The Case for Betting on Western Alliances, Not Against Them

Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi—both senior Biden-era Asia and China hands—use Foreign Affairs' new issue to challenge the reflexive pessimism gripping Western capitals about NATO and the wider alliance system. Trump's tariffs, his threats over Greenland and his skepticism of NATO's Article 5 have convinced many observers that America's postwar alliance architecture is dying under its own contradictions. Campbell and Doshi argue the opposite: alliances have survived acute shocks before, from de Gaulle's NATO walkout to the Suez crisis, and the structural forces that built them—shared threats, technology, trade—are intensifying rather than fading as China and Russia draw closer together. They contend Beijing's own scale advantage leaves Washington with no realistic path to competing alone, making allied mass, not unilateral strength, the only durable answer. The authors don't dismiss the damage Trump has done to trust among partners, but they read it as a stress test rather than a terminal diagnosis. Their prescription is a new bargain: allies accept more of the burden and some loss of autonomy in exchange for continued American commitment, formalized through deeper technology-sharing and joint industrial planning. It is a deliberately unfashionable argument—alliance fatalism has become the consensus view among realists and restrainers alike—which is exactly why it is likely to shape how Western capitals talk about the alliance question this autumn.