2026-06-04
1 小时 9 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
If the price of getting Europeans to spend more—and we can talk about Asians too—
is a collapse in deterrence and an end of the meaning of Article 5,
you have not made anybody more secure and you’ve made war more likely.
The American way of war, the ability to find, fix, and finish just about any target
anywhere in the world, is very much predicated on allies and partners
who give you access, basing, and overflight.
And we’ve started to see some real sportiness, particularly vis-a-vis our European allies,
in terms of allowing that or at least publicly allowing that.
Six months ago, Phil Gordon and Mara Karlin wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs
about the plight of America’s allies in Trump’s second term.
What was surprising, they argued, was not the administration’s cajoling and threats
or all the ways U.S. policy had called into question the basic principles of these relationships;
the surprise was that allies were surprised by these moves in the first place.
Almost a year into Trump’s second term, they had done little to develop a Plan B.
The months since have brought a wave of new challenges to America’s alliances:
the threats to seize Greenland and pull out of NATO,
the continued warnings to free riders, the shifting approach to China,
a war in Iran launched with little consultation even of the Gulf leaders who would be most directly affected.
I spoke to Gordon, who was national security advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris,