As everyone who follows the news is now aware, the Trump administration, while planning air strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, set up a social media chat group of “principals” and inadvertently included a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, in that group. Predictably, there has been outrage at the idea of using a messaging app to exchange operational military information, with the inclusion of Goldberg as the icing on the cake. Others have highlighted the antipathy to the Europeans (quelle surprise) shown by several of the participants.
However, a glance at several exchanges involving the vice-president, J.D. Vance, and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, shows reasoning that is far more alarming. Vance starts the exchange with this comment: “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary.” Already we’re in trouble here logically, because the fact that the U.S. supposedly has a much smaller percentage of its total trade passing through the Suez Canal than Europe has of its trade has no bearing at all on the significance, to the United States, of the dollar value of the former.
After Hegseth replies to Vance, citing “start[ing] this on our own terms,” “Freedom of Navigation,” and “Reestablish deterrence,” the National Security Adviser, Michael Waltz, tries to address Vance’s figures by stating that, “per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.” Vance then responds that, while he will defer to Hegseth’s views, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” Here we have a genuinely alarming level of moral illiteracy, analogous to saying that if the police arrest a drug dealer in a high-crime area, someone who lives in a low crime area would be entitled to protest that his taxes are going to “bail out” people who happen to live in the neighborhood near the drug dealer. (I might say, as an academic, that I have serious questions about what Vance learned in his undergraduate philosophy courses.)
Hegseth then responds with a diatribe about “European free-loading” as “PATHETIC,” a comment followed up by “S M” (Stephen Miller?) about how “Egypt and Europe” should do something “in return.” This something immediately morphs into “a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? … there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” Put aside the strange use of the words “free-loading” and “remunerate” (to go back to the analogy above, it would be as if the person living in the low-crime area would castigate the residents of the high-crime area as freeloaders and insist on sending them a bill for the taxes he or she paid), and what we have here, in all its crudeness, is the notion that when the U.S. spends money on its military in or not far from Europe, it is making a contribution to its alliance with European states, a contribution that should either be matched by the latter or else reimbursed by them, perhaps in kind (buying U.S. goods? investing in the U.S.? thanking Trump?). This view is wrong in a number of ways, one more alarming than the next.
To start with, a basic, but relatively minor, point. For the past three-quarters of a century, since the end of World War II, the drafting of the North Atlantic Treaty, and the formation of NATO, the United States has maintained a strong military presence in Europe, at times using that presence (for example, the Gulf War) outside of Europe. To imagine that it has done these things as either a gift to the Europeans or a de facto loan which it expected to be repaid is sheer, unadulterated fantasy. Every single president, at least until Trump, saw the U.S. military presence in Europe, as well as its deployment “out of area,” as in the national interests of the U.S. Moreover, the supposed under-payment by Europe – the fact, for example, that European military spending has consistently been a lower percentage of GDP than that of the U.S. – was, while irksome to U.S. officials and embarrassing to their European counterparts, never seen as some type of exploitation or undermining of the alliance.
Second and more importantly, the extensive scholarly literature on NATO as furnishing a collective good which was, relatively speaking, undersupplied by smaller members and oversupplied by the U.S. (as Mancur Olson put it, “the exploitation of the great by the small”), presumes, with very little evidence, that the collective good in question is supplied through the medium of collective military spending. It is not, and never was. As I argued in an earlier post, for much of NATO’s history, the Soviet Union was not seen as posing a serious military threat, one that had to be dealt with by spending on conventional forces. The U.S. kept military forces in Europe for a number of reasons – reassuring Germany’s former foes and providing logistics for intervention in France and Italy, among the earliest of those reasons – and the retention of those forces was seen in Washington as an end in itself. Notably, the level of military spending was almost irrelevant, both by the United States (it didn’t matter, for example, how many fighter jets the U.S. had in Europe or how modern they were) and by the Europeans. Indeed, there was even an argument for some years that one purpose of NATO was to keep European military spending to a low level, or at least to a level easily controlled by the United States. Thus the metaphor of “burden-sharing” ranks as among the most inaccurate phrases in the international relations literature, right up there with “rule-based order” “off-shore balancing,” “human security,” and “intelligence community.”
If the first mistake – that the Atlantic Alliance is some kind of gift or loan by the U.S. to Europe – is patently wrong, it can easily be pushed back on (preferably, by Americans, including U.S. politicians) and is, in the grand scheme of sins, a relatively venial one. The second mistake – that NATO members militarily underspend in providing a collective good – is more tenacious because it has been peddled for decades on both sides of the Atlantic. In the context of the Ukraine war and the general rise in NATO arms spending that has provoked, I would expect this mistake to become less salient – not because people are now reexamining the past, but because they are focused on the future – although still trotted out routinely by Washington whenever (i.e., most of the time) policy makers there decide they want to criticize the Europeans.
However, there is a third mistake, and this one is far more serious in terms of its implications. The North Atlantic Treaty is usually described as an alliance, one in which the signatories are, through their separated and coordinated actions, trying to prepare for, and thereby deter, a possible attack. I pointed out above that for most of NATO’s history, this description is inaccurate because there was no serious concern about a Soviet attack. But in a deeper sense, even if there had been such a concern, the core fact of NATO was the daily, multi-sector, sedulous interactions by which European members were subordinated to the United States. This subordination existed from the highest level – for example, the way that initiatives needed to be blessed in the White House, if not actually beginning there – to the lowest tactical and committee level, whether for planning or operational purposes. It is why even the most feckless of congressional Republicans were shocked into protest the other day when it was revealed that there was consideration being given to relinquishing the post of SACEUR.
Of course, many alliances are highly asymmetric, with one member providing the lion’s share of resources or direction. But that’s not the point of those alliances, which is to prepare for or actually fight a war. In the case of the Atlantic Alliance, it’s the exact opposite: what matters is that the U.S. is on top, with the alliance’s many goals stapled on after the fact. To use sociological language, we have here a subordination-superordination group, one in which each actor gains status in fulfilling its role. A classic case in point is the words of François Mitterrand, who stated before the UN that France was “faithful” to the Atlantic Alliance, who told his ambassadors that France was “a loyal ally,” and who, on the eve of the Gulf War, argued to his own ministers that not to support the U.S. against Saddam Hussein would be to act as “traitors.” Presumably, had Bush decided against intervention, Mitterrand would have encouraged his ministers to support U.S. passivity.
With this in mind, we can see why characterizing U.S. actions in the Red Sea as contributing to an alliance, in the classic sense of the term, is such a serious mistake. What Trump did vis-à-vis the Houthis was not intended as a contribution to European security, even if the Houthis may well have threatened, at least a bit, the security of European trade. Rather, Trump authorized air strikes for a variety of reasons – note in particular Hegseth’s concern about the importance of starting “on our own terms” – and the expectation, or at least hope, was that the Europeans would either help logistically (as the UK did, by assisting in refueling) or, as discussed in the leaked texts, provide some kind of after-the-fact funding. In one sense, there is nothing new about this. “U.S. acts/Europeans support” has, for decades, been a highly standard sequence. At times, notably during military operations outside of Europe, the Europeans have not supported U.S. actions (e.g., the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, though they did not interfere with logistics). Nor, when they have lent support, was it purely in kind: during the Gulf War, for example, the Germans (and also, outside of Europe, the Japanese) provided funding for U.S. and other forces.
Nonetheless, those out-of-area operations had two characteristics which were perfectly in keeping with the vertical quality of the U.S.-Atlantic Treaty relationship. One is formal consultation: the leader (patron, as I have called it elsewhere) informs the follower (client) of its intended (usually already decided-on) actions and “invites” the client to support it. That invitation can be put in extremely strong terms – during the Vietnam War, for example, Lyndon Johnson dangled economic help to the UK in exchange for brigades; he also seized Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson by the lapels and berated him for an hour over the latter’s call for a bombing halt – but it can, in both principle and practice, be refused. The second characteristic follows on the first: after the anger occasioned by the follower’s refusal to support, the situation returns, more or less, to normal. Thus, Johnson and Pearson patched things up in 1965; similarly, Schroeder’s replacement by Merkel, and Chirac’s by Sarkozy, as well as the ostentatiously pro-NATO stances of both leaders, helped restore their countries’ relations with the United States after the Iraq war psychodrama. Episodes such as these should indicate clearly that what is at stake is not European, or NATO-wide, security, even though everyone uses that terminology; rather, it has to do with who leads and who follows.
What the Houthi strike messages show is not only that U.S. attacks in Yemen have almost nothing to do with European, or U.S. allies’ security, but, more importantly, that the attacks and the discussion of billing the Europeans for them are not in the slightest the standard type of “invitation” by the U.S. for its allies to support it out-of-area. For one, there is no invitation – a situation light years removed from how, just a year or so before, the Biden administration operated in Operation Poseidon Archer and Operation Prosperity Guardian – for another, there is also no attempt at smoothing things over with the Europeans should they refuse the invitation (which, again, is what happened in 2024). Instead, the decision is made without even bothering to inform the Europeans about what is happening, much less to invite them to support it; the focus is entirely on getting them to pay for the benefit they supposedly will be obtaining. Assuming that the participants in the chat have even a tenuous grip on reality, they are unlikely to imagine that the Europeans will agree to paying the bill, and so one way to read S M’s message is that the likely non-“remuneration” will be used to “extract” “some further economic gain” from them.
In short, we are witnessing the transformation of what was once a stable, albeit conflicted, relationship between leader and follower, a relationship in which the coin of the realm was the U.S. military presence in Europe, the deliberate subordination by European states to that presence, and, outside of Europe, an elaborate ritual of invited, and often supplied, support for U.S. military activity. That relationship is now in the process of being replaced by something quite different: either one in which the U.S. acts militarily as it wishes and sends the bill to Europe; or one in which the U.S. uses its military operations outside of Europe as a way of inflicting economic pain on Europe. In neither case can this remotely be referred to as an alliance, at least as the term is conventionally used. Alliances protect; this is a protection racket. How far advanced this transformation from alliance to racket may be; whether, and how, it can be reversed; and what its implications are for an entire raft of issues are matters for debate. But we can start by at least using words correctly.