America should be less engaged with foreign trade and alliances.
Last night National Review Institute put on a debate about foreign and trade policy in Dallas. Daniel McCarthy and I defended the proposition that America should be less engaged with foreign trade and alliances. Dominic Pino and Rebeccah Heinrichs opposed us.
I thought I’d share just a sliver of my opening statement:
We argue that America’s independence, power, and credibility rest on a simple equation. America’s commitments in the world must be matched by the resources it brings to the fight; those resources are the prowess and strength of its military, its wealth and industrial capacity, and its willingness to fight.
Our opponents are arguing, whether they realize it or not, for the continuation of a policy that puts both sides of that equation out of order.
Consider America’s involvement with NATO. Since roughly 1960, the United States has averaged about 35 percent of allied GDP but more than 61 percent of allied defense spending. U.S. share of global GDP has remained relatively constant since the end of the Cold War, but our hard commitments have expanded from defending Western Europe to almost all of the Eastern Bloc as well, almost every inch of the 700,000 square miles vacated by the Soviet Union.
NATO continues to expand, recently adding 900 miles of border with Russia in Finland. In exchange, Finland made a solid two-year commitment to spending more than 2 percent of GDP.
We are expanding these commitments even as the Pentagon acknowledges that Americans had to downgrade our readiness to fight. We used to pursue a posture of being ready for two major wars at once. Now we aim at something more modest. We are expanding these commitments even as Congress, looking at our fiscal future, has put a freeze on increases in the military budget.
In the poker game of geopolitics, our policy of expanded alliances means increasing the size of our bluff, even as we see the strength of the cards we have in hand being weakened when measured against the board. Somehow we think we can save ourselves by risking even more.
And our allies are not coming to save us. Look at just the last few years. In 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a great turning point in German policy, toward rearmament, the Zeitenwende. All pretense of pursuing it was abandoned. By August 2024, the German Council on Foreign Relations concluded Zeitenwende “no longer carries political force and should be abandoned as a term of use.”
Even now Donald Trump is correctly calling Europe’s bluff. After the Bridge Colby memo about our dangerously low armament stockpiles, Trump announced a deal with Europe where European NATO members would buy weapons from America and distribute them to Ukraine as they see fit. Just this week the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, balked. “He is the one who promised to stop the killing. So it can’t be on us.”
Currently, this is not a burden-sharing arrangement but a blame-shifting one. When marriages turn this way, lawyers get hired to sort out what’s left over.