From Security Dependent to Civilizational Partner

I honestly don’t think I’ve seen anything so hysterical, so unhinged, and so unbecoming of those in power than the reaction of the transatlantic foreign policy blob to the Trump White House National Security Strategy (NSS). Merely announcing the idea that NATO will not continue to expand to more countries until the heat death of the universe has caused babyish wails of abandonment. You would think that the world woke up one day to discover every foreign American base mothballed overnight, every American troop and bullet withdrawn behind the Mississippi River, and the entire U.S. Navy redeployed to Lake Superior.

Even those who claim it to be a dead letter are seething at the idea that anybody was allowed to have a job in the foreign policy field who could possibly have a critique of the last 25 years of American foreign policy, or could possibly have been chastened by its failures, or could come to conclude that there has been overextension. The idea that there are modest consequences to misadventure is foreign to them.

I realize that the reaction is deeply personal for many. For some of the expert people, their entire moral identity is wrapped up in the idea of deploying American blood and treasure to every worthy cause on the planet. But for others, the problem is closer to home. The idea that there won’t be indefinite and permanent expansion of America’s responsibility over every electoral outcome and political culture on every atoll on earth means that the entire circuit of weeklong and weekend paid-for gabfests will not expand forever, either. Many of the people who pretend to run the world, many of the people who believe that they alone have the moral clarity to deploy American power the world over, would be faced with the unwelcome prospect of spending more time with their much-harder-to-rule spouses and children. Imagine the comedown for these people. They spend their days and weekends away from home imagining they are wrestling away the Black Sea from Russia, and then they have to deal with the Putinesque tantrums and difficult attritional warfare of toddlers holding on to their iPads too long.

The reaction from Europe is particularly sad and hilarious. The NSS asks for the same thing that presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George H. W. Bush to Barack Obama have wanted: for Europe to take more responsibility — more of the weight, the cost — for its own security into its own hands. America has accounted for less than 40 percent of Allied GDP over the lifetime of the alliance but contributed more than 65 percent of the military spending. This simple ask is being portrayed as a “divorce,” even though the document goes on to call Europe to something much more dignified than being an American security dependent. With an almost painful earnestness, the NSS calls Europe to be something like a partner in preserving the values, traditions, and faith of Western civilization. No dice. Europe, or at least those who lead it, wants to remain on its extended vacation from history, on our dime, forever.

America is like the Hollywood father who has adopted an incredible array of foreign-born children at his wife’s instructions. His musing aloud that 31 seems like enough mouths to feed is treated by the wife as a threat to the entire family. Her bond with her eldest French daughter suddenly does not feel secure until another blood oath has been taken on behalf of some Moldovan orphans. There’s a pathology involved here, and it’s not ours.