Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
examples of the Obama administration’s cool relations with allies point in the same direction, showing a profound doubt about the wisdom of the U.S. military’s intercession as a keystone of alliance relations, a certainty that U.S. engagement is more provocative than stabilizing, and an abiding faith that important strategic regions of the world can best achieve equilibrium if left to their own devices. The Obama administration’s deep hope of concluding large strategic agreements with states—Iran, for example—that regard the United States with enmity is the obverse face of its ambivalent view of allies. The ambivalence did not begin with President Obama.
The attempt to patch things up with powers that regard the United States as hostile started well before he took office. A senior foreign policy official of George W. Bush’s administration asked a highly respected elder academic, one of America’s leading experts on Turkey and the Middle East, about the advisability of building bridges to Iran’s radical clerics. The professor answered that the effort would “earn nothing except the enmity of the Iranian people and the contempt of their rulers.”3
President Obama also tried his hand at grand bargains. He sought to “reset” relations with Russia, notwithstanding Vladimir Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. The remaking of U.S. foreign policy did not end with Russia’s rejection of Obama’s overtures. Echoing Obama’s 2013 televised wishes to Iran, Secretary of State John Kerry wrote the same year of his commitment “to resolving the differences between Iran and the United States, and continuing to work toward a new day in our relationship.”4
Iran’s leadership was unfazed. In early May 2016, the deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Hossein Salami, threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to the United States and its allies. He added that “Americans cannot make safe any part of the world.”5 The Iranian general’s overstated claims aside, he has a point.
Most of America’s allies are medium-sized states located where geography and the nation’s broad political interest in containing potential adversaries combine. Asked to define Central Europe, a senior Polish statesman once sought refuge in geography, calling it “the area between the Baltic and the Black Seas.”6 This description includes, among others, the Baltic States and the Visegrad Group of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, as well as states that abut the Balkan Peninsula, Romania and Bulgaria. These mostly democratic states sit on or near Russia’s western border, so that the center of the entire area brackets Russia while its littoral extremities touch the seas through which Russian ships must pass to reach the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Geography, containment, and politics combine in favor of the United States. Wise policy will exploit these strengths by supporting the Atlantic Alliance.
The post–Cold War commitment of the United States to the independence and security of Central and Eastern European states has added to Western Europe’s strategic depth as it nourished democratic stability in the cradle of the wars that convulsed Europe beginning more than a century ago. The same American commitment has countered Moscow’s effort to control utterly the flow of energy westward and corrode NATO, an alliance whose ability to preserve freedom on the western end of the Eurasian continent remains vital if there is to be such a thing as “the West.”
The Middle East is significantly different from Europe and Asia because America’s most important ally, Israel, is a regional power that has successfully withstood neighboring enemies’ attacks since reassuming its position as a Jewish state nearly seventy years ago. Otherwise, America’s generally weak allies are mostly grouped together along the Persian Gulf, where their self-interest in resisting Iran and maintaining peaceful seas over which their oil can be transported has aligned with America’s large interest in an unmolested supply of Middle Eastern oil and—now—growing interest in containing Iran.
Finally, there is China, where American allies, friends, and partners bracket the East Asian mainland from Japan to South Korea to Taiwan, the Philippines, the Australian continent, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and the subcontinent, India. The U.S.-led network of bilateral alliances has supported the progress of democracy, large strides in regional prosperity, and increased markets for U.S. goods and services. As with the European peninsula’s oceanic borders, the dependable presence and deterrent ability of American seapower has been pivotal in supplying the hard power to ensure the safety of free sea-lanes, defend allies and friends, and convince a growing potential adversary that nothing is to be gained from war with the United States.
While a peaceable U.S. presence has remained a constant in the region since the end of World War II, its effects have changed. Where U.S. interest once offered stability in which East Asian states prospered, today the bilateral relationships that exist between these states and the United States are a land moat against Chinese regional hegemony as well as a breakwater against China’s ambitions in the island chain that lies further east in the Pacific. Because half the world’s population lives in Asia, regional hegemony there has a meaning unlike anywhere else.
The allies, partners, and friends that successive U.S. administrations have constructed into a global system since World War II share several important characteristics. They are all at great distances from the United States but quite close to potential adversaries. They ring the Eurasian continent. Besides the Arab states and Vietnam, they are democracies. With very few exceptions, they sit astride vital sea lines of communication or choke points through which a large fraction of international shipping passes. From their shores, seapower can be exercised, whether it is to guarantee the safety of the world’s navigational routes, command the proximate seas, project force ashore, encourage allies by a U.S. naval presence, or supply the bases that support America’s entire network of global alliances.
If budget cuts, loss of interest, disengagement, or other obstacles decimate American power, the nation will lose its ability to make safe the parts of the world in which it has a strategic interest. This will result in historically unprecedented international chaos, from the South and East China Seas to the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and, most immediately, to Russia.
The seagoing inklings of this chaos are in full sight as the United States concentrates on combating terror at the expense of reinvigorating its ability to defeat such potential adversaries as Russia and China. The steel sinews of American seapower not only have guarded our ability to ship goods abroad and communicate with allies but also, since the end of World War II, have provided an unequaled ability to respond to crises, remain present in troubled regions, provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and apply force from sea to land. Our seapower has served as the single strongest guarantor of such order as exists in the world today.
No one alive today knows a world in which general principles of order do not exist. Although practiced imperfectly and selectively, most states acknowledge them as the standard of international behavior. Respect for national sovereignty, government by consent of the governed, freedom of navigation on the high seas, and economic systems based on capitalism are some of the better-known elements of the order. All have been objectives of American foreign and security policy since the nation’s founding.
Today’s order has its intellectual roots in the transition from ancient to modern political theory that took place as human nature’s concern with life in society replaced virtue as the aim of politics. For practical purposes, the international system we know began with the Treaties of Westphalia, which were signed in 1648 and which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The war had been an exceptionally barbaric European free-for-all over religion. At its end, the duke of the religiously divided northern European duchy of Pomerania described the long conflict as having “driven [the poor] to such unnatural and inhuman food as buds of trees and grass, and even to the flesh of their own children and of dead bodies.”7
In the event, a balance of state powers and practicality lighted Europe’s path away from repeated violent explosions of religious dissension fueled by the collision of imperial ambition, aspiring states, and lesser principalities. As with the Magna Carta, in which the nobility’s specific complaints against King John led to a broader acceptance of individual rights, the Westphalian agreements set in motion today’s international order.
Since World War II, America’s allies, its military, and its diplomacy have been