Rethinking the Biden Administration's enthusiasm for new alliance structures

I suppose there’s nothing quite like a war involving Israel to send foreign policy mavens into flights of doomsday fantasy. Noah Smith jumps into the act:

It feels like something that was long sealed away has broken loose. In 2022 we saw a nuclear-armed great power invade and try to conquer a neighboring country. Now Iran is threatening to go to war with Israel, and the U.S. is sending carrier strike groups to the region to deter it. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan may be getting ready to invade Armenia, Serbia might invade Kosovo, and other wars and atrocities are breaking out in various corners of the world.¹

That passage deserves credit for packing a substantial amount of panicky fantasy into four sentences!²

But professional warmongers are always ready to take advantage of such sentiments to make whatever mischief they wanted to make for years. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously enthused after the 9/11 attacks in 1991 about what he wanted to do:

Hours after a commercial plane struck the Pentagon on September 11 2001 the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was issuing rapid orders to his aides to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement, according to notes taken by one of them.

"Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly," the notes say. "Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not."³ [my emphasis]

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. The Iraq War, 20 years of war in Afghanistan that ended with the Taliban back in power, the torture program and “special rendition”, Guantanamo prison that is still operating, massive civilian casualties (aka, “collateral damage”), and an ongoing drone assassination program that is basically serial acts of war. All things to keep in mind when people talk about the October 7 Hamas attack being “Israel’s 9/11.”

Also worth keeping in mind is that the neocons have been jonesing for a war with Iran since 1979. If Secretary of State Anthony Blinken shows up at the United Nations with a little bottle of white power, watch out!⁴

How much are formal US alliances helping us?

So, with the neocons in war-fantasy heaven already, it’s worth asking how the Biden Administration’s foreign policy, which has focused on containing an increasingly powerful China as its first priority, has prepared the US for this moment.

Biden’s continuance of the process that began under the Trump Administration with the Abraham Accords is part of the strategic mix of the current moment. For Iran and the Palestinians, a partnership between Saudi Arabia and Israel would be a disaster for their perceived interests. And granting an American security guarantee to Saudi Arabia would go even further in that direction.

Jonathan Hoffmann (of the Cato Institute) explained in a piece several days before the October 7 Hamas attack:

The Abraham Accords have become the new “lodestar” of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Through these series of normalization deals, the United States hopes to create a more formal coalition through which it believes it can best advance its interests, namely by maintaining its regional influence amid Russian and Chinese “encroachment” while also allocating more attention to other global theaters such as Eastern Europe and the Pacific.

However, regional actors are increasingly using the Accords as a mechanism to keep the United States entangled in the region as the continued guarantor of their security. The Arab states that joined the Abraham Accords were granted considerable policy concessions for doing so without any serious debate as to whether such tradeoffs served the interests of the United States. They interpret the Accords as a mechanism for maintaining the regional status quo – with more concrete and integrated U.S. security guarantees undergirding it.

This is precisely the lens through which Riyadh views its possible entry into the Abraham Accords: as a way to pressure the United States into granting the kingdom sweeping concessions and guaranteeing Washington remains its ultimate protector over the long term. Washington’s ongoing support for actors like Saudi Arabia has resulted in a vicious cycle: by committing itself to propping up the underlying sources of regional instability, the United States repeatedly finds itself having to confront challenges that are largely the product of its own presence, policies, and partners in the Middle East. Making things even more obscene, Washington may be deepening its commitment to these illiberal states at a time when it has become clear that the region hardly matters to U.S. national security.⁵ [my emphasis]

Über-Realist Stephen Walt, consistently one of the most insightful and provocative foreign policy scholars and who also actively participates in contemporary debates, raises some important questions about the risks and effectiveness of the US international alliances, which are being actively expanded by the Biden Administration. Among other things, he cautions:

Indeed, in today’s world, what U.S. officials like to call “alliances” or “security partnerships” are more like protectorates. In many cases, the United States has agreed to defend weak and vulnerable countries that can’t do much to help the United States no matter how much they might want to. Such arrangements may still be useful if the country in question is in a critical location or controls other valuable assets, but that determination needs to be made on a case-by-case basis and in an unsentimental and hard-headed way.⁶ [my emphasis]

He recalls the elaborate system of post-war alliances, the most important of which for the US is NATO, often called the most successful international alliance in history. He discusses the following formal alliances structures:

ANZUS (1951-present): Australia, New Zealand, United States

Despite being in operation for more than 60 years, the ANZUS treaty has only been formally invoked once. Then Australian Prime Minister John Howard did this in 2001 as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, leading to Australia’s involvement in the United States led ‘War on Terror’.

Australia’s commitment to other US-led causes such as the Vietnam War, while not formalised under ANZUS, have been linked to the treaty. Many political commentators suggested that Australia’s strong involvement in Vietnam was a means of proving our usefulness to the alliance, demonstrating Australian loyalty should we need US support in the future.⁷ (National Museum Australia)

Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), aka, Baghdad Pact (1954-1979): Britain, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, with bilateral US treaties with each member

Formed at the urging of Britain and the United States, the Central Treaty Organization was intended to counter the threat of Soviet expansion into vital Middle East oil-producing regions. It was never very effective. Iraq withdrew from the alliance in 1959 after its anti-Soviet monarchy was overthrown. That same year the United States became an associate member, the name of the organization was changed to CENTO, and its headquarters was moved to Ankara. Following the fall of the shah in 1979, Iran withdrew, and CENTO was dissolved.⁸ [my emphasis] (Britannica Online)

SEATO (1954-1977): Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, aka, Manila Pact: Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Phillipines, Thailand, US.

Damien Fenton notes of this alliance:

There is no denying that in the latter half of its existence, SEATO was overshadowed, and indeed ultimately overwhelmed, by the Vietnam War and the eventual failure of the United States and its allies to prevent the conquest of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by communist forces. The inescapable taint of failure attached to SEATO as a result of these events certainly explains the willingness of the organisation’s members to disband it in 1977, the disparagement it provoked among Western geo-political and defence observers in the final years leading up to its demise, and its total disappearance from their debates subsequent to that disbandment.⁹ [my emphasis]

And Walt observes:

Together with NATO, the bilateral U.S.commitments to South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, informal but significant support for Taiwan and South Vietnam, and the U.S. role in the Organization of American States (founded in 1948), this ever-expanding array of security commitments sought to contain communism around the entire perimeter of the communist world and the Western Hemisphere as well.

During the Vietnam War, alliances like CENTO and SEATO were often part of policy debates. SEATO was used as a justification for the Vietnam War, but it was a bogus excuse. Nothing in the SEATO treaty required the US to intervene in Vietnam. Neither South Vietnam nor Laos nor Cambodia were SEATO members.

Though as Fenton also describes:

[T]he US did win agreement for the inclusion of a protocol to the Manila Treaty that made it clear that SEATO reserved the right to treat any threat to the stability and security of the three newly independent Indochinese states as a threat to the alliance itself… . This effectively put the “Protocol States” under SEATO protection which, while apparently satisfying the American aim of shoring up the boundary of the Cold War frontline in Southeast Asia, would nonetheless prove far more difficult in its execution than its proclamation.¹⁰ [my emphasis]

US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (1951-present)

This alliance has increased its scope over the decades and is a key part of the current US containment strategy against China:

In 2015, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan reinterpreted its constitution in a historic move that allowed its military to defend allies for the first time, but under limited circumstances. The change helped pave the way for the United States and Japan to revise their defense guidelines once again, expanding the scope of their military cooperation and focusing the alliance on current threats—including from China and North Korea—and new technologies. …

The United States and Japan have worked closely on developing ballistic-missile technology, with the 2019 U.S. Department of Defense Missile Defense Review describing Japan as one of the United States’ “strongest missile defense partners” [PDF]. In 2020, the United States approved the sale of 105 F-35 fighters to Japan. Meanwhile, Japan has committed to working with the United States to improve space, cyber, and maritime awareness capabilities and deepen science and tech cooperation, focusing on defense applications of unmanned systems and artificial intelligence.¹¹

Walt gave this interview a few days ago to Steve Clemons¹² on the current situation in Israel-Palestine, including some discussion of the negotiations with Saudi Arabia - and the lack of them with Iran:

1. Smith, Noah (2023): We're not ready for the Big One. Noahpinion (Substack) 10/15/2023. (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

2. Quick reality check: Israel has threatened to go to war with Iran so many times over the last two decades I stopped counting years ago. (But the risk of a Iran-Israel war soon is real.) Azerbaijan just got what it wanted via a criminal transfers of ethnic Armenians into Armenia, and it has been Armenia that has wanted since the fall of the USSR to annex territory internationally recognized as Azerbaijan’s. And Serbia a few weeks ago did do a small armed incursion into Kosovo, a country that was part of Serbian sovereign territory that NATO removed by force in the intervention of 1999 and formally declared independence in 2008, a status Serbia has never recognized.

3. Borger, Julian (2006): Blogger bares Rumsfeld's post 9/11 orders. The Guardian 02/24/2006. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/24/freedomofinformation.september11> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

4. Mitchell, Jack (2023): 20 years ago, the U.S. warned of Iraq's alleged 'weapons of mass destruction'. NPR 02/03/2023. <https://www.npr.org/2023/02/03/1151160567/colin-powell-iraq-un-weapons-mass-destruction> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

5. Hoffmann, Jonathan (2023): Biden’s Middle East deal is a disaster. Responsible Statecraft 09/27/2023. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/biden-deal-saudi-arabia-israel/> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

6. Walt, Stephen (2023): The Biden Administration Is Addicted to Partnerships. Foreign Policy 10/03/2023. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/03/biden-blinken-security-pacts-partnerships-southkorea-japan-vietnam-ukraine/#cookie_message_anchor> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

7. ANZUS Treaty. National Museum Australia, n/d. <https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/anzus-treaty> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

8. Editors (2023): Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). Britannica Online 03/20/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Central-Treaty-Organization> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

9. Fenton, Damien (2012): To Cage the Red Dragon: SEATO and the Defence of Southeast Asia 1955–1965, 2. Singapore: NUS Press.

10. Fenton, op. cit., 27.

11. Maizland, Lindsay & Cheng, Nathanael (2021): The U.S.-Japan Security Alliance. Council of Foreign Relations website 11/04/2021. <https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-japan-security-alliance#chapter-title-0-8> (Accessed: 2023-15-10).

12. Stephen Walt: US, Israeli strategy on Palestine has failed: The Bottom Line. A'l Jazeera English YouTube channel. 10/12/2023. (Accessed: 2023-15-10).