that challenges to its security remain at a distance.
The idea of alliances is going through a rocky patch in the United States today. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump spoke of “putting America first,” an expression of views held by many who are dubious about the length and extent of American engagement beyond its borders since the attacks of 2001. Along the same line were questions about our allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who have failed to meet the defense spending obligations that the alliance requires. NATO members have been shirking their responsibility to spend 2 percent of their GDP on their own defense for decades. This is not a new story.
Only five NATO members—the United States, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Estonia—met the Atlantic Alliance’s 2 percent of GDP requirement. Trump’s suggestion would affect the other Baltic States, Germany, and the rest of the 82 percent of alliance members who failed to meet their NATO defense obligations. It might encourage them to take their commitments more seriously. Some already are. Romania, Lithuania, and Latvia will meet the 2 percent target before the end of 2018. Nevertheless, the choice of the electorate in the 2016 campaign implies a diminution of Western security and is a fair representation of the doubts with which Americans today regard an outward-looking foreign policy.
Some of the national media took note of candidate Trump’s comment. However, the U.S. electorate’s general shrug at the threat to hold fellow alliance members responsible for their obligations indicates that the idea of a U.S.-led international order based on allies and supported by naval presence, deterrence, and, if necessary, seaborne expeditionary warfare no longer possesses the acceptance it had enjoyed since the end of World War II.
Skepticism about alliances is not limited to one party. President Obama began his administration by returning a bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy. He said that then–Prime Minister David Cameron bore responsibility for the violence that followed Muammar Qaddafi’s death when “he [the prime minister] became distracted by other things.”2 When Islamist terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in 2015, killing eleven staff members, heads of state from Europe to the Middle East marched through the French capital’s streets in solidarity. The White House sent no one.
Relations between the United States and Israel declined precipitously in the Obama administration. The media blamed this on frosty personal relations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. More likely, the latter believed that West Bank settlements are the cause of friction between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and that this tension is key to resolving the Middle East’s problems.
Additional examples of the Obama administration’s cool relations with allies point in the same direction, showing a profound doubt about the wisdom of the U.S. military’s intercession as a keystone of alliance relations, a certainty that U.S. engagement is more provocative than stabilizing, and an abiding faith that important strategic regions of the world can best achieve equilibrium if left to their own devices. The Obama administration’s deep hope of concluding large strategic agreements with states—Iran, for example—that regard the United States with enmity is the obverse face of its ambivalent view of allies. The ambivalence did not begin with President Obama.
The attempt to patch things up with powers that regard the United States as hostile started well before he took office. A senior foreign policy official of George W. Bush’s administration asked a highly respected elder academic, one of America’s leading experts on Turkey and the Middle East, about the advisability of building bridges to Iran’s radical clerics. The professor answered that the effort would “earn nothing except the enmity of the Iranian people and the contempt of their rulers.”3
President Obama also tried his hand at grand bargains. He sought to “reset” relations with Russia, notwithstanding Vladimir Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. The remaking of U.S. foreign policy did not end with Russia’s rejection of Obama’s overtures. Echoing Obama’s 2013 televised wishes to Iran, Secretary of State John Kerry wrote the same year of his commitment “to resolving the differences between Iran and the United States, and continuing to work toward a new day in our relationship.”4
Iran’s leadership was unfazed. In early May 2016, the deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Hossein Salami, threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to the United States and its allies. He added that “Americans cannot make safe any part of the world.”5 The Iranian general’s overstated claims aside, he has a point.
Most of America’s allies are medium-sized states located where geography and the nation’s broad political interest in containing potential adversaries combine. Asked to define Central Europe, a senior Polish statesman once sought refuge in geography, calling it “the area between the Baltic and the Black Seas.”6 This description includes, among others, the Baltic States and the Visegrad Group of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, as well as states that abut the Balkan Peninsula, Romania and Bulgaria. These mostly democratic states sit on or near Russia’s western border, so that the center of the entire area brackets Russia while its littoral extremities touch the seas through which Russian ships must pass to reach the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Geography, containment, and politics combine in favor of the United States. Wise policy will exploit these strengths by supporting the Atlantic Alliance.
The post–Cold War commitment of the United States to the independence and security of Central and Eastern European states has added to Western Europe’s strategic depth as it nourished democratic stability in the cradle of the wars that convulsed Europe beginning more than a century ago. The same American commitment has countered Moscow’s effort to control utterly the flow of energy westward and corrode NATO, an alliance whose ability to preserve freedom on the western end of the Eurasian continent remains vital if there is to be such a thing as “the West.”
The Middle East is significantly different from Europe and Asia because America’s most important ally, Israel, is a regional power that has successfully withstood neighboring enemies’ attacks since reassuming its position as a Jewish state nearly seventy years ago. Otherwise, America’s generally weak allies are mostly grouped together along the Persian Gulf, where their self-interest in resisting Iran and maintaining peaceful seas over which their oil can be transported has aligned with America’s large interest in an unmolested supply of Middle Eastern oil and—now—growing interest in containing Iran.
Finally, there is China, where American allies, friends, and partners bracket the East Asian mainland from Japan to South Korea to Taiwan, the Philippines, the Australian continent, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and the subcontinent, India. The U.S.-led network of bilateral alliances has supported the progress of democracy, large strides in regional prosperity, and increased markets for U.S. goods and services. As with the European peninsula’s oceanic borders, the dependable presence and deterrent ability of American seapower has been pivotal in supplying the hard power to ensure the safety of free sea-lanes, defend allies and friends, and convince a growing potential adversary that nothing is to be gained from war with the United States.
While a peaceable U.S. presence has remained a constant in the region since the end of World War II, its effects have changed. Where U.S. interest once offered stability in which East Asian states prospered, today the bilateral relationships that exist between these states and the United States are a land moat against Chinese regional hegemony as well as a breakwater against China’s ambitions in the island chain that lies further east in the Pacific. Because half the world’s population lives in Asia, regional hegemony there has a meaning unlike anywhere else.
The allies, partners, and friends that successive U.S. administrations have constructed into a global system since World War II share several important characteristics. They are all at great distances from the United States but quite close to potential adversaries. They ring the Eurasian continent. Besides the Arab states and Vietnam, they are democracies. With
