It’s hard to think of two modern secretaries of state as dissimilar as Antony Blinken and John Foster Dulles. Dulles was by most accounts a stiff, relentlessly serious, and buttoned-up Wall Street lawyer with a moralistic streak, the living embodiment of the WASP-y eastern establishment. By contrast, Blinken is usually described as friendly, cosmopolitan, unpretentious, and easy to work with. He’s a self-described pop music buff who appears to have decent blues guitar chops. If you can picture Dulles bending a note on a vintage ax and channeling his inner Muddy Waters, you’ve got a more vivid imagination than I do.
But these two very different men are eerily similar in at least one way: each thought the best way to keep U.S. adversaries contained was to round up as many states as possible into U.S.-led security arrangements. This strategy didn’t work that well for Dulles, however, and I suspect it won’t pan out the way Blinken hopes, either.
Back in the early years of the Cold War, Dulles led a series of diplomatic initiatives that critics labeled “Pactomania.” As an advisor to President Harry Truman, he negotiated the initial version of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and helped facilitate the ANZUS treaty between the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. As secretary of state under Eisenhower, Dulles backed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which brought together Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Washington was not a formal member of this arrangement, but it signed bilateral agreements with each of the member states and attended meetings as an observer. Convinced that neutrality was “an immoral and shortsighted conception,” Dulles was also the architect of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), whose members were United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan. Together with NATO, the bilateral U.S. commitments to South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, informal but significant support for Taiwan and South Vietnam, and the U.S. role in the Organization of American States (founded in 1948), this ever-expanding array of security commitments sought to contain communism around the entire perimeter of the communist world and the Western Hemisphere as well.
What about now? Even before relations with Russia deteriorated, the United States had been steadfastly committed to open-ended NATO enlargement and the gradual expansion of security partnerships in other key regions. By 2015, in fact, the United States was committed to defending nearly 70 countries around the world, together comprising more than 2 billion people and about 75 percent of global economic output. That impulse has only deepened in the wake of the war in Ukraine, with Washington actively supporting the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO and insisting that Ukraine (and possibly others) will be welcomed into the alliance at some point in the future. The Biden administration has also worked to deepen the so-called Quad (U.S., India, Australia, and Japan) in the Indo-Pacific and has helped broker a new level of security cooperation between Australia and Great Britain through the AUKUS technology-sharing deal.
But wait, there’s more! President Joe Biden helped mend fences between South Korea and Japan at a Camp David summit and Biden and Blinken have spent considerable time and political capital cajoling Saudi Arabia and Israel into normalizing relations in exchange for some still-unspecified amount of American blandishments or security guarantees. (For recent critiques of this particular endeavor, see here and here). And let’s not forget those two democracy summits, during which Biden and Blinken tried to line up the world’s democracies and reverse the rising tide of authoritarianism that has been underway for the past 17 years.
“Wait a second,” I hear you say. “What’s wrong with trying to bring more and more states into our orbit? Isn’t it better to have lots of friends?” At a moment when both Republicans and Democrats have their hair on fire about China, doesn’t it make good sense to get as many countries as possible on our side? Chinese President Xi Jinping is trying to do the same thing with his Belt and Road Initiative, right? Isn’t an ambitious campaign of coalition-building a more cost-effective means of limiting Chinese influence than simply shoveling more money at the Pentagon (though we seem to be doing both simultaneously)? Those most strongly committed to promoting a liberal, “rules-based” order may also believe that adding new names to the list of U.S. partners and allies conveys that the arc of history is still bending in that direction. So what’s the problem?
To be sure, when powerful and stable states face the same threats that we do, forming an alliance with them makes good sense. Having written a whole book about this phenomenon, I’m the last person to object to balancing behavior of this sort. NATO was successful during the Cold War because the United States and its European allies had a common interest in deterring a Soviet attempt to dominate Western Europe. That same logic drove the bilateral “hub-and-spoke” alliances in Asia, despite some significant internal tensions, and it is why efforts to strengthen these arrangements are desirable now. When potential allies have formidable military capabilities of their own—like some European countries used to have—they can be a valuable supplement to American power.
Even when states are united by a shared perception of threats, however, the ultimate value of the partnership depends in part on whether the members agree on a common strategy and are willing to share the burdens appropriately. Adding weak and vulnerable members to an alliance may not strengthen it, and long-standing partnerships become less effective if some members let their own military capabilities languish. When this happens, Uncle Sucker ends up bearing an excessive burden, and the partnership’s ability to achieve its stated goals will be jeopardized.
Indeed, in today’s world, what U.S. officials like to call “alliances” or “security partnerships” are more like protectorates. In many cases, the United States has agreed to defend weak and vulnerable countries that can’t do much to help the United States no matter how much they might want to. Such arrangements may still be useful if the country in question is in a critical location or controls other valuable assets, but that determination needs to be made on a case-by-case basis and in an unsentimental and hard-headed way.
A third problem with the overzealous pursuit of new partners is the possibility that their agendas will be incompatible with ours. This was one of the fatal flaws in arrangements like CENTO and SEATO: Dulles thought he was enlisting partners in an anti-communist crusade, but some of these regimes did not see the Soviet Union as a major threat and mostly wanted American help to deal with local problems (including their domestic political opponents). Vietnam is smack dab in the middle of Southeast Asia, for example, but SEATO wasn’t much help during America’s long war there. Washington may think globally, but most of its allies act locally, which makes them less willing to support our broader agenda and instead forces U.S. officials to grapple with complex and intractable regional issues.
And don’t forget the security dilemma. Whether intended or not, bringing new states into U.S.-led security arrangements can make other states less secure and cause them to respond in dangerous ways. Former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s concerns about CENTO encouraged him to court Soviet support, thereby ushering in two decades of superpower competition in the Middle East. Similarly, open-ended NATO enlargement alarmed Russia’s national security elite and eventually led Moscow to take increasingly stringent measures to stop Ukraine’s drift toward the West, an effort that began with the illegal seizure of Crimea and culminated in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch an illegal invasion of the rest of Ukraine. U.S. efforts to strengthen an anti-Iranian coalition in the Persian Gulf probably encouraged Tehran to move closer to both China and Russia and to undertake other measures designed to undercut U.S. influence in the region. The point is that forming or expanding U.S. security commitments will not enhance security or stability if it causes rivals to take dangerous steps that they might otherwise have foregone.
Another potential downside is one of moral hazard, or what MIT’s Barry Posen calls “reckless driving.” If allies believe that Washington will ride to the rescue no matter what they do, they will be more inclined to take risks that could embroil the United States in an unnecessary conflict. Think of Saudi Arabia’s disastrous war in Yemen, or Georgia’s ill-fated initiation of a military clash with Russia in 2008. This problem doesn’t arise in every case, but it is another reason to be wary of open-ended commitments and to consider the risks of extending U.S. protection to states with ambitious agendas of their own.
Expanding alliances willy-nilly also increases the risk of a credibility trap. Hard-liners habitually portray U.S. commitments as tightly interdependent, insisting that the United States’ response in one situation invariably sends a powerful signal about how it will respond everywhere else. Whether in the form of the moth-eaten “Munich analogy,” the repeatedly discredited but apparently immortal “domino theory,” or the exaggerated fear that disengaging from one commitment will lead other states to “bandwagon” with our adversaries instead of doing more to balance against them, the belief that all commitments must be honored lest all of them suddenly collapse is deeply embedded in U.S. strategic discourse. There’s a dangerous paradox here: The more commitments you have, the harder it is to honor them all, which encourages U.S. leaders to fight for small stakes in order to deter threats to more vital interests elsewhere.
America’s many partners are on to this game, of course, which is why they constantly complain that their confidence in America’s promises is waning. Given the Blob’s obsession with credibility, what better way for foreign dependencies to extract new pledges or concessions from us? This tendency reminds us that even a marginal expansion of the U.S. security umbrella today can become a sacred and ironclad commitment tomorrow. U.S. leaders—to include Congress—should therefore think long and hard about whether a new commitment is worth what it might end up costing down the road.
These arguments do not imply that the United States should abandon all of its current allies or refrain from ever taking on a new commitment. But they do highlight the need for greater skepticism and due diligence than U.S. policymakers have practiced in the recent past. Senior official and congressional leaders should consider carefully whether the strategic benefits of a new commitment will exceed the likely costs and risks and be wary of arrangements that are of greater benefit to others than they are to us. Above all, they should avoid making commitments that seem attractive only if one assumes that the pledge will never have to be honored. Writing checks on the assumption that they will never be cashed is a good way to end up penniless. The lesson? If you wouldn’t fight for a foreign country today, don’t promise to fight for it tomorrow.