Don't Scrap America's Alliances. Fix Them.

Elbridge Colby, Jim Thomas

Security, Americas

Preserving U.S. alliances makes us stronger.

DOES THE United States benefit from having allies? In recent months, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has voiced skepticism about the value of core American allies in Europe and East Asia. Trump argues that U.S. allies are free riding off the United States, and that their contributions to U.S. security are no longer sufficient to justify either the risks or the costs they impose on Americans. He is far from alone this election season. Surrogates for Bernie Sanders like Jeffrey Sachs have made similar arguments. Even President Obama himself expressed frustration about allies and partners that do not pull their weight in his recent Atlantic interview, as did former secretary of defense Robert Gates in his second memoir. In earlier years, politicians as diverse as President Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield issued similar complaints.

There is something to all this. U.S. alliances should exist not primarily as expressions of national altruism and largesse, but as ways of advancing America’s own interests. And alliances can indeed cease to make sense. Cold War alliances that did not have legs, like NATO’s stillborn cousins CENTO in the Middle East and SEATO in Southeast Asia, attest to this reality.

But the truth is that sustaining alliances in North America, Europe and maritime Asia does advance U.S. interests—even when looked at from a hard-nosed businessman’s point of view. The reality is that U.S. alliances have served and continue to serve as an enduring source of strategic advantage and leverage—and ultimately, added security—for America. Indeed, Washington’s network of pacts is the envy of America’s rivals. Its main strategic competitors would trade places with us because they recognize and value what many alliance naysayers increasingly discount: America’s web of foreign security relationships is a source of power and influence in the world. And in particular, America’s rivals understand that U.S. alliances have foreclosed their expansion or reassertion of spheres of influence through the use of military force.