One of the claims one hears most often about U.S. military alliances, whether in Europe or bordering the Pacific, is that their principal function is to protect or defend the signatories. One finds statements to this effect by politicians – including those hostile to the alliances, like Trump – as well as by international relations analysts inside and outside of academia. However, a closer look shows that the supposed relationship between protection and what the U.S. supposedly signed up to in concluding its alliances is exaggerated, aleatory, and largely beside the point. To see this, we can start by recalling some basic facts.
1. None of the formal U.S. alliances was established because of concern that the Soviet Union posed a significant military threat to the members of those alliances. The North Atlantic Treaty, for example, was an outgrowth of the Brussels Pact: the U.S. was induced to negotiate the treaty because of the need to reassure Germany’s recent enemies that the U.S. would stand by them; to head off potentially ruinous spending by those enemies that could undermine the Marshall Plan; to provide a basis for possible U.S. intervention should it look as if the Communist Party could take power in France or Italy; and to regularize the archipelago of military bases the U.S. had at that point in Europe. But fear of an attack by the USSR did not figure, at least not when the Treaty was negotiated.
2. The same can be said for other U.S. alliances: with Latin American countries (the Rio Pact), with Japan, with the Philippines, and with Australia and New Zealand: there was no serious concern with attack by either the USSR (or, in the latter cases, China). And even where countries (South Korea, Taiwan) were considered as in danger of attack, the U.S. had already engaged to defend them several years before the alliance was signed. But, once again, for all the inter-American and Pacific cases, the treaties did help institutionalize the existing set of bases. Indeed, if I were forced to pick a single factor that was the proximate trigger for constructing formal U.S. alliances after 1945, it would be the array of military bases established by the U.S. during World War II. Bases before treaties…
3. Nor, to return to Europe, did this situation change for many years. If we fast forward to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concern of U.S. officials, even before Clinton became president and opted for NATO enlargement, was to make sure that Europe did not become demilitarized or neutralized, a possible future then being discussed not only for the former Warsaw Pact states but for the rest of Europe as well. Hence, U.S. officials pushed strongly for Germany being reunified while continuing its NATO membership. Both then and some years later, when debate raged among U.S. elites as to whether or not NATO should be expanded, there was no sense that Russia posed a threat to former Warsaw Pact members (the greater worry was about internal Russian anti-democratic forces and Russian foot-dragging on strategic arms limitation). That came later, after the reigniting of the conflict in Chechnya.
4. But if most U.S. treaties were negotiated to deal with issues other than Soviet, Russian, or Chinese threats, the existence of those treaties did not in itself lead to U.S. intervention to protect the signatories from other threats. Pakistan, for example, was one of the countries with whom the U.S. signed the Manila Pact (SEATO), and yet when push came to shove, the U.S. did not defend it against India in 1965, a fact that weighed heavily on Pakistan’s decision to withdraw from SEATO a few years later. To complicate matters still further, the United States has consistently used its own military forces to defend states with whom it did not have a formal treaty. Examples range as far back as the Korean War, the U.S. wars in Indochina, Lebanon (twice), the Gulf War, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. In short, defense and alliances are two very different phenomena.
5. What then is NATO? An organization that coordinates the militaries of member states, that plans for contingencies and carries out exercises, and that provides a formal hierarchy with the U.S. always providing the supreme commander: in short, a series of mechanisms whereby European states are yoked to the U.S., somewhat akin to the way Louis XIV tamed and bankrupted the French aristocracy by obliging them to spend months at Versailles. NATO has for decades also been a series of operations outside the territory of the signatories: formally, in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in the Horn of Africa, and in Libya; informally, via “coalitions of the willing,” as well as the use of bases and overflight rights in member states, in the Gulf War, Iraq, Ukraine, and various other locations.
6. It might of course be argued that all of these activities are secondary and that the core of NATO is the U.S. protecting the other member states. However, although some military exercises are clearly directed at a possible war with Russia, almost all of the out-of-territory operations are unrelated to such a war. Moreover, much of the day-to-day activity of NATO can be (and has been, since NATO’s inception) attached to a broad array of goals, not simply defense against Russia. As my coauthor and I have argued, U.S. foreign policy is means-, not ends-driven: what matters is keeping the means in place, so that they can be used in any number of circumstances, with ends stapled on top. For this reason, as long as NATO exists as a means, it can always be used, in any number of ways, to defend its members against Russia or any other possible enemy. Whether or not Trump overtly rules out such a goal today, any crisis involving NATO and Russia would immediately raise the possibility of such a defense. As long as NATO exists and regardless of Trump’s loathing of all things European, no potential aggressor could be sure that U.S. forces in Europe would simply sit by and do nothing. And to be honest, the situation was not all that different during the heyday of Atlanticism.
7. From this perspective, the concern by European leaders that the U.S. is deserting them, or the complementary concern by Trump’s advisers that the U.S. presence in Europe drains resources from the “Indo-Pacific,” is unnecessary given Russian weakness, and therefore should be drawn down or eliminated, is misplaced. The issue is not whether the U.S. officials want to continue defending Europe through NATO, but whether those officials want NATO, period. Here we are in uncharted waters, because although the U.S. has in the past reduced forces in NATO, it has never contemplated giving up on the organization, the coordination mechanisms, the supreme command, the bases, and so forth; more to the point, it has never seriously given any thought to the prospect of Europeans – the British, the French, or, perhaps the Germans or the Poles, in one future – deciding on their own, perhaps against U.S. wishes, to use nuclear weapons against Russia. For now, I have some difficulty in believing that the post-NATO fantasies of the Trump White House could stretch so far (though the issue needs to be thought through much more systematically).
8. The problem that the Europeans face with Trump, Vance, and company is thus less apocalyptic and, paradoxically, more far-reaching. It’s not whether the U.S. will favor Russia over Ukraine and NATO (it will, but this can be dealt with), nor is it whether the U.S. will dare leave the Europeans to their own devices or to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin (it most likely won’t, as argued above), it’s instead whether the U.S. will try to effectuate regime change in London, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw. To put it schematically, the threat isn’t U.S. desertion of NATO or acquiescence in an invasion of, or attack on, a NATO country by Putin; it’s active undermining of democracy, liberalism, and tolerance by Trump and his acolytes.