As feared, the president of the United States arrived at last week’s NATO summit in a mood of preposterous spleen, profound contempt and shocking rudeness. He insisted on sharing before the cameras imaginary facts that hadn’t a thing to do with the summit agenda, and he refused to listen to anyone who tried, however gently, to correct him. In the words of Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, “These are not negotiating tactics. They are the tactics of someone who does not want a deal.” In a private meeting, Trump reportedly threatened that unless the allies boosted their military spending beyond previous agreements by January, the United States would “go it alone.” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, implored Americans not to “normalize” this. “He is the first American president since Harry Truman,” Burns noted, “to not believe that NATO is central to American national security interests.” And Burns is a Republican. [...]
The open, liberal world order we know today was built in the wake of World War II and expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By design, it is led by the United States; by design, it ensures permanent U.S. military hegemony over Eurasia while uniting Europe under the U.S.’s protection. The goal of this American grand strategy is to prevent any single power from dominating the region and turning on United States and its allies. American hegemony serves, too, to quell previously intractable regional rivalries, preventing further world wars. Dean Acheson, George Marshall and the other great statesmen of their generation pursued this strategy because they had learned, at unimaginable cost, that the eternal American fantasy of forever being free of Europe — isolationism or America-Firstism, in other words — was just that: a fantasy. Four hundred thousand American men lost their lives in the European theaters of the First and Second World Wars. (American fatalities in all of the other 20th century conflicts — including Vietnam, Korea and the Persian Gulf — do not total one quarter of that number.) Our postwar statesmen were neither weak nor incompetent. They were the architects of the greatest foreign policy triumph in U.S. history. [...]
In recognizing this history of blood, however, we must recognize something equally true: In the wake of World War II, liberal democracy saw its fullest realization in the West. This flourishing of peace and human rights cannot be explained by a sudden outbreak of European pacifism. (Consider the 1956 Suez expedition, crushed by an infuriated President Dwight Eisenhower; or the 1954-62 Franco-Algerian War.) It happened because during World War II, Europe destroyed itself, leaving the United States overwhelmingly powerful by comparison, its only rival the Soviet Union. Through the application of economic, diplomatic and military force majeure, the United States suppressed Europe’s internal security competition. This is why postwar Europe ceased to be the world’s leading exporter of violence and became, instead, the world’s leading exporter of luxury sedans. [...]
At the same time, the United States built an open, global order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the International Court of Justice. This order is in many respects an empire — a Pax Americana — but it is more humane than any empire that preceded it, with institutions that are intended to benefit all parties. Postwar U.S. statesmen believed that prosperous, liberal democracies that traded freely with each other would neither go to war with each other nor the United States. They ascribed, in other words, to the so-called Democratic Peace theory — a theory with overwhelming empirical support.
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