The Western Alliance Must Do Better

It is time to renovate the Western Alliance. The comparative confusion in international affairs in recent years seems to have been the result of three contemporary phenomena: the super-imposition of President Trump’s shock and awe negotiating style of beginning with outrageous threats and claims and working backwards slowly from there over a world that since the end of the Cold War has naturally been moving away from collective security against a defined threat toward nationally or regionally based security. This has taken place when enemies of the status quo in the world have moved away from direct armed conflict to acts of terror, proxy wars, or inducement of the most powerful countries into guerrilla wars that they cannot easily resolve.We have seen the latest demonstration of the Trumpian method in this farce about Greenland, where tiny contingents of Scandinavians were sent to reinforce the native dogsled and ski defense teams of Greenland against a possible military assault from America. Obviously, no such absurd event was ever going to occur under any circumstances. In this episode, recourse to Trump saber-rattling is less easy to explain than usual. He already had all that he wanted, so it is difficult to dispute historian Niall Ferguson’s divination that his motive was to prevent the worried sheep huddled at Davos badgering Mr. Trump when he arrived with irritating requests for moderation in Iran and unrealistic proposals about Ukraine and Gaza.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent undoubtedly spoke for the administration when he said that the worst fate in any negotiation was that the matter be consigned to a special committee of the European Union. It is a truism that the North Atlantic Treaty is the most successful alliance in history. Its purpose was to contain the Soviet Union, and it did so until that state disintegrated.President Trump with leaders of European nations and NATO at the White House on August 18, 2025. Win McNamee/Getty ImagesSince the early 90’s, the Europeans and Canadians reduced NATO to the ludicrous concept of the “alliance of the willing” in which they graciously accepted an American guarantee of their national security while determining on a case-by-case basis if they would be bothered to contribute to individual NATO projects. It was the joy of making collegial the power of one great nation to enable its so-called allies to bestride the world in a masquerade of influence that they did not really possess. Commercially, the equivalent condition developed of America having an intolerably excessive and easily avoidable trade deficit of nearly $1 trillion.Perhaps the most striking illustration of this contrast between the Trumpian perception of contemporary facts and the European attachment to a level of influence that their declining comparative geopolitical strength no longer justifies, is the failure, until Mr. Trump pointed it out, of the recognition by the European leaders that they were little qualified to demand that America stand up to Russia in Ukraine when they themselves were largely financing the Russian war of aggression as customers of Russian oil and gas and most of the European allies did not wish to take on the potentially onerous burden of allowing Ukraine into NATO. They contributed fairly generously to Ukraine’s resistance with no discernible concept whatever of how to bring the war to a satisfactory end. Such progress as there has been on that front is to Mr. Trump’s account.Ukrainian soldiers fire a cannon towards Russian army positions near Kharkiv, June 2, 2025. Anatolii Lysianskyi/Ukraine’s 127th Separate Brigade via APMr. Trump promised to avoid enmeshing America in hopeless and endless wars as President George W. Bush did in Iraq and Afghanistan. The recent lightning strikes of the American military have indicated that the United States is at a new range of weapons and methods in its arsenal to avoid contests of attrition.What is needed is not a continuous erosion of NATO, nor an endless cultural clash between ineffectual European collegiality and the application of precisely applied American direct remedial action. Mr. Trump and his spokesmen are sincere and accurate in their concerns about Europe’s economic stagnation, deteriorating civil liberties, and failure to control immigration. Europe will have to deal with those problems if it wishes to retain any significant influence.The Western Alliance should be reconstituted as a world alliance of adequately democratic countries with special arrangements with certain undemocratic ones to preserve guaranteed traditional frontiers and legitimate interests. Such a group, so widely extended to include India, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, and many other countries, would be so large that an element of partial collegiality would be justified.It would be led but not completely dominated by the United States, and would be an antidote to the corruption and hypocrisy of the United Nations, many of whose functions it could effectively assume. It would be understood that everyone would pay their weight or be suspended as members. What we have now is slapstick farce on a dilapidated stage: Europeans claiming a level of influence they don’t have, the Canadians waffling about “middle powers” that have no weight, and America being unnecessarily cavalier about allies it will still need. We must do better than this.

The Western Alliance Must Do Better

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