Bret Devereaux

I see close parallels with much of what we are doing now - banging the table about NATO contributions, demanding to know what NATO can do for us and demanding that our NATO partners sacrifice more - rather than less - of their national interest on the altar of the alliance 11/

I think that gets the benefits of NATO to the US - *our* part of the interest calculation - wrong. We pay for our part in NATO because the risk of a near-peer conflict is so great that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Let me put that in a thought experiment...12/

Let's say the base chance of a near-peer conflict is just 5% normally in the next 50 years, but without NATO (and our security commitments in East Asia) it rises to 15%. WWII cost something like $300bn at the time, or something like 4.1 trillion inflation adjusted. 13/

Just to the USA, not counting the cost in blood. If we assume that the near-peer conflict deterred by the 'off-the-table' effect would be of similar magnitude (I suspect it would be worse), the value of reducing its chance of happening by 10% over 50 years...14/

(avoiding fancy present-value calculations because I'm lazy) is something like $100bn per year over and above the security spending we'd be engaging in *anyway* (which, as a maritime power, would always be considerable)...15/

Given that framework, it seems to me we ought to be willing to make considerable sacrifices of *our* interests just to keep our alliance network intact - rather than, as the Romans did, pounding the table for a better deal and ending up in an unnecessary war 16/

Just like the ruthless thing to do for the Romans was to *not* keep all of the loot, but share it out, because the future loot was worth it, the ruthless thing for the USA to do is to, if necessary, slap large amounts of money on the table to keep this system going. 17/

Obviously, selling that to the American voter would be difficult...but the Marshall Plan was sold to the American voter on similar terms - a mix of 'it's the right thing' and 'it's the expedient thing' so I hardly think it impossible 18/