Colin Dueck explores the future of American military alliances.
The American experience with military alliances has been informed by two competing impulses: a nationalist emphasis on US sovereignty and an internationalist desire to create a more liberal world order. …
… Keeping all this in mind, the American alliance system is unique. It is unusually global, unusually liberal, unusually asymmetrical, and unusually long-lasting. It is entirely natural that such an unusual system would eventually be questioned, decades after the disappearance of its original rationale. Complaints over allied free riding are nothing new. What is new is the election of a two-term president who has made these complaints central to his foreign policy stance. Donald Trump has been very consistent on this point for roughly 40 years now. He views US allies as free riders and insists on military and economic concessions from them to redress that imbalance. His first-term foreign policy produced some useful rebalancing without overstraining the US alliance system. In his second term, however, President Trump has doubled down on key priorities such as protective tariffs and staffed his administration with loyalists who will do as he says. It remains an open question whether this second-term approach will produce more good than harm when it comes to the US alliance system.
Certainly, multiple aspects of this approach represent a significant improvement over the Biden–Harris legacy. The second Trump administration has correctly emphasized the domestic health of the United States as fundamental to the country’s international position. The administration has rolled back left-liberal delusions on a wide range of public policy issues. It has reasserted US sovereignty in relation to a variety of dysfunctional organizations at the global level. …
… The question for US alliance policy is whether all these worthwhile efforts in burden sharing, defense, deterrence, diplomacy, and a strengthened economic base are offset by potential downsides. America First as envisioned by Trump is a package deal, and that package involves a new approach to trade and industrial policy on a truly massive scale.
