sentimentalise foreign policy and overrate alliances in general. If alliances are military associations between two or more polities for mutual benefit and aid in extremis, they are best assessed in cold blood. In particular, traditionalist anti-Trumpists at times mischaracterise America’s formal, institutionalised partnerships like NATO, South Korea, Japan and Australia. They revere such relationships not as means to an end, to be reviewed and recalibrated as circumstances change, but as near-sacred arrangements that must be foundational forever.
In truth, alliances forged in peacetime can be useful and provide a state with valuable security benefits. To say that alliances are over-rated is not to say that they should not be rated at all. It is possible to recognise the value of an asset, like a slugging home run hitter who often strikes out or a fast baserunner with below-average batting skills, while being wary of over-inflating it. The same goes for diplomatic relationships. Alliances are not all-important. They can supplement but do not substitute for self-help. They do not dependably function either to prevent or deter war. In some cases, they can help trigger it. They tend to form or collapse in line with pressing material interests. They fare badly when they become inconvenient to one of the parties.
As is notorious, Trump has threatened to abandon U.S. allies or the treaties that bind Washington to their protection. He has described alliances as free-riding extortionate arrangements that bleed American resources. And especially in his second term, he and his officials present America’s diplomatic relationships in starkly transactional terms.
The charge that Trump views alliances as a “protection racket” is misleading: Trump does not threaten to attack allies if they don’t pay up. But he does threaten to cancel protection for defence budget delinquents, and let adversaries have at it. Recall too that he overtly covets or threatens the resources of long-standing partners, from Greenland to Canada, not to mention inflicting punitive tariffs. It is understandable that people who should know better are tempted to define their opposition to Trump around a theology of alliances.
Anti-Trumpian foreign policy intellectuals … at times, over-value the place of alliances in history and today
In particular, alliance-ism became central to progressive-liberal critiques of Trump. To be a progressive oriented against Trump was also, often, to embrace alliances. Offended parties don’t just respond that America’s international pacts are useful supplementary assets worthy of investment. They speak of alliances in terms approaching holy awe, as profound and permanent unions, and the indispensable core of American security-seeking in the world.
Note the heightened language. Thus, former Secretary of State Susan Rice called for a “renewal of our vows” between Washington and NATO. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described AUKUS, the trilateral security pact between the U.S., UK and Australia, as a “marriage.” President Joe Biden, like his Australian counterparts, spoke of U.S.-Australian “mateship.” The marital metaphor is not even assuring on its own terms. Marriages are no guarantee of fidelity of permanence. Ask France, after Australia’s defection from its submarine contract with the Naval Group, with Washington’s connivance. So too for the “family” or “friendship” model. States are not people writ large. Their interactions are not the equivalent of interpersonal amities. They represent millions of citizens, whose interests may diverge from “friendly” others. Even in the “transatlantic family”, there is a long history of U.S. presidents making coercive threats of abandonment against European allies, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon to George W. Bush.
Anti-Trumpian foreign policy intellectuals also, at times, over-value the place of alliances in history and today. National security council official and strategic mind Rebecca Rapp-Hooper borrows from the foreign policy sage Walter Lippmann to argue that America’s alliances are the “shields of the republic.” Denouncing Trump, historian Anne Applebaum claimed “security and defence organizations” are “special and inviolable”, “the basis for American military power, as well as for American wealth and prosperity”, just as Margaret Macmillan frames the same associations as key sources of American power. At the annual conclave of the foreign policy establishment at Munich, participants regularly reaffirm the supreme worth of security treaties. “Vital” is a common adjective, a strong word that means something is necessary for life, not just desirable, making alliances as necessary as breathing. Since, it is assumed, alliances were historically vital, so must they continue to be, the answer to every major security question. Hence the recent surge of arguments for an Asian Pacific Defence Pact, akin to NATO, to counter China.
All of this is wrong-headed. For the record, Walter Lippmann did not regard alliances in themselves as the republic’s shields. Rather, the “shield” was the alignment of America’s power and commitments into a form of “solvency” that was needed to succeed abroad, and this solvency required limitation and discipline, with a surplus of power in reserve, not alliance worship. What mattered was coherence and the weight and effectiveness of power that could be applied. Alliances could support this, but their value was not intrinsic. Lippmann, along with others like George Kennan who generally supported America’s system of power projection, opposed the escalation of America’s campaign in Vietnam precisely for the reason that it was the waste of blood and treasure in a peripheral war. The U.S. waged war in Vietnam partly to reassure allies from West Germany to Japan of Washington’s credibility as a security guarantor. Instead that conflict consumed American power, drained and polarised American society, and signalled not resolve but the limits of its capacity, moving allies to advise the U.S. to limit its commitment.
Nor is it clear that alliances, as opposed to less absolute forms of collaboration, are essential to influence or power projection. If so, why do western governments and observers now watch so carefully the moves of India and China, conspicuous for their lack of hard commitments abroad, or the real but non-committal cooperation between Moscow and Beijing? Material collaboration without hard commitment is evidently important in today’s geopolitics. Under Biden, there was an awkward tension in Pentagon-speak on this point. On one hand, alliances were “vital” to the contest for the twenty-first century. On the other, ally-less China still managed somehow to be America’s “pacing challenge.” A deficit of treaties or promises does not make one an international loner.
Historically, the basic problem is that allies don’t always show up, regardless of how intense their contractual duties. Pre-war alliances that are inconvenient to one of the parties may collapse, as with Egypt’s separate peace with Israel in 1973, Italy towards Germany in 1915, Britain and Denmark in 1864, or France’s unilateral withdrawal from the Crimean war in 1856. Alliance enthusiasts claim that external balancing, or coalition-building, increases collective resources and thereby substitutes for expensive armament. But the historical record suggests differently. One reason states historically busily arm themselves is that they ultimately distrust the assurance of others riding to their help, and wish not to hold their survival hostage to others’ word. And for good reason: allies break their commitments in wartime perhaps at a rate of between twenty to twenty five per cent. Minority odds, perhaps, but a consequential dice-roll.
Again, wartime alliances can be vital, by augmenting industrial power, technology access, manpower and firepower size. But such alliances tend to form as interests converge in the face of common threats. In other words, interests drive alliance formation more than do prior alliances creating interests.
Trump’s transactional language may be abrasively overt, but alliances are ultimately supposed to be transactional. The ally-nation wants something in return for their investment and risk, and if they don’t get enough, eventually there will be a reckoning. To behave otherwise is to betray the interests of those citizens one represents. This is true whichever party is in office. Only, some would prefer that the transactional heart of alliances should be garbed in elevated language of permanence, friendship and transcendence of some kind. Either the senior ally does not really believe this language, making it wise for others to be on their guard. Or it does, and it thereby squanders a necessary part of making alliances work, the credible threat of abandonment.
The fetishising of alliances as sacred, permanent institutions makes them work less well and indeed invites a moral hazard of sorts. The Bidenists revered alliances and believed their “bear hug” would moderate Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ pogrom in October 2023. Israel’s status as a designated non-NATO ally was hardly a restraining influence. And despite gentler warnings for years from U.S. presidents about the inadequacy of European defence budgets, that message was undercut by affirmations that U.S. NATO commitments were “unbreakable”, “unwavering” and “eternal.”
Paradoxically, America’s allies will fare better within those alliances if they appreciate that all alliances are ultimately transactional and subject to revision. From the vantage point of allies, to insist wishfully that alliances are permanent, profound friendships (as when Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong claimed the U.S. and Australia are bound by “timeless values”) is to deflect attention from their impermanence, and from the problem that allies’ interests can diverge, sometimes at short notice. Remember Singapore, 1942.
What about NATO in the event of a direct war with Russia? Those who enthuse most about alliances insist that NATO helped win the Cold War by deterring Soviet aggression, that it helped pacify Europe into a benign dependency on American patronage, and that it is the vital stop sign that would deter Moscow’s military adventurism.
So alliances can have a value … But they are means, not ends
Firstly, it’s not clear that NATO itself was an important contributor to Soviet restraint in Europe. Nuclear weapons and their stalemating effect probably sufficed, but even if they hadn’t, it’s hard to imagine a counterfactual NATO-less world where West Germany — the weightiest military power on the continent — would not have rearmed. Secondly, if the mere existence of treaty commitments is to be linked to the peace that follows, that also raises the awkward counter-case of 1914, a war that erupted in a theatre of alliance blocs. Thirdly, NATO article V is not an ironclad guarantee or near-automatic mechanism of allied solidarity. In fact, it assures its members of little. It commits members only to do what they deem “necessary”, a clause that would give reluctant states (Portugal? Croatia? Germany?) an “out” from any direct clash between Russia and the north Atlantic powers. This in turn should temper enthusiasm for a Pacific NATO-style pact. While joining NATO and receiving cheap security from a relatively unthreatening superpower has obvious attraction, states like Finland and Poland have compelling reasons also to arm themselves heavily. And all states have compelling reasons to prepare to make informal coalitions should NATO be fractured in the event of a crisis.
So alliances can have a value, especially if they reflect a strong common interest likely to survive the tests of direct threat. But they are means, not ends. Historically, their value is context-dependent. They are neither timeless nor necessarily reliable as a route to safety. Under the wrong circumstances, one state’s vital interest will prove less vital to another. Not even grand declarations, choreographed summits or ever-enlarging memberships can legislate away the central predicament of foreign policy, that all nations exist in a state of ultimate solitude.
