Donald Trump memorably took out a full-page advertisement in multiple newspapers in 1987 charging that America was carrying too much weight for its allies. In his first term he repeated this charge, threatening to withdraw from Nato and berating US allies around the world in the process. Last week’s gathering of Nato’s heads of government in Turkey suggests his approach is running out of steam as the world adjusts and the president bumps up against the limits of American unilateral power in Iran.
Trump’s domestic political opponents should breathe a sigh of relief but not rush headlong into an uncritical embrace of US alliances. For all his counterproductive bluster, Trump recognized something real. If his opponents in the Democratic and Republican parties are not more clear-eyed about what alliances cost Americans – as Biden failed to be with Israel – they will fuel the fires that brought Trump to power in the first place.
The Ankara summit shows the limits of how far Trump will go. Weakened by his failed war on Iran, which now seems destined to drag on in fits and starts indefinitely, Trump found that his attempt to dominate the meeting rang hollow. His talking points berating allies for not doing enough – this time to support him against Iran – have lost their shock value. What’s more, they conflicted with his later claims that the meeting was filled with “tremendous love”.
A year ago, tensions ran high as European leaders feared Trump might withdraw America from Nato altogether, leaving them to fend for themselves against a hostile and militarized Russia. This threat is losing its force. Withdrawing from the almost 80-year-old alliance would be a lot of trouble, creating a domestic political firestorm that Trump cannot afford. It could also look weak, and Trump likes the stage that Nato offers him anyway. More important, Europe is growing stronger and less vulnerable to Trump’s threats of abandonment and is now on course to acquire serious defenses against Russia for as long as the threat persists.
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Washington should welcome this. Europe and America are allies because of shared interests in sustaining peace and prosperity, and only secondarily because they belong to institutions like Nato. As long as those interests remain, the alliance will work; without them, the institutional structures will hollow out anyway.
Even if Trump’s Sherman’s march through longstanding US global institutions like Nato is slowing, the damage he has done is still real and will take years to repair. His threats have destroyed trust and undermined confidence in Washington. This will make it more difficult for Washington to build the partnerships it does need, including for pressing challenges on climate, global health and the world economy.
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But if Trump’s approach to US alliances has been badly misguided, too many of his political opponents – Democrat and Republican – remain overcommitted to American military alliances, espousing an enthusiasm that borders on the religious.
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Superficially, alliances might seem like the international equivalent of social clubs – like-minded states meeting to talk about their shared values and global vision – but the core of an alliance is a commitment to fight a war for another country. The commitment may be explicit or implicit, but it is a huge cost, and US leaders cannot afford to tie their nation to allies that do not reciprocate with real benefits for the American people themselves.
Biden’s bear hug of Israel was the most glaring case. It drove his administration deeply into the arms of Benjamin Netanyahu and with that, the tragedy of Israel’s Gaza strategy. But there are other examples as well, in Biden’s one-dimensional reassurance of European allies, his unwillingness to show daylight with Ukraine, and his pledges of unconditional support to Taiwan.
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The Nato summit in Ankara is likely to be remembered less as a US-European divorce than as another step toward a Nato in which Europe’s role becomes equal to America’s – and toward a more balanced US-European relationship that can still be productive for both sides. Future American leaders can learn from Trump’s mistakes without simply reacting against them. The world needs constructive American leadership, but it also needs realism about the limits of American power and the costs the American people will bear – and should be expected to bear – for the other nations of the world. This requires a balanced approach to US alliances, neither a full-throated embrace nor a Trumpian scorched-earth campaign.
