Axis of Frenemies

An under-appreciated aspect of America's alliance system

During World War II, the United States and its major allies were engaged in a more or less existential battle with a group of nations similarly allied against us. Our goals were certainly not always aligned—the Roosevelt Administration was far from keen to restore either the British or French empires, to say nothing of its concerns about the Soviet Union’s postwar intentions. Notwithstanding those substantial divergences of interest, though, the paramount goal of defeating the Axis, and the historically enormous efforts all the allies made toward that goal in terms of blood and treasure expended, made us allies in any important sense you might care to advance.

After the war, the United States formed, for the first time in our history, a long-term alliance with some of our key European allies from the war—as well as with some of our former enemies—in an effort to contain the Soviet Union. NATO was, from the start, an alliance very much in the spirit of America’s wartime alliances, organized around a core common interest and a commonly-shared burden. It was arguably the most successful alliance of its kind.

Not all of America’s Cold War alliances were quite like that, but what they generally had in common was an orientation around containing the Soviet Union, our great ideological and geopolitical adversary, and whether you think that was a sound basis in retrospect for foreign policy or not, it was a basis. Since the end of the Cold War, however, it’s been less and less clear what, exactly, our alliance system is about. For a while, it looked like the United States was aiming at a kind of universal alliance, a tamed international commons in which the United States played the world’s policeman. More recently, there’s been a lot of idle chatter from the Biden Administration about how America stands at the head of an alliance of democracies, a stance which is wildly hypocritical given how often we toss concerns about democracy and human rights aside because of other interests in play. But I understand why the blather is happening: because we can’t easily explain what many of our alliances are for anymore.

I’m not even primarily thinking of NATO here, though I’ve argued before for a shift where we cultivate rather than obstructing a common European defense and accept that this will mean a Europe that is also more independent-minded. Nor am I thinking about our principal allies in the western Pacific. It’s not news that the United States is increasingly concerned about China and the need to contain it militarily, economically and diplomatically. One can argue that this understanding of our interests is faulty, and that we would be better served by a more cooperative and less zero-sum view of China’s rise—but at least there is an understanding of our interests underlying what we are doing in the region.

What about the rest of the world, though? Take Pakistan, a major non-NATO ally. Once upon a time, Pakistan made some sense as a Cold War ally, given India’s mild pro-Soviet tilt and Pakistan’s consequent alignment with China, and we shared common interests in the proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But since the end of the Cold War, Pakistan built a rogue nuclear program and has been implicated in other countries’ efforts at nuclear proliferation; its intelligence service supported the Taliban in Afghanistan both before and after America toppled their regime; and Osama bin Laden found refuge on Pakistan’s territory. Moreover, even if none of that mattered, Pakistan today is still aligned with China, and the United States is trying to build a cooperative relationship with India. Finally, Pakistan’s history has been plagued by military coups and rampant corruption, and is neither an important American market nor a supplier of any strategic resources to America or its allies. In all of that context, how can Pakistan be described as an ally at all, much less a “major” one?

I think the right way to understand America’s “alliance” with Pakistan is that its primary purpose is to sustain some measure of American influence in the country. Would American interests be advanced by reducing our ties? Not obviously— they certainly weren’t during the period after 1998 when America formally distanced itself to punish Pakistan for its nuclear tests. Among the most valuable things the United States has to offer Pakistan are military equipment and training, and we’re trading that for some cooperation on matters of interest to the United States, and for the ability to influence Pakistani policy to a modest degree. Even if all we get is a better understanding of what’s going on inside the country, that’s worth something.

But it’s not much. And what I think we don’t recognize sufficiently is that a great many American relationships are like this, including some that are of long duration with deep connections throughout the United States government. Many of our “allies” are really more like frenemies, with whom we are united less by deep common interests that we share the burden of defending than by the recognition that it is often better to be frenemies than strangers.

I’m musing about this now because the Biden Administration has been hard at work trying to broker a Saudi-Israel peace agreement, and I think the foregoing is the right framework for understanding why we are doing that. Because otherwise, the effort doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Mind you, Saudi Arabia and Israel might well make peace some time soon, but if they do the reason is rooted in the deep common interests of both countries, not in American pressure or sweet talk. The Arab-Israeli conflict is long since over; essentially every country in the region has given up on the idea that Israel might just evaporate in the face of persistent opposition. The occupation is still a very serious matter, practically and morally, but it’s no longer the organizing principle of Arab politics. In that context, Saudi Arabia and Israel have little reason for enmity. Meanwhile, they have many reasons to work together. Saudi Arabia’s primary geopolitical concern these days is competition with and the threat from Iran. That’s also a primary Israeli concern. Its primary economic challenge is adapting to a post-carbon era. Walling off Israel will not help it meet that challenge either, and embracing Israel might well help it. Finally, Saudi Arabia probably has at least as much to fear from Islamist radicalism as Israel does. The two countries have been quietly cooperating for years now, and formalizing that cooperation would make deepening it much easier.

All of that is well and good, but what does it have to do with the United States? Why should we be offering Saudi Arabia security guarantees and a civilian nuclear program that could easily be turned to military purposes, if peace with Israel is already in their interest? What, in other words, do we get out of the deal?

We’re certainly not getting stalwart support for American interests. Saudi Arabia has been an American ally for decades, but the material basis of that alliance has long since decayed and has now largely collapsed. In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia helped bankrupt the Soviet Union by driving down the price of oil; they also helped America get aid to the Afghan mujahideen. But the Soviet Union is long gone, and the Saudis have been anything but solicitous of American interests in recent memory. Specifically, when energy prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Saudis declined to open the spigot. When we needed their support, in other words, they emphatically weren’t there.

If the Saudis haven’t been helpful to America when we needed them recently, though, it’s also true that we don’t need them nearly as much as we used to. Back during the Gulf War and the Iraq War, America was profoundly dependent on imported oil; countries like Saudi Arabia had the American economy literally over a barrel. That’s not true anymore. The United States is now a net petroleum exporter, with production at an all-time high largely thanks to the fracking revolution that took off in the Obama administration. It’s worth remembering, in fact, that the last time the Saudis manipulated the oil market in a serious way, it wasn’t to punish America’s enemies but to bankrupt American frackers, and thereby eliminate some of their competition. What, then, is the continued basis of the alliance with Saudi Arabia? And if it has none, why are we proposing to do all of this for them?

Well, perhaps we’re doing it for Israel—but Israel is another state of which one could ask these kinds of questions, albeit not as acutely. America’s emotional ties to Israel run far deeper and broader than is generally recognized by critics of our relationship, and today our alliance poses far fewer problems for America’s other relationships than it did in, say, the 1970s. Moreover, notwithstanding American aid, Israel has never shied from shouldering the burden of its own defense; there’s a reason why observers who complain that Taiwan is not taking their defense seriously point to Israel as the model they should emulate. But the benefits America earns from the alliance with Israel are also relatively small. And from a timing perspective, America’s eagerness to broker a deal is peculiar. The current Israeli government is the most extreme of its history, to the point that it is seriously threatening the country’s own stability. So why would the Biden Administration want to reward Benjamin Netanyahu by burnishing his image as a peacemaker? (The same of course can be said in spades of Saudi Arabia’s brutal Mohammed bin Salman.)

I think the answer, with respect to both Saudi Arabia and Israel, is that both countries could be even more troublesome if they were not anchored by an alliance with America. If we cut Saudi Arabia off, that doesn’t mean they’d shelve their ambitions for a civilian nuclear program; it means they’d look elsewhere for assistance developing it. If we cut Israel off, that doesn’t mean they’d be more accommodating of American interests, whether with respect to technology transfer or its treatment of the Palestinians; it means they’d be less so. Moreover, if the United States ceased to be a reliable ally to either, they’d look for other patrons. Saudi Arabia already has important commercial interests in common with Russia as a fellow petro-state; they’ve also got important interests in common with China, to which it is the largest supplier of oil. Israel has been developing better relations for some time as well with China, Russia and India—which is entirely rational on their part. But the United States now perceives itself to be in a status competition with all these other powers, and even with Europe in some ways. We’re willing to pay a certain material price simply to remain the first call an important foreign leader will take on any given day.

Take a look at the following graphic from this report by Robert Satloff for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy describing the benefits for all parties of a prospective U.S.-Saudi-Israeli peace agreement:

Saudi Arabia gets some significant material and diplomatic benefits from both Israel and the United States: support for the NEOM project, cooperation on security and intelligence, better access to weapons, support for a nuclear program, and some level of commitment by America to its defense. Israel gets some significant diplomatic benefits from both Saudi Arabia and the United States, and some material benefits as well: cooperation on security and intelligence, particularly against Iran, the prospect of better relations across the Islamic world, and a boost to Netanyahu’s personal standing. But what does the United States get? Some commitments to prevent technology leakage to China, and some commitments on human rights, none of which will be particularly easy to enforce. Besides that, it get a “reaffirmation of America’s leadership” and “prestige” from brokering a historic peace. Those aren’t nothing—but they aren’t really comparable to what we are giving to Saudi Arabia directly, and therefore to Israel by transitivity.

But my point is: that is kind of what you should expect. Our common interests really are fairly limited, and while both countries could do important things for America (Saudi Arabia in terms of how it manages the oil market, Israel in terms of how it deals with the Palestinians), those things would cut against their fundamental interests as they see them—so they aren’t going to offer to do those things. Yet America’s interests would not be served in any obvious way by giving them the cold shoulder and encouraging them to take calls from Beijing instead. We are offering a lot to retain what influence we have, because we think losing that influence would make our objective situation even worse.

Or would it? The irony is that the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement is substantially a consequence of President Obama’s determination to close a nuclear deal with Iran. Riyadh and Jerusalem reasonably understood that project as a sign that America wanted to reduce its commitment to the region, began looking around for ways to replace that commitment—and found each other. China’s successful brokering of a thaw in Saudi-Iranian relations is another fruit of American disengagement, but it’s unclear how that thaw hurts American interests either. Even if it burnished Beijing’s prestige and reduced Tehran’s isolation, reducing the chances of conflict in the region is far more significant.

So perhaps America would actually benefit from benign neglect of much of the world. To make that case, though, you’d have to actually make that case. It’s not that our allies are freeloaders who we should charge more for the privilege of American protection—that was Trump’s line, and while it was effective on the stump it did no demonstrable good in the real world. (I note, in passing, that Trump was obscenely solicitous of Saudi interests, and that America got essentially nothing in return.) Rather, the case to be made is that America would benefit from having less direct influence in world affairs, and that we shouldn’t worry if other powers fill the gap.

That’s not a case that Great Powers, much-less world-girdling one-time hegemons, tend to accept willingly, of course. But nobody said multipolarity was going to be easy.