The U.S. must invest in those willing to share the risk, counter shared rivals, defend shared values, and compete where and when it matters most.
The U.S. must invest in those willing to share the risk, counter shared rivals, defend shared values, and compete where and when it matters most.
I magine you are a senior Pentagon official. The president orders you to devise a military operation to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and eliminate a dozen Russian strategic bombers. You have two weeks.
You conceal your well-founded shock. Such an operation would take months of planning, cost billions of dollars, risk thousands of American lives, and might very well trigger World War III.
Yet last month, America’s partners accomplished both of these once-inconceivable objectives in twelve days at little cost to the United States. In each case, core U.S. interests were secured not by American boots and tank treads but by sovereign partners acting decisively — with American buy-in.
These feats point toward a necessary evolution in America’s alliance structure. A new model has emerged — one fit for an age of great-power competition and constraints and grounded in convergence, not control, empowerment, not dependency.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has given Ukraine more than $67 billion in security assistance. In return, Ukraine has devastated Russian military forces at a scale unseen since World War II. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is a shell of its former self. As of June, Russia had lost more than 1 million troops in Ukraine as well as thousands of tanks, artillery systems, and fighting vehicles.
The second Trump administration has approved more than $12 billion in major arms sales to Israel, with another $510 million sale of bombs announced on July 1. With this backing, plus years of U.S. intelligence and munitions support, Israel rolled back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and hollowed out Hamas and Hezbollah — Iran’s most potent proxies. Although U.S. forces struck three key Iranian nuclear sites with 14 “bunker-buster” bombs and dozens of submarine-launched cruise missiles in Operation Midnight Hammer, the mission’s success built on years of Israeli preparations, deception, and air superiority over Iran in the days leading up to the U.S. attack.
Such a return on investment would impress even the most cynical Wall Street fund manager. It also heralds a seismic shift in America’s alliance logic.
President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach and its corresponding push for allies to carry their weight and pay their fair share excite isolationists — who want to pare back U.S. commitments and dismiss allies as freeloaders. They also alarm internationalists who fear Trump’s actions will cost the United States old friends and scuttle what’s left of the liberal international order.
In reality, Trump demands something far simpler: reciprocity. America provides the tools that partners need to deter, defend, and act against shared adversaries; these allies and partners use these tools against shared threats when necessary. Howls that America is abandoning allies and abdicating leadership are unfounded. Trump aims to rebalance and recalibrate America’s allies, creating a network of enablers and force multipliers — not strategic liabilities. He wants partners who plan to expand and honor their commitments, take defense spending and strategy seriously, strengthen ties with each other, and possess the intent and capacity to thwart China and Russia.
Ukraine and Israel exemplify this new model of allied statecraft: one in which the United States helps those who help themselves — especially partners who act independently, absorb risk, share burdens, and execute operations aligned with U.S. interests.
Under this model, allies are not freeloaders or hapless ideologues. They are frontline states whose relationships with America are grounded in reciprocity, burden-sharing, sovereign initiative, and strategic convergence against bad actors.
This approach has deep strategic roots. Even Great Britain, at the zenith of its imperial power, needed allies. That’s why, throughout the 19th century, Britain leaned on others — Portugal, Spain, Austria, and Prussia — to hold the line against Napoleon or thwart imperial Russia’s expansionist aims, because England’s wise men knew the country could not hold off multiple threats alone.
America, too, must now think like a mature power. It cannot bestride the narrow world like a Colossus. Its strength lies not in occupying ground or checking every rival at every turn, but in enabling partners and orchestrating favorable outcomes.
Critics worry that empowering allies — especially those that don’t fully align with American values — could drag the United States into wars it would be better off avoiding. This is a well-trodden neo-isolationist argument that U.S. allied commitments make the superpower weaker because our so-called friends “risk roping the United States into conflicts over strategically marginal territory,” as scholar Barry Posen wrote in a 2013 Foreign Affairs piece.
As early as 2015, political scientist Michael Beckley tested this “entrapment” thesis by examining every militarized interstate dispute the United States participated in from 1948 to 2010. He found that U.S. involvement was rarely — if at all — driven by formal alliance commitments. Over more than 60 years, Beckley identified only “five ostensible episodes of U.S. entanglement.” In most cases, however, U.S. involvement was driven by strategic interests — not alliance obligations — and U.S. policymakers were often the leading advocates of military action, pushing their allies to fight.
Beckley also found that great powers, like the United States, can also mitigate allied entanglement by “inserting loopholes into alliance agreements, sidestepping costly commitments, maintaining a diversified alliance portfolio that generates offsetting demands from different allies, and using explicit alliance commitments to deter adversaries and dissuade allies from initiating or escalating conflicts.” Frank dialogue and conditional support also work.
In reality, the greater danger is refusing to ask partners to step up, thereby forgoing opportunities to leverage partnerships that could yield strategic depth, deterrence, and the devastation of shared foes.
Some allies are already rising to the challenge. Japan has abandoned decades of postwar pacifism as it backfills U.S. munitions stocks, develops advanced counterstrike systems, and doubles its defense spending. Australia is expanding its submarine fleet under AUKUS, co-producing munitions, and reducing its dependence on China. Poland has become NATO’s “golden ally,” spending over 4 percent of its GDP on defense and acquiring hundreds of tanks and artillery systems to deter Russia.
Of course, sustaining this new alliance model doesn’t rest solely on America’s allies. The United States must delineate what it will provide and what it expects in return. This includes offering advanced military training, force integration, and resources to modernize war-fighting concepts using lessons from post–Cold War combat. It means expanding intelligence-sharing efforts and offering credible political backing.
In return, allies must be willing to fight for themselves. No partner nation should ask American service members to die for a cause they won’t defend themselves. Allies must also scale up their defense production and manufacture “denial” munitions — drones, artillery, and missiles — rapidly.
If both sides honor this bargain, clear benefits will emerge: forward deterrence for America at a fraction of the cost of peacetime overextension or wartime intervention.
In a world of expanding threats and shrinking resources, the U.S. can no longer be the world’s policeman. Our nightstick is not long enough; the beat is too large. Instead, we must become what the moment demands: an orchestrator, a geostrategic venture capitalist who invests in those willing to share the risk, counter shared rivals, defend shared values, and compete where and when it matters most.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.