His comments about how it would be better to have allies than not struck me as pro forma. (I mentioned it in my piece, btw: “His basic formulation, that we should work in concert when we can and alone when we must, is obviously correct.”) It just seems to me that if you’re giving a big speech about American foreign policy and talking about how we should think about the role of alliances within it–which Krauthammer did–you might want to suggest that rebuilding the Western alliance, or replacing it with another one, should be one of our foreign-policy aims. He didn’t. The drift of his comments, taken as a whole, was that America can basically do it alone and shouldn’t care about what other nations think. That’s not a hopeful basis for an alliance politics.