In Defense of Allies

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

 

The countries that have been most discomfited by Trump 2.0 so far are probably Canada, Denmark, and Ukraine.

 

This is not exactly the axis of evil, or the axis of anything except countries that are either dependent on the United States or otherwise easily pushed around.

 

The tone of the first couple of months of the Trump administration has been overwhelmingly one of disregard at best, or contempt and hostility at worst, for our longtime allies.

 

Perhaps all of this can be chalked up to establishing leverage for better deals in negotiations — taking Greenland, or at least getting functional control of it, from Denmark; forcing the Ukrainians to accept an unsatisfactory peace deal in the war with Russia; and extracting . . . whatever it is that we decide we ultimately want from the Canadians.

 

In the Houthi Signal chat last week about opening a sea lane and hitting a terror group that had been attacking U.S. naval vessels, JD Vance immediately went to the question of whether we wanted to “bail out” the Europeans since so much of their trade runs through that route.

 

Touting his impending reciprocal tariffs last week, Trump said of foreign countries, “They’ve taken so much out of our country, friend and foe. And, frankly, friend has been oftentimes much worse than foe.”

 

Let’s stipulate that almost all our allies should be spending more on defense and that Europe is annoying and, indeed, often pathetic (to use Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s word from the Houthi chat). Still, allies are valuable, and having them clearly advances the national security of the United States.

 

That doesn’t mean that we should simply accept any arrangement that has existed in the past, or buy into gauzy sentiments about our obligations to allies — or “the rules-based international order” — that are detached from our cold-eyed interests. No, we should want alliances because they increase our hard power and make it easier to deter and fight wars.

 

The old Churchill saw is correct: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

 

Alliances Have Always Been Crucial to the U.S.

 

It is typical for great powers to have alliance systems, in one form or another. Athens had the Delian League, and Sparta had the Peloponnesian League. Rome had its foederati.

 

Alliances have been important to us from the beginning; they were central to our success in the Revolutionary War. Without the French, Spanish, and Dutch — all providing different levels and sorts of support — we wouldn’t have prevailed.

 

On the other side of the ledger, Britain at the time had managed to get completely isolated in Europe, which one scholar calls “the dominating factor” in its defeat in the American Revolution. When it had continental allies, Britain was generally in good shape, and in its immediate prior wars with France, this was so. But when the allies disappeared, so did Britain’s superiority at sea. The Duke of Newcastle had presciently warned: “France will outdo us at sea when they have nothing to fear on land.”

 

In the 20th century, of course, the Allied victory in World War II was a function of a more powerful and well-managed coalition defeating a less powerful and poorly managed one.

 

It was after World War II that our alliance system as we know it came into being. As Hal Brands and Peter Feaver note in an excellent defense of alliances in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, we worried that nations in Europe and East Asia wouldn’t ally with us if our approach would be to let them get overrun — as we did in World War II — and then go back and liberate them.

 

Instead, we made the commitment in advance, which has been a good deal for them but also for us.

 

Friends with Benefits

 

Responsible allies are clearly a benefit to our deterrence and war-making. Whatever can be added to our effort in terms of military forces, intelligence, or territory is a net plus.

 

Even if allied forces aren’t as capable or large, as Brands and Feaver point out, they still may have particular military strengths that augment our forces (e.g., Japanese anti-submarine capability) and better intelligence about their own region or parts of the world where they’ve traditionally had influence.

 

It was an obvious advantage to us in confronting the Soviet Union that we had the combat power of allies to add to our own, and allies have contributed fighting forces to all of our conflicts since the end of World War II.

 

There has been great annoyance from the right and the Trump administration about Europe not doing enough to support Ukraine in a war that directly impacts Europe much more than us. There is justice to this complaint. Yet, by some calculations (there are arguments over the numbers), Europe altogether has spent more than we have, and it is the Europeans who are talking — we’ll see what comes of it — of sending troops to secure an eventual deal.

 

This isn’t nothing.

 

Brands and Feaver cite other benefits. It helps us immensely to be able to conduct operations from allied countries in proximity to our adversaries — for instance, facilities in Turkey (a NATO member, of course) and Qatar and Bahrain played crucial roles in the anti-ISIS campaign in the first Trump administration.

 

It’s not as though we’d be at daggers drawn with the U.K. or France absent NATO, but a formal alliance structure institutionalizes all sorts of practices and relationships that provide a useful stability to our relationships with friends.

 

Formal alliances also make it much easier to muster allied forces in a crisis, since so much has been invested over time in joint training.

 

Finally, alliances that come with red lines work to deter conflict and prevent a dangerous uncertainty from entering into regional dynamics. The Soviets didn’t show any appetite to cross NATO red lines during the Cold War, and despite his aggression, Vladimir Putin hasn’t either.

 

The Dubious Case Against Alliances

 

It’s not true that alliances inexorably suck us into conflict, or become “entangling.” In a definitive study of this question in the journal International Security, Michael Beckley found very little evidence for it.

 

“Over a sixty-two year period in which the United States maintained more than sixty alliances,” he wrote in the 2015 article, “I find only five ostensible episodes of US entanglement” (two crises in the Taiwan Straits, the Vietnam War, and the Balkans wars in the 1990s). Even these cases aren’t clear-cut, Beckley stipulates, because in each there were other reasons for U.S. involvement, and allies tended to restrain us, or we tended to restrain them.

 

In most cases, Beckley continues,

 

U.S. actions were driven by an alignment of interests between the United States and its allies, not by alliance obligations. In fact, in many cases, U.S. policy makers were the main advocates of military action and cajoled reluctant allies to join the fight.

 

In the Vietnam War, for instance, U.S. policymakers did express concerns about maintaining our credibility with allies, but we didn’t bail out the French when they were being expelled by the Viet Minh, and our allies opposed our involvement and worried that it would weaken us. The overwhelming reason we fought in Vietnam is that we considered it in our own national interest.

 

Likewise, the longest-lasting and most extravagant U.S. military actions of the last two decades, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, were fundamentally driven by the United States, not by NATO (in the case of Afghanistan) or the “coalition of the willing” (in Iraq).

 

If allies aren’t dragging us into wars, neither are they driving our military expenditures. In a hypothetical world where we had no allies — and so no extra increment of allied military power, or friendly territory to operate from — we’d have to spend more on our defense, not less.

 

Even without our alliances, we’d presumably find it too risky to maintain our current atrophied post–Cold War defense establishment in the context of a world of renewed great-power competition. Unless we are going to accede to Chinese dominance in Asia, we will need more military technology and matériel, and the ability to develop and build them quickly.

 

It also makes no sense, as has been floated, to give up our historic military command of NATO out of penny-pinching or bureaucratic reasons. We’ve had the command since the days of General Eisenhower; no country responsibly calculating its own interests would conclude — all things being equal — that it would rather that some other nation have command of the world’s most powerful military alliance.

 

And it’s simply not conceivable that we would send our troops to fight under, say, a French general, which may be the ultimate point for those pushing this idea.

 

What Allies Owe Themselves

 

We shouldn’t be needlessly insulting or threatening to our friends (by the way, Pete Hegseth has been saying all the right things on his Asia trip). On the other hand, our allies need to realize that they are operating in a different political environment, and react accordingly.

 

Like progressives here at home, Europeans may want to automatically dismiss whatever Trump and his team say. But just because it is Trump declaring that our allies need to do more and that we need to be mindful of what’s in it for us, it’s not wrong. Moralistic lectures in response aren’t going to get our allies anything, except perhaps emotional satisfaction.

 

Our partners would be wise to learn from the exemplary example of the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who put on a master class in managing the relationship with President Trump during his first term, to the benefit of his country and our alliance.

 

Our friends aren’t our adversaries, but they are going to have to do more to prove their worth.