Alliances

Last week I attended a meeting here in Washington convened to discuss the future of the U.S. alliance system out to 2025. The convener will remain anonymous, as will the U.S. government agency sponsor. We had a very good discussion, but I thought its level failed to match the goal of the meeting. Here, below, is how I expressed it to the chairman--for what it's worth.

The easiest way to think about U.S. alliances, but not the most useful in my view, is to chart which associates still add to U.S. strength and which do not, and which potential allies might provide more value-added. Obviously, as my TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead pointed out in his blog the very day after this meeting, the “trilateral” U.S./Europe/Japan approach of the Nixon Doctrine was the substitute for an unnatural and declining U.S. preeminence after World War II; it led, somewhat surprisingly to many, not to multipolarity but to a new period of U.S. preeminence. Now that this preeminence in turn may be eroding thanks to an accumulating U.S. domestic policy paralysis and the rise of China and the BRICs, we recognize that the power of Europe and Japan is not what it was (though many exaggerate their relative decline: demographic weakness and GDP stasis are not nearly as important in a pinch as human capital, social trust and institutional coherence). If Europe and Japan cannot make up for what we lack to muster a plurality if not a majority of international influence, India and maybe Brazil and others might do on a global scale what the old trilateral arrangement did in Europe and East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. This is the way a baseball general manager thinks: How can I substitute into the roster better players than the ones I have now?

There's nothing wrong with this, but it is inadequate as intellectual flooring for the building we should want to build. It is also just too obvious to warrant much discussion; any professional for whom the content of the foregoing paragraph is a revelation is probably in the wrong business. The key questions with which to begin, rather, are: “What do we want our allies to do for, and with, us?”, and, as important; “Has the typology or the relative weight of our needs shifted as the world has changed since our legacy alliance system developed during and after WWII?”

A third question follows logically, I think: If there has been a shift, even a subtle one, and if we anticipate further movement away from the way things worked 50 years ago, then how does the nexus between function and structure look? In other words, aside from deciding which allies we seek for which purposes, we need to ask: "How we should design our interactions with them, and how might we want them to interact with each other?"

Until we think through these three questions, we can have no framework to assess our circumstances or set coherent goals. We can also not get far in properly analyzing second- and third-order policy questions such as what overseas basing footprint we should desire, or what kinds of military acquisition (and export market) strategies we should pursue. In my view, approaches that do not set out these questions as guideposts may be adequate for dealing with present policy questions, and for planning out a year or three. But they cannot match up against a request to look out to 2025 and beyond.

What We Want Allies to Do

A typology of alliance utility might look something like this:

First, we want allies who can (and will) fight with us in interstate wars (and hence help to deter them).

Second, we want allies, local and external, who can (and will) fight with us in insurgencies (intrastate contingencies).

Third, we want allies who can perform pre- and post-conflict stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping missions—allies, in other words, with full-array or selected civilian expeditionary capabilities.

Fourth, we want allies who can lend legitimacy to U.S. policies and principles simply by virtue of their symbolic presence at our side.

Fifth, we want allies in order to prevent potential rivals from allying with or wooing other states away from us into potentially hostile coalitions.

Sixth, we want allies in order to promote commercial relationships (within a generally liberal global trading regime) that may become strategic.

Seventh, we want allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices so that the American public will incline to support a responsible internationalist foreign policy.

Some allies can do all seven of these things for us, others only a few or perhaps just one. How we invest in allied capacities ought to be a function of how deep and diverse allied help can be, it being understood that by building up of allied capacities we invariably augment the autonomy of their decision-making processes.

Has the mix of these seven utilities changed with the evolution of international politics over the past half century? I would say it has. Our need for allies to fight interstate wars has declined, but our need for local allies to aid us in intrastate wars (and external allies to aid us in stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts) has risen. I would say that our need for allies for purposes of legitimacy has risen as the global normative climate has changed (become more democratized), but our need to keep neutrals from allying with rivals has declined (with the end of the Cold War). I would say, too, that our need for allies to advance commercial relationships has risen as the world economy has become more complex and integrated, but our need for allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices for domestic purposes has declined with distance from World War II and Vietnam.

I think that a recognition of these changes should inform U.S. diplomacy and military planning across a wide range of issues. I do not have space or time to detail all these now, but one example may illustrate the general principle.

Most historians now agree that the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War was a blunder, saddling the United States with a possession it could not readily defend. Even TR came fairly quickly to this conclusion, and he was right; that possession helped cause the Pacific War with Japan.

In 1898 we went to the Philippines; now the problems of indefensibility and access are coming to us, in a manner of speaking, thanks to new military technologies. We have assumed in recent decades a very permissive environment when it comes to getting to and operating from U.S. bases in allied territory. If this permissive environment is compromised, it ought to force a rethinking of how we are deployed abroad, for what purposes and with what broader implications. Thus, for example, there is nothing that U.S. forces inside the Gulf, in Bahrain, Qatar and elsewhere, can usefully do that an over-the-horizon posture cannot also do at lower political cost. All those U.S. facilities and personnel do is create a rich target set for Iran; they are potential hostages in a war, our having brought Pearl Harbor close to them (to continue the Philippines analogue). We do not need bases inside the Gulf of that size and nature; we do need local allies to lend legitimacy to an informal anti-Iranian alliance, but our military presence in such numbers probably on balance reduces our ability to do that because, again on balance, it delegitimizes the authority of the regimes in the eyes of local populations. We cannot defend those regimes against resolute intrastate challenges, and of course that is not what U.S. forces in the Gulf are for anyway. But we are stupid to act out of habit in ways that make such challenges more likely.

Structure and Function

The legacy alliance system we have is segmented. We have a series of bilateral alliances and “special” relationships (like major non-NATO allies whose relationships with us have not been ratified by the Senate), and we have two (or two and a half) cases of multilateral alliances (NATO, ANZUS and the Rio Treaty). We have relations with all these allies and alliance systems, which arose and tend to be useful as agents in regional problematics. But in an age when more problems and opportunities are transregional in nature, we do not have an alliance system in which partners can interact with each other except in ad hoc ways.

If it were possible politically today (it is not….., but it was in 1990-92 when this idea first entered my head, and may be again), it would be wise to diminish the segmentation of our legacy alliance structure. This would better align U.S. policy goals with the means to achieve them. A more integrated, institutionalized alliance system (with a permanent secretariat and a real budget) would give us modular options that would produce gains in flexibility, burden-sharing and also legitimacy enhancement and domestic staying power if the basis of the integrated system rested on shared liberal democratic principles.

Since the members of such an alliance, with the United States at the hub, would compose the richest, technologically most advanced and most politically stable nations on earth, it would put us in a better position to align diplomatic, economic and political elements of statecraft to create an incentive structure for powerful autocracies to avoid irritating us, and for some petty ones to make domestic political adjustments so as ultimately to join us. The latter dynamic might work a little like the acquis communautaire of the European Union, and we would be wise to study that method carefully as a model that has worked well.

Specifically with regard to Third World autocracies, having an integrated global alliance system would enable us to say to impoverished autocracies that we will only help you economically if you help yourselves politically, because the ultimate source of your economic penury is your political dysfunction. An MCC-like concept would replace entirely the present USAID concept of relating to these countries. Its ultimate purpose would be to strengthen other legitimate sovereignties, the better to prevent failed states and “gray zones” that breed political violence, transnational crime and terrorism. This should be the opportunity-purpose of such an alliance: to shape the social milieu of developing societies in an historical period of great disruption, lest many of them collapse or lose so much governance capacity as to amount to more or less the same thing. Our current, segmented legacy alliance structure is incapable of achieving such a goal, and we certainly cannot achieve it by ourselves.

It would be coy not to admit that this alliance structure is meant in some respects to displace the functional aspirations of the United Nations. The UN is hopeless, and will always be hopeless for inherent structural reasons, in doing anything of real positive significance. For political reasons it would be unwise for the United States to withdraw from the UN or its functional agencies, but it is in the U.S. national interest that many of the functions the UN claims to be able to do but cannot do still get done. We need an alternative venue that actually works by properly arraying incentive structures and backing them with real power and appeal. That is what a new and improved U.S. alliance system design can do.

As suggested above, it takes a special molten time in international politics and real American leadership to get anything as bold as this accomplished. Truman, Acheson and Marshall seized their opportunity and built the institutions of the West world that today form the basis for the even broader concert of nations sketched here. Alas, today we have no such leadership and the times are not so molten. More is the pity, for no matter which states we switch in or out of our alliance system in coming years, even out to 2025, that system will remain less than the sum of its parts instead of more so long as its basic design remains unchanged.

Europe and Citizens United

It has been nearly a month since I have visited this space; too bad, but the day-job comes first. I don't know how daily bloggers find time to read or think. Maybe they don't find time, which would, I suppose, explain the quality of much of the blogosphere. But never mind that.

I have been thinking of many things, and reading and learning as I go. But I have generated as many questions as I have answers. Let me summarize them with reference to three events.

The European Crisis. What has been going on in Europe, centered around Greece, in the past few weeks has been extraordinary. As luck would have it, The American Interest is coming out in a few weeks with a major cluster called "What Happened to `Europe'?". This is just dumb luck--Joe Joffe suggested doing something like this before the Greek crisis burst open--but I'll take it. The main question is, has the EU and the European "model" hit the wall of reality, and the wall won, or are we just witnessing growing pains that will leave the experiment stronger for the challenge?

I suspect the former, but who knows? The $1 trillion bailout seems impressive, but it is not enough to save the euro. The idea of having one currency and one central bank, but zero political center and 27 separate tax and fiscal policies is crazy. To support a single currency requires a federal arrangement that harmonizes countercyclical processes region-wide. So I have been saying for 15 years. If the Europeans jump to that, they may pull off a great advance. This was always the plan: Do something that won't work unless you do something else, and so on and on, jumping ahead from crisis to crisis. That's a nutty way to run a railroad or build a federal union, but the juggernaut has stayed on track more or less until now because of the shield provided by American military and economic power. Now that, for various reasons, that shield is no longer what it was, we--that is, the Europeans--are in serious trouble.

So what has the EU done? It has not proposed, yet at least, building the federal structures that can support a common currency. Instead, it has faced the problem of financial overextension--too much debt--by extending further--by taking on more debt. And in the process it has cast moral hazard to the howling wind. That is not all. It has allowed the whole wager, all $1 trillion of it, to depend on the prospect of fundamentally altering the nature of Greek government and society. The Greeks (of all people)! This would be funny if it were not so serious, and serious not just for Europeans but for Americans, too. Greeks have been evading taxes since Ottoman times. No one is going to change their sport anytime soon.

Capitalism, Democracy & Law. That's the other main cluster in the forthcoming July/August issue of TAI. And here, two questions have assailed me.

First, all three of my authors writing about Citizens United have focused entirely on the supply side of the problem: how to get money to politicians in ways that do not abet corruption and unfairness. Not one of them has given so much as a single thought to the demand side. The average cost of election campaigns, in constant dollars, has nearly quadrupled in the past quarter century. Why I keep asking; no one knows for sure. I think it has a lot to doing with the cost of TV ads, and rising passions in the culture wars, but there are many, academics as well as shills for corporations, who say no, it's not so. Maybe the issues in the relevant elections brought out more corporate money than ever before, and maybe the financial sector --a.k.a. Wall Street--led the way. But it has to have some explanation; what is it, then? We don't have that explanation because, as best I can tell, no one pays any attention to the demand side, and I think this is a form of intellectual madness.

Second, I wish someone would spend more time clarifying the relationship between capitalism and democracy. We all know the convenient and comforting myth which claims that markets and democracy always support and reinforce each other. Michael Novak has written a lot about that, as have many others. But this is only a partial truth. Yes, there are elements of a market system that build morals; I agree with that. Markets are not evil. But capitalism, because of the inherent inequality of talent and virtue, as Jefferson once put it to Adams (or was it the other way around?) necessarily generates inequality. But political democracy aims to guarantee equality in terms of citizenship. So rightthere you have an inherent and eternal tension: One-man, one-vote clashes with the fact that any one man will be more or less able to influence political discourse through money than another. Economic inequality does not rest easily with political equality.

At the extremes, it follows logically that there will be times when democracy must be protected against capitalism (like now), and other times when capitalism must be protected against democracy, by which I means surges of irrational, idealistic populism (as between 1907 and 1913). There is never a stable equipoise between the two. Yet we want both and need both. Managing the balance is what American politics is really about. The idea that there is no problem, that capitalism can never menace democracy and democracy can never menace capitalism are twin forms of utopianism, the former of the Right, the latter of the Left. I don't understand how anyone cannot see this. But this, I guess, is my problem.

Well, that's enough for now.