Introduction

It seems hard to pin down exactly when it was that alliance politics became once again the basis of so many news headlines, as is now the case in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Intuitively, some readers might point to 2016, when British voters chose to withdraw their country from the European Union (EU) and voters in the United States elected Donald J. Trump to be their next president. These twin events signaled a deep disenchantment with multilateral cooperation in two countries that have historically underpinned what many call the liberal rules-based international order. Trump’s broadsides against longstanding treaty partners, whether as regards their economic policies or their military spending, alarmed governments around the world that are friendly to the United States. Still, one can just as well point to the twelve months spanning March 14, 2013 and March 18, 2014. The first date is when Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China for life, prompting fresh concerns among US partners in East Asia over China’s foreign policy direction under his authoritarian leadership. The second date marks the signing of the Treaty on Accession of the Republic of Crimea to Russia, thus formalizing the first territorial annexation in Europe since 1945. Unsurprisingly, many of Russia’s Western neighbors reacted with alarm. They feared that they themselves would soon become objects of military aggression and so looked to the United States for protection. At least with respect to those alliances led by the United States, the events bookmarking those twelve months helped produce the insecurity that the fateful votes cast in 2016 simply aggravated.

      Few may have realized it at the time, but 2008 was arguably the watershed year for how the United States managed its military alliances around the world. The first major event to be considered here took place in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, where leaders of all twenty-six North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states gathered to discuss the future of the alliance. One key item on the agenda was whether to extend Membership Action Plans (MAPs) to Georgia and Ukraine, a move that, if approved, would set those countries on the path toward full membership. Under George W. Bush’s leadership, the United States advocated strongly for their inclusion. Getting endorsement from Washington was a big deal for Georgia and Ukraine. After all, thanks largely to the United States, other East Central European countries like Poland and Latvia had been able to become NATO members in the previous decade. Yet, despite Washington’s record of consistently getting what it wanted with NATO enlargement, this time was different. At the summit in Bucharest, France and Germany pushed back against the US initiative, in part because they did not wish to antagonize Russia, which was opposed to those countries’ prospective membership in NATO. As NATO makes decisions based on full consensus, Georgia and Ukraine ended up being denied those MAPs that they had coveted so much. Several months later, in August, Georgia fought a brief war with Russia. The pro-Western coalition government ruling Ukraine at the time collapsed one month later.

The second major event in 2008 was the financial crash. To be sure, the declared bankruptcy of major investment bank Lehman Brothers in mid-September that year was the culminating point of a smoldering crisis that had already been roiling the subprime mortgage market since early 2007. Nevertheless, the bankruptcy of that particular bank precipitated major stock market losses and the failure of several other important financial institutions located in the United States. The US unemployment rate increased to its highest level in decades, while the output of goods and services plummeted dramatically. The crisis was wide-reaching, impacting European and Asian markets as well and becoming the most serious crash since the Great Depression. Joseph Nye (2011) even opined that the financial crisis plaguing the United States gave China an opportunity to assert its foreign policy interests more actively, now that the hobbled superpower appeared to be on the decline. With so much wealth wiped out, and so much debt incurred to reinvigorate the US economy, many questioned whether Washington could afford to maintain its international commitments. In the aftermath of this crisis, some security analysts advocated that the United States must retrench by withdrawing military support to allies in order to focus on domestic problems. Those allies, they argued, were strong enough to provide for their own defense (see MacDonald and Parent 2018; Posen 2014).

The third event was the election of Democratic nominee Barack Obama to the US presidency in November 2008. As candidate, he pledged to repair the United States’ standing in the world, arguing that Bush had squandered much of the international goodwill his administration received following the September 11, 2001 attacks by waging an unpopular war in Iraq. Obama spoke in favor of re-engaging with countries like Russia, while calling for US military alliances and partnerships to be rebuilt so that they could deal with threats ranging from nuclear proliferation to terrorism. He also promised to reinvigorate the NATO-led campaign in Afghanistan. But despite meeting with European leaders and giving a major foreign policy address to a large crowd in Berlin over the course of his campaign, Obama’s presidential agenda was to be primarily domestic. He advocated expanding healthcare coverage and, once the financial crisis was in full swing, focused his rhetoric on stabilizing markets, job creation, and tax reforms. Although much optimism greeted his electoral victory, the economic damage wrought by the financial crisis suggested that the United States would turn inward during his presidency. With global capitalism in severe distress, Obama voiced skepticism toward global free trade, pledging to renegotiate trade treaties while embracing protectionist measures that called on companies to “Buy American.”

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