Here’s a big idea in psychology that also applies to diplomacy and geopolitics. It’s the insight that the most toxic relationships aren’t the unambiguously negative ones we have with our enemies. They’re instead our ambivalent relationships with frenemies, which can unpredictably toggle from sunny to dark and back again, causing more stress than simple loathing would. In international relations, such enemies are called allies.
The US has many kinds of “allies.” They include the 52 formal ones, those whom the US is obligated by treaty to defend if they’re attacked, and vice versa. Confusingly, though, the label can also refer to the large and growing club of nations that are better termed “quasi-allies” — Israel and Taiwan are prominent examples. These are friends who cooperate with the US for geopolitical purposes but lack mutual-defense assurances. Yet other countries are simply partners or, as one US diplomat optimistically calls them, “emerging partners.” In commitment terms, America’s relationships are therefore increasingly promiscuous, and range in status from polygamous marriage to passing dalliance.
Some strategists in Washington consider this an urgent problem, for it threatens to entangle the US, arguably overstretched already, in ever more global conflicts. Others, who include strategists in the administration of President Joe Biden, believe that such a “variable geometry” of alliances and partnerships is the only thing that can preserve American leadership and therefore a modicum of world order.
Next year, this debate will boil over, if Biden indeed faces Donald Trump in the presidential election. The latter, if given half a chance in his second term, would cut off almost all commitments to America’s allies, and opt for the diplomatic equivalent of one-night stands.
The clash of these two candidates is the latest round in a long-running American debate between internationalism and isolationism or, as the concepts are often called nowadays, engagement and restraint. Both sides in this controversy have good arguments, but both also have to contend with a vexing reality. It’s that the US won’t make these strategic decisions alone. Not only are America’s alliances often ambiguous. Each individual relationship, however close it sounds in the preamble of its treaty, is also fraught in its own way. For the US to keep leading, Americans must therefore learn to tolerate ambivalence, and all the stresses that come with it.
