3
America’s Cold War alliances accomplished their central goals. They enabled forward defense, to better protect the homeland. They facilitated deterrence, dissuading adversaries from attacking. And Washington could exert control over security partners while keeping them in the political fold. These partners also made contributions beyond their mandates, committing blood and treasure to assist the United States in out-of-area conflicts, such as the Vietnam War. And they provided diplomatic backing on all manner of political issues. In short, allies were essential to the United States’ grand strategic objective of defending Eurasia to secure its own economic and military survival. But were these political and strategic advantages worth the price?
Empirically, this question is vexing to answer for two reasons. First, there are no controlled experiments in international relations, and we cannot rerun the Cold War to examine what costs the United States would have accrued to maintain its security without allies. (In much the same way, we cannot cleanly measure the causes of America’s impressive alliance record, although we can feel confident that the results were as intended.) Second, while alliance costs can be measured in a number of ways, all of them are flawed.
The vast academic literature on alliances discusses many kinds of costs. They may be tabulated in defense spending that would not be necessary absent the alliance. They may manifest as lives lost and wars fought when a state is entrapped in conflict by an ally. They may reflect loss of political flexibility owing to constraints imposed by allies. Allies may also abandon commitments, forcing their partners to draw up new plans and pay for their implementation.
All of these metrics are ambiguous; all are open to multiple critiques. But to the extent that we can rely on them for evaluation, they suggest that US alliance strategy was not nearly so costly an endeavor as we might expect. The United States bore a larger financial load than its weaker partners, but most of this spending was not devoted to the material needs of defending allies. Rather, Washington’s spending maximized US security while defending and controlling allies. In the process the United States faced few instances of true allied entrapment or abandonment. What little entrapment occurred during the Cold War was mild, resulting in inconvenience but no serious challenges to US security or freedom of action.
If the United States had not extended its Cold War alliances, or if it had ended them in an effort to reduce political and material costs, it may not have saved much. In exchange, it could have lost a great deal more. Without alliances the United States would have faced different, perhaps costlier, foreign policy burdens and would have missed out on the financial benefits of alliances. Washington’s Cold War alliance strategy was almost certainly more affordable than an alliance-free strategy in a similar world.
Footing the Bill
In his 1961 inaugural address, President Kennedy warned America’s partners not to free ride “on the back of the tiger” lest they “end up inside.”1 For longer than it has had alliances, the United States has worried about burden-sharing: Would allies pay fairly toward the common defense, and could they do more to contribute? Though these questions have long occupied American analysts and policymakers, it is not clear how they should measure burden-sharing or what constitutes a reasonable contribution.
Contrary to an increasingly common misconception, US allies do not pay dues in exchange for their security guarantees. Rather, each government independently determines what it will spend on national defense, including as it relates to the alliance. These outlays make it easier for the United States to fulfill its security promises, and they aid the US missions of forward defense and deterrence. One way to measure burden-sharing, then, is to compare allies’ defense spending to their respective gross domestic products (GDPs) and see how each ranks against the others. As Fig. 3.1 shows, Washington outspent most of its allies for most of the Cold War. The gap was especially pronounced in the 1960s and 1970s.
It is tempting to look at this chart and conclude that US allies took advantage of their defender. But Cold War burden-sharing was lopsided because Washington wanted it this way. The United States extended its security guarantees with the expectation that it would gain in ways that are hard to express in dollar terms: basing access, deterrence capacity, and allied control. US leaders did not expect defense-spending equality or anything close to it in the early Cold War period. To the contrary, they sought asymmetric alliances in part because these would allow the United States to shape allied defense policies. If allies had been equal defense spenders, they might have reduced US spending on forward deployment, but they also might have developed their own nuclear weapons or other capabilities and strategies at odds with US interests.
It also does not make sense to expect equal spending, since the United States and its allies had different national security objectives. The United States was spending on a global force posture to prevent Europe and Asia falling under Soviet control, a condition that strategists believed would pose an existential threat to the homeland. The allies had more modest goals. They sought to defend themselves and contribute to the alliance within their regions. Without these partners, Washington might still have been able to prevent hostile powers from dominating Eurasia, but the United States would have borne the full cost.2 One could reasonably argue that the United States obtained its foreign policy goals more cheaply thanks to its allies.
Fig. 3.1 Allied defense spending as a percentage of GDP, 1960–1991 (data source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute)
To further complicate matters, US spending on forward presence in a given country does not cleanly map to the cost of the alliance with that country. That is because the United States uses its bases to defend entire regions, not just the allies hosting them. Throughout the Cold War, the United States maintained its heaviest European defense presence in Germany and its largest Asian presence in Japan, yet each of those positions allowed the United States to defend many other allies. Moreover, each base was established because US planners believed those regional defense hubs to be necessary—not because the ally demanded it construct those bases or deploy a specific number of troops. The United States also maintained some Cold War alliances that included close political relationships but no base access at all, such as with Australia. We cannot, then, examine US defense expenditures on a particular country to evaluate accurately alliance burden-sharing. American spending on forward defense supports a broad and ambitious grand strategy selected for reasons of self-defense, not in response to the defense needs of particular base-hosting allies.
It is also important to keep in mind that allies’ defense budgets can be spent in a variety of ways, some of which are helpful to the defender and some of which are less so. This further complicates the calculation of costs borne by the defender. If allies spend on research and development, major military platforms, or troop preparedness, their spending will be especially useful to collective defense and therefore will reduce the burden on the defender. If instead allies’ defense budgets are taken up by inflated personnel costs, this will not bring nearly as much value to the alliance, and the defender will find fewer of its costs offset by its allies.3
Allies also can contribute to the common defense in ways that are not reflected in their military spending. During the Cold War, many allies defrayed US overseas basing costs without adding line items to their defense budgets. Some used nondefense funds to pay for construction and transportation. Others subsidized forward defense by granting free base leases or forgoing payments the United States would otherwise have had to make. Some combined these methods. Each partner fashioned their contributions in the manner most feasible given domestic political circumstances and constraints.4
More broadly, any comparison of American spending on overseas force posture to allies’ defense contributions constitutes an inherently flawed burden-sharing metric. Such comparison is based on the faulty presumption that the purpose of US alliances is to do a service for the allies. But the United States has never spent on allies’ defense as such. It assumed alliance commitments in order to preserve its own national security. Washington incurred costs associated with forward presence, deterrence, and alliance control because they promoted the national defense. Allies’ contributions toward these costs was an additional benefit.
Despite the many quantitative and conceptual challenges that come with calculating burden-sharing, in the late Cold War period, Congress requested that the Defense Department do just that. In its annual “Allied Contributions to the Common Defense,” the Pentagon evaluated several metrics assessing allies’ contributions as a function of their ability to pay. Fig. 3.2 tracks allied spending according to one of these, the “fair share” metric. The metric divides the ally’s share of the alliance’s total defense spending by its share of the alliance’s total GDP. If an ally accounts for 2 percent of the alliance’s total GDP, and contributes 2 percent of total alliance defense spending, it has a ratio of one. A ratio of one implies that the ally is paying its fair share. A ratio greater than one implies largesse; less than one stinginess.
By the Pentagon’s accounting, the United States spent quite a bit more than its fair share on defense throughout the 1980s. Among NATO allies, Turkey, Greece, the United Kingdom, and France also spent as much or more than their fair share, while Canada, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Japan underspent.5
Fig. 3.2 Allied defense spending as function of ability to pay, 1981–1990. A ratio of one indicates spending equal to the ally’s ability to pay, according to the Pentagon’s “fair share” metric. A ratio below one indicates that the ally is paying less than its fair share; greater than one indicates that it is paying more than its fair share. (data source: US Department of Defense)
These spending gaps have inspired energetic debate. Respected scholars have argued that allies’ chronic underspending on defense imposes unsustainable burdens on United States. These scholars point out that long-term security guarantees create incentives for allies to spend less than they might otherwise. Put differently, the supply of American security induces moral hazard. This concern applies even to allies who are spending healthily, because we have no idea how much more they would spend if they could not count on American protection.6
But it is also reasonable to argue that these spending gaps are of little consequence. The important question is whether it is cheaper to have a foreign policy that relies on sustained cooperation with allies afflicted by moral hazard than to have a unilateral policy with no burden-sharing at all. On this view, as long as US defense spending does not exceed national means, it is hardly tragic if allies spend a bit less as a proportion of GDP. There is no evidence that American defense spending hampers growth or makes the country less competitive. And while the defense budget makes up a sizable chunk of federal spending, a relatively small portion of that money goes to forward basing. To those who bemoan burden-sharing gaps, a reasonable rejoinder is that Washington should ensure that its own budget commitments are sound in national terms, rather than preoccupy itself with false equivalence abroad.7
Finally, when we think about the costs of alliances, we should be mindful that alliance agreements themselves impose no financial burdens on the US Treasury. What costs money—and potentially lives—is the associated force posture. Proposals for cutting US alliance spending are usually suggestions about curtailing overseas defense presence. This is not a semantic difference. It points to an important reality that many miss when they refer to alliances as extravagant: in order to generate substantial savings in its own defense budget—that is, to close the gap between its “allied contribution” ratio and those of its thriftier partners—the United States would have to close overseas bases and return the personnel and materiel to the continental United States. Simply consolidating bases and relying more on rotational deployments would not generate substantial cost savings.8 Leading scholars have argued for just this kind of move—ending alliances and shuttering related bases to curb commitments and spending. Such dramatic changes would require not just a transformed alliance policy but a completely different grand strategy—one that does not seek to secure the balance of power in Eurasia through forward defense, deterrence, and allied assurance and control.
The Political Costs of Alliance: Entrapment, Abandonment, and American Strategy
Cold War Entrapment
Strategists may attempt to tabulate the political costs of alliances by considering the dilemmas of alliance entrapment and abandonment. Entrapment occurs when a state is dragged into a conflict in pursuit of an ally’s interests. Lesser forms of entrapment can occur when one partner behaves recklessly or takes an especially firm position toward an adversary due to its confidence in alliance support. Abandonment occurs when an ally fails to fulfill the terms of its security pledge by, for instance, refusing to assist in wartime or, less urgently, shirking commitments in peacetime.9
The likelihood of entrapment and abandonment is thought to vary depending on how power is distributed internationally. Allied entrapment and abandonment were probably less likely during the Cold War than other eras, such as the period preceding the First World War. With multiple centers of political power, alliances were less stable, and countries aligned and de-aligned with relative frequency. The structure of Cold War competition, by contrast, was conducive to durable alliances. Because the bipolar world was organized around two military-industrial power centers, the United States and the Soviet Union, smaller allies could not easily tip the balance of power. The loss of any one smaller partner was not catastrophic, whereas it is more likely to upset stability in a multipolar world.10 Moreover, the independent interests of Cold War allies—in both the US and Soviet columns—were too minor to compel the superpowers to act against their own wishes.11 Nonetheless, prominent scholars point to what they perceive as the serious risk of American entrapment by “reckless drivers.”12
If America’s Cold War alliances involved serious entrapment costs, the historical record would include cases in which the United States had been dragged into conflicts and crises despite having no direct stake in them. There are few such cases. American allies have proven no more likely to become engaged in conflicts with adversaries than are other states, suggesting that US security guarantees have not provoked adventurism.13
True, during the Cold War, the United States faced serious national security challenges in allied territory, including the Berlin Crisis and the Taiwan Straits Crises. But as we saw in Chapter 2, the strong US stand over Berlin was not a product of beneficent obligation to West Germany; US policymakers saw US national interests at stake. Alliance with Bonn helped to make the US commitment to West Germany more credible, but it did not entangle the country in an uninvited fracas. Likewise during the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis, Washington had an independent interest in averting a conflict between Taipei and Beijing; it was not simply ensnared in an ally’s woes.
The United States also entered two major wars during the Cold War, in Korea and Vietnam. But in neither case was its participation a result of alliance commitments. The United States could not have been entangled by alliance with South Korea because the two did not have an alliance during the war. The dynamic arguably was just the opposite: Washington was dragged into war because it failed to commit to Seoul in early 1950. The United States later dangled the prospect of an alliance in order to win the South’s support for an armistice. Vietnam, the most flagrant American military blunder of the Cold War, also was not provoked by alliance obligations. SEATO, the US defense pact in Southeast Asia, did not include Vietnam as a partner. Indeed, most of America’s allies opposed the US war in Vietnam, and some worried that they would be entrapped.14 South Korea and Australia did enter the fray, sending large numbers of troops to assist the United States, even though their own publics opposed the war. The United States fought in Vietnam because of its own perceived national interests and arguably paid lower, if still considerable, costs in blood and treasure than it would have if not for allies.15
In the first few years after the Cold War, the United States participated in two more major conflicts, in the Middle East and the Balkans. The Gulf War was precipitated by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, with which the United States did not have an alliance. The George H. W. Bush administration committed troops to repel a violation of the UN Charter—not because it was obligated by treaty to protect Kuwait. Alliances played a greater role in the decision to take part in conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, as the United States sought to keep the North Atlantic Treaty relevant after the Cold War. But the Clinton administration also identified humanitarian interests and aimed to establish the United States’ newfound global primacy through leadership in the Balkan conflicts. Neither Bosnia nor Kosovo were NATO members.16
Given the scholarly conventional wisdom that alliances cause entrapment, why is it so hard to find cases of American entanglement? There are several reasons. First, the United States has designed its alliances with terms that reduce its exposure to risky commitments.17 Second, when it does commit to an ally, the United States tends to construct its treaty obligations vaguely, giving itself ample room to support its allies without entering conflicts.18 And third, Washington has been selective with its alliance partners, rejecting requests for security pacts when it judges the associated commitments too dangerous.
A clear example of Washington’s care in crafting treaty language is the 1954 agreement with Taiwan. Policymakers worried that Chiang Kai-Shek would exploit a US security guarantee, shrouding himself in American protection while launching attacks on mainland China. To guard against this, the United States gave itself an escape hatch in case Taiwan used force offensively. According to language attached to the treaty, Taipei needed to get Washington’s agreement before any such use of force. That meant Chiang could not take just any aggressive action he wished and expect American support.19 The alliance treaty also deliberately excluded several islands whose status Chinese communists and nationalists disputed. The United States opted to back Chiang through tensions over Quemoy and Matsu in 1954 and 1958, but Washington was not legally obligated to act as it did. During the first crisis, the alliance was still in draft form. During the second, Washington engaged because policymakers thought it wise to deter Mao’s China. The United States was not legally compelled to take any specific action.
To the contrary, American treaty promises are designed to leave Washington with room to maneuver. Most US alliances are triggered by an “unprovoked attack” on the ally, but no language spells out what constitutes unprovoked attack. Treaties, moreover, do not indicate what the American response will be in case of attack. Recall that in 1948 NATO allies sought a treaty provision that would require the United States to automatically enter a war if Western Europe was attacked, and Washington declined. The North Atlantic Treaty and all subsequent treaties promise American consultation if allies are victims of attack, but the nature of defensive aid is not specified.
Ambiguous commitments give Washington flexibility in times of crisis. When Taiwan and China became locked in an escalating standoff in 1958, the United States made public statements on Taiwan’s behalf, moved forces into the region, and provided naval convoys for Taiwanese ships. This was a nimble response short of war, enabled by Washington’s freedom to design its action as it saw fit. In 1956 the United States used its leeway to stay out of a crisis altogether. Late that year two of the closest US allies, Britain and France, joined Israel in an invasion of Egypt. They hoped to regain the Suez Canal after Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized it. But President Eisenhower opposed the intervention. Washington felt no obligation to participate, placing the United States in fleeting alignment with the Soviet Union and against its allies for the sake of preventing escalation.20
When the risks of entrapment run high, American leaders may never ally at all. US policymakers have made careful decisions about which international partners they should support, rejecting even close friends that pose excessive danger. Israel may be the most prominent example. Though a longstanding confederate on defense and intelligence issues, Israel is not a treaty ally. This is no accident. During the Kennedy administration, Israel requested a formal security guarantee from Washington. From 1961 to 1963, US policymakers seriously considered the idea. The prospect of alliance was attractive in no small part because US officials thought they could persuade Israel to abandon its nuclear program in exchange. But while Kennedy’s team wanted very much to stop Israel from going nuclear, it felt it could not offer a guarantee without risking entrapment. A particular concern was the tension between Israel and Egypt, a country the United States did not count as an adversary. Ultimately the United States chose not to pursue the alliance. Today it is America’s Middle Eastern partners—Israel and several Arab states—that are most often accused of “reckless driving,” but none of them are treaty allies.21 Formal US allies have records of highly responsible behavior.
Just as it is difficult to locate cases of US entrapment in allies’ security crises, so too is it difficult to identify instances in which alliances have ensnared the United States politically. The United States has never been caught in an alliance treaty it wanted to escape. The early republic renounced the treaty with France when it became cumbersome, began to support France’s rivals, and engaged in a naval war with Paris. There were no major political repercussions for the volte-face.22 Similarly, a century and a half later, the United States was able to extricate itself from SEATO without issue. The alliance had never provided much benefit in defending against communist subversion, in part because SEATO members disagreed on where and how the treaty should apply. They also held sharply diverging views about the war in Vietnam and their obligations to support it. Britain and France quickly began to distance themselves from the pact. SEATO lasted until the 1970s only because Washington wanted to maintain a defensive relationship with Thailand, which it did by essentially bilateralizing the pact through quiet diplomatic notes. Well before his election, Richard Nixon had called the alliance an “anachronistic relic,” and he encountered little resistance when he began to dismantle it once in office.23
If US hands were tied unduly by alliances, the country might never have achieved the important goal of opening formal relations with China. Doing so required a dramatic alliance policy reversal: before Nixon could go to China, the United States had to agree to Mao and Chou Enlai’s demand to end the alliance with Taiwan and withdraw all troops from the island.24 In 1971 National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger assented, paving the way for the historic presidential visit the following year.25
Ultimately it took longer to disassemble the alliance, as the move was politically unpalatable back home. Nixon postponed until after his reelection, and again until after the 1974 midterms. After Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford continued to demur. Jimmy Carter finally finished the job in 1978. In response to the abrogation, an outraged Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which allowed Washington to maintain a looser security pledge to Taipei. The bipartisan congressional Taiwan lobby even brought a lawsuit against President Carter, but they could not stop him from ending the alliance and recognizing China.26 Against determined bipartisan opposition, successive American presidents nullified a pact when they felt it no longer served the national interest.
If international relations scholars overstate the dangers of alliance entrapment, this may be because they focus on only one form of the problem: being dragged into war. In the case of the United States, this has not occurred, but Washington has arguably been ensnared in more modest ways. As US policymakers have discovered, when allies’ goals differ, their influence on each other may result in commitments they would otherwise have preferred to avoid.27 A security guarantee also may encourage the defender to get involved in an ally’s crisis early, rather than to stand aside and wait for it to escalate. An alliance-extending state is therefore likely to participate in crises short of war in order to prevent the outbreak of serious confrontation.
The 1961 Berlin Crisis is one example. Had the United States not been allied with West Germany and other Western European states, it might have stayed out of the Soviet-induced imbroglio: no treaty required action in Berlin. But, thanks in part to these alliances elsewhere in Europe, President Kennedy felt a need to coordinate with partners and increase his military commitment to the city in an effort to bolster immediate deterrence. However, this probably helped to resolve the crisis on terms more favorable to the United States. Similarly the United States did not have a specific obligation to defend Quemoy and Matsu in 1958, but the existence of an alliance likely increased Eisenhower’s perception that he should do something to support Chiang.
This effect is more nuanced than the entrapment or entanglement that scholars generally describe. It might be better thought of as alliance dilation—a subtle expansion of commitments beyond those indicated by the original alliance. Because of preexisting mutual interests, however, it is nearly impossible to identify what precise causal role alliances play in dilation. Expanded commitments necessarily arise when the United States has a genuine security interest in a relationship. That said, it would be wrong to contend that alliances never lead guarantors to devote resources they would not, absent the security guarantee. This subtle dilation does not entail costs as significant as we have been led to believe, but what costs accrue are nonetheless tangible.
Abandonment in American Alliances
The United States was never so close to its allies as to become obviously entangled in their wars or crises, nor did it become shackled to alliances its leaders preferred to discard. But what of the opposite alliance quandary? Was the United States ever jilted?
Abandonment occurs when an ally reneges on its commitment. An ally might officially sever ties, becoming neutral or realigning with another security guarantor. Or it might simply fail to hold up its end of the bargain by neglecting to give aid in a time of war.28
In the strictest sense, this has not happened to the United States. The country has itself ended alliances—with France, SEATO, and Taiwan—but never have allies backed away from their obligation with the United States. Because neither America nor its allies were directly attacked during the Cold War, allies never had the opportunity to slip a wartime commitment.
As with entrapment and entanglement, however, abandonment can take subtler forms. One is free-riding, which occurs when an ally benefits from an alliance without contributing to it sufficiently. As we have seen, it may not be appropriate to label allies free-riders just because they have smaller defense budgets than they might be able to afford. But there have been rare instances in which a treaty ally, seeking to exploit security guarantees, imposed meaningful political and material costs on the United States and other allies. The most damaging was the French effort under Charles de Gaulle to reap the benefits of NATO while shirking many of the costs.29 De Gaulle’s policy culminated in France’s withdrawal from the NATO military structure in 1966, a move that, as Helga Haftendorn puts it, left “the survival and the future course of the alliance … in jeopardy.”30
De Gaulle was on a mission to restore France to great power status. To this end he sought to build up the French armed forces and reinvigorate the country as a diplomatic player that would secure its interests on the world stage even when these departed from NATO’s. In particular he envisioned France serving as a mediator and promoter of détente, which in the 1960s seemed possible as the risk of war in Europe appeared to subside. Between 1960 and 1963, de Gaulle made known his opposition to Anglo-American NATO leadership and introduced several plans to raise France’s profile within the alliance.31
A true believer in sovereign independence, de Gaulle worried that France would be overly constrained by NATO and the United States. At the same time, he feared that the United States would exercise its own independence, abandoning its commitments when convenient. The Soviets had a nuclear arsenal on par with the Americans’ and were beginning to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that would allow them to strike the US mainland: Why would the United States risk a strike on Washington to save Paris? De Gaulle’s predecessor had initiated France’s nuclear program, and the general embraced it as a way to guarantee France’s survival if US security guarantees attenuated. Caught between a desire for autonomy and the need for protection, de Gaulle also opposed President Kennedy’s doctrine of flexible response, which both asserted centralized American control and struck him as potential US disengagement from Europe.32
During the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations, US officials took pains to coax de Gaulle back into NATO’s embrace. They toyed with multiple proposals to provide the alliance a multilateral nuclear stockpile, hoping to obviate de Gaulle’s pursuit of his own. By 1963, however, de Gaulle was obviously trying to extricate France from NATO military planning and was refusing to participate in a new forward-defense strategy to protect Germany. Two years later American officials were reasonably sure that de Gaulle would abandon the alliance and began to order high-level government studies to examine their options in response. They also held wargames to analyze the defense implications of French defection. Johnson’s cabinet considered threatening de Gaulle with the complete withdrawal of American protection to convince him to remain in NATO. But they decided the threat would not be credible—if the Soviets ever attacked Western Europe, it would be geographically and politically impossible for the United States not to aid France.33
By 1966 the French economy was at full strength, de Gaulle had just been reelected, and the United States was escalating in Vietnam, a war the general opposed. De Gaulle sensed an opening for mediation with the Soviet Union and an opportunity to execute his long-laid plan to leave NATO. He did so shrewdly, announcing his intention to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated command without abrogating the Atlantic alliance. This was a move American officials had not anticipated. De Gaulle was renouncing France’s peacetime military responsibilities to the alliance but was not defecting altogether. In essence, France was refusing to contribute to the alliance, even as it continued to claim to the alliance’s protection. It struck the Johnson administration and many NATO allies as the ultimate evasion. The allies were outraged and immediately sought to limit the damage.34
The political and material costs of de Gaulle’s defection were significant, not least because France was home to so much NATO infrastructure—President Johnson declared the alliance would have to “rebuild NATO outside of France.”35 The House Armed Services Committee insisted that de Gaulle’s decision had “done more to endanger the security of Western Europe than all activities undertaken by Communist governments since the beginning of the NATO alliance.” All foreign forces and equipment, including 71,000 US personnel, would be expelled from France on April 1, 1967—April Fools’ Day, as Senator Ernest Gruening noted dyspeptically—or else be forced to submit to French military command. A significant percentage of the US personnel were sent to Germany, with the remainder repatriated to the United States. Logistics and supply depots were also moved to Germany, along with $1 billion of materiel. US Air Force equipment and personnel were dispersed to other European bases. Far more cumbersome was the relocation of the allied headquarters and the NATO Defense College to Belgium. NATO also lost supply lines and petroleum pipelines that ran through France.36
In a further insult, the alliance had to negotiate with Paris over whether it could count on the use of French territory and airspace in the event of a war. If the answer was no, there would be a gaping hole in NATO defense plans. Even with that permission, the French defection would reduce the territory available in which to execute NATO’s defense strategy because no alliance troops would be on the ground there. In all, the United States estimated its material losses at between $300 million and $1 billion worth of infrastructure and other defense investments in France.37 This was not wartime abandonment, but it was about as costly as peacetime defection could get.
Yet France’s departure proved a blessing in disguise for NATO, galvanizing the remaining members. It had not just been de Gaulle who was anxious about the advent of nuclear parity with the Soviet Union and the possible attenuation of US security guarantees. Most NATO members feared the alliance would collapse just as the USSR was becoming more capable. President Johnson used the shock of de Gaulle’s withdrawal as an opportunity to revitalize the alliance. He quickly pushed through NATO approval of the flexible-response approach and agreed to give allies more of a voice in strategy through a new Defense Planning Committee and Nuclear Planning Group.38 Other leaders in the alliance also seized the moment. Catalyzed by the French withdrawal, Belgian Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel initiated a year-long study to examine the future of the alliance, which ultimately devised a plan for strengthening deterrence and charting a course toward stability with the Soviets. The plan guided the alliance’s strategy for the rest of the Cold War. De Gaulle’s nationalist stance against NATO integration wound up inspiring a wave of defense institutionalization that would bring the allies closer together and carry them through the decades.39
There were other instances of alliance defection during the Cold War, such as New Zealand’s. An energetic antinuclear movement developed in New Zealand in the 1980s, resulting in the country’s decision to become a nuclear-free zone. This was akin to dropping a commitment to the United States, because American nuclear-powered ships were no longer allowed to make port calls. New Zealand was suspended from ANZUS and its status downgraded to “friend.” But the United States and New Zealand continued to cooperate on important defense and intelligence matters, and the inability to port had little impact on US strategy.
In both of these cases, France and New Zealand continued to benefit from American security guarantees, despite contributing less to the alliance than they previously had—clear instances of free-riding. But while the costs of de Gaulle’s gambit were considerable, they were hardly beyond America’s means: even the highest estimated losses to the United States totaled no more than 1 percent of the costs of the concurrent Vietnam War.40 Indeed, neither France’s nor New Zealand’s defection imposed costs outweighing the benefits of alliance. No Cold War–era or contemporary strategist or policymaker could credibly argue that the long-term advantages of NATO were offset by de Gaulle’s escapade, and New Zealand’s choice in the waning days of superpower competition was a minor irritant.
Does Cutting Ties Cut Costs?
We cannot measure precisely the financial burdens of alliance or the costs of alliance dilation and modest free-riding. Nor is there clear evidence of flagrant entrapment and outright abandonment to be weighed. It is therefore difficult to settle conclusively the cost-benefit accounting of America’s alliance system.
Again, counterfactual analysis can help us divine some clarity from murky history. Faced with the contention that the United States overspent on alliances during or after the Cold War because allies failed to pay their fair share, the appropriate question is whether fewer alliances and slimmer force posture would have resulted in less cost. And what if the United States had maintained no major alliances at all during the Cold War? Would it have paid fewer political and material costs?
If the United States wished to spend significantly less on costs that have been associated with alliances it could attempt this through a significant reduction in its overseas force posture. This could be accomplished by ending several major American alliances, allowing the United States to close bases and withdraw troops. Such a strategy would end or amend the North Atlantic Treaty, the US-Japan security treaty, and the US–Republic of Korea mutual defense treaty, transferring to all allies the primary responsibility for their defense. These drastic moves would considerably reduce the size of the US military by cutting back on personnel, aircraft, naval vessels, and other major platforms. As a result, defense spending might drop from about 3.5 percent of GDP to 2.5 percent in contemporary terms.41 Washington would free itself from many of its overseas commitments by adopting a wait-and-see approach, addressing international threats when and if they arose, much as it did before the Second World War.
The financial benefits of this homeland-defense strategy, as opposed to a forward-defense strategy, may seem obvious. With a smaller defense budget, the United States could invest in any number of needed domestic programs. There are some clear political benefits, too. By pulling back, the United States would guarantee itself against entrapment. There would be no advanced obligations with the potential to constrain foreign policy decisions.
If this were the end of the calculation, the cost savings of reducing alliances and reorienting American strategy might be compelling. But we must also calculate what the United States might lose along with its pacts. In particular, pre-commitment, for all its potential downsides, is what produces deterrence. The promise that a powerful defender will enter a conflict helps to ensure that the conflict never starts. If the United States detached from commitments, reducing its deterrence posture to only its homeland, it would no longer be able to prevent outbreaks of hostilities. This would, in turn, increase the chances of the United States finding itself involved in full-blown wars. Ultimately, saving money by cutting deterrence may actually raise the cost of defense in blood and treasure.
Furthermore, under this scenario, when Washington did decide to enter conflicts, it would do so without the advanced planning and coordination that forward defense enables. This would cause delays as troops and platforms move from the continental United States; surging forces in Europe or Asia would require weeks as opposed to days. The costs of deploying a large expeditionary force with no existing basing arrangements would be enormous. And once the United States committed to a conflict, deployment delays would put its forces at a disadvantage. As in the Korean War, the US military would likely have to spend months reversing losses before it made gains.
In this wait-and-see world, would-be US allies would have to provide for their own defense, potentially making cooperation with the United States more difficult. They would develop incompatible weapons systems and defensive doctrines that assumed no allied cooperation. There would be few opportunities to train together. Military cooperation would drift.42 Even if one-off alignments were formed for the purpose of fighting a given war, each participant would enter the conflict as an independent operator rather than as a member of a coordinated coalition. If this war were instead fought by longtime allies enjoying strategic and operational coordination, it would cost much less.
Consider what a leaner, alliance-free Cold War posture would have looked like. In the absence of deterrence and forward defense, the United States might easily have found itself joining additional wars on the Korean Peninsula or facing bolder Soviet attempts to take West Berlin or West Germany. Recall that the United States tended to extend Cold War alliances to states it was likely to defend anyway, preferring to pay tolerable upfront force-posture costs instead of much higher ones in blood and treasure later on. A wait-and-see approach would not have ended the Cold War or obviated America’s interest in upholding the balance of power. Rather, the standoff may well have been hotter, forcing the United States to join active conflicts along Cold War fault lines from a militarily disadvantageous position.
Korea provides a cautionary tale. Because the United States disengaged, removing troops in 1949 and signaling diplomatic pullback in 1950, it soon found itself fighting over the very same territory. At the price of $341 billion (more than $3 trillion in current dollars) and 36,574 American lives, it was surely costlier for the United States to join this war once it had started than it would have been to form an alliance, maintain a troop presence, and deter North Korea from invading.43 Similar conflicts may have arisen in West Berlin and Taiwan if not for forward defense and deterrence. The United States would not have been compelled to join those wars, but if it had participated, the challenges would have been considerable—far greater than those of deterrence.
Pruning alliances would also lead to economic sacrifice. Moving forces home can actually be more expensive than keeping them overseas. Some allies, such as Japan and South Korea, subsidize US forces so heavily that it is cheaper to station them abroad.44 Moreover, ending American alliances could harm US prosperity generally. Economists have found that American security commitments bring sizable trade benefits. After Washington grants security alliances or deploys troops overseas, bilateral trade flows improve sharply. The data suggest that American security commitments increase regional stability, which in turn reduces the costs of trade. It follows that if American security treaties and military personnel are reduced, trade will also suffer. In economic models, a 50 percent reduction in defense treaties and troop levels reduces overall US bilateral trade by 18 percent. Cutting treaty relationships by half could reduce trade in goods by $426 billion. Cutting both treaty ties and military personnel by the same amount would lead to an annual loss of $577 billion in trade. This would be associated with a net reduction in US GDP of $490 billion per year, in 2015 dollars.45 This trade is equivalent to nearly 80 percent of the modern US defense budget. Ending alliances and downsizing force posture may therefore reduce US defense spending somewhat, but it could not possibly compensate for the trade losses that would accompany disengagement.
A Price Worth Paying
American concerns about the financial and political burdens of alliance are as old as the republic itself, but they are not borne out in the record.
It is true that many US allies underspent on defense throughout the Cold War, according to the Pentagon’s fair-share metric. But allies’ relatively low defense outlays, as compared to US spending, do not tell us as much as many politicians, international relations theorists, and everyday citizens seem to believe. America’s spending reflects the country’s far-flung global strategy, not its alliance commitments per se. Moreover, spending-gap data do not support the conclusion that the United States would have incurred fewer political and material costs if it had pursued an alliance-free Cold War strategy. Without allies and a forward presence, Washington would have faced different kinds of entrapment and abandonment threats, which, if realized, would very likely have been costlier than those rare instances that occurred during the Cold War. The United States also would have forgone substantial economic benefits.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Washington has rarely been entangled in conflict on behalf of its allies, and when it has joined them in crises, it has done so because it saw US interests at stake. US leaders never found themselves stuck in a treaty arrangement they wished to discard. The milder issue of alliance dilation has arisen; US leaders’ view of the national interest sometimes expanded with its pacts. But while one might object to their reading of the national interest, it was at least in part that reading—not simply entanglement—that resulted in additional commitments. Finally, while the United States paid political and material costs for France’s abandonment of NATO, these were negligible compared to the benefits the alliance provided over the decades.
Given the manifest benefits delivered by the Cold War shields, and the potentially enormous costs the United States would have otherwise assumed on its own, one can reasonably conclude that investing in alliances was a wise decision. The tremendous political advantages alliances provided at low cost likely help to explain their longevity. Indeed, Washington was so certain of the return on its alliances that it refused to discard them even when their Soviet raison d’etre suddenly disappeared.