U.S. allies are not emerging from the past weeks with greater confidence in their long-standing ties to Washington, nor is Beijing emerging with new trepidation about its own position.
If anything, the past days have reinforced for Western allies — and confirmed for Beijing — that America’s coalition advantage is fraying.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, President Donald Trump used his address not to reassure allies but to restate his theory of alliance: Relationships are conditional, and value is owed to the United States on its terms. Trump framed long-standing U.S. alliances as a ledger — America giving “so much,” getting “so little.”
Against that backdrop, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered the week’s clearest diagnosis of what this portends — rupture, not transition — and advised middle powers to start planning for self-preservation.
And just as U.S. allies were absorbing what transpired in Switzerland, the Pentagon issued its National Defense Strategy days later, reframing U.S. commitments toward homeland and regional priorities while recasting allied contributions as conditional responsibilities, themes previewed in the administration’s National Security Strategy released in December.
It’s consistent with what has become the administration’s recurring habit: treating coercion as an organizing principle — using conditional access to weapons, intelligence, interoperability and industrial cooperation to police allied dependence.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Warsaw Pact was a compliance mechanism
The administration has described its posture as a modern Monroe Doctrine. Pundits have reached for the protection-racket analogy: Pay up, show loyalty or lose the shield.
Both capture something real, but neither captures the mechanism at work inside U.S. security relationships. For alliance management, the best comparison is the Warsaw Pact, the U.S.S.R.’s Cold War military alliance.
The Soviet Union’s approach to alliances centered on discipline. A CIA assessment in 1974 noted that, from Moscow’s viewpoint, the Warsaw Pact’s value as “a mechanism of control over its allies” was as important as its value as a military counterweight to NATO.
Military integration — joint exercises, common equipment, centralized command — was paired with economic and political leverage, ensuring that deviation carried material consequences.
The Trump administration’s published strategies and the rhetoric used to sell them recast alliances as conditional arrangements: Washington sets priorities, defines acceptable behavior inside the alliance, and controls access — industrial, military, intelligence — to reward the “model” ally and penalize those who resist. That is Warsaw Pact logic applied to a different system: discipline through dependence, with costs for dissent.
The Warsaw Pact wasn’t merely an alliance; it was a compliance mechanism. Control and subordination were the point, and interdependence was the restraint. That design produced quiet resentment and chronic inefficiency, and it proved brittle. When Soviet enforcement weakened at the end of the Cold War, cohesion evaporated.
U.S. is treating its allies like managed dependencies
This begs the question: If China, as the Trump administration has repeatedly said, is the pacing threat, why choose an approach that invites the same vulnerabilities the Soviets couldn’t survive?
“Bloc” politics is intoxicating for leaders who prize dominance — especially when it comes with deference, public tribute, and victories that can be claimed as personal credit. It promises clean hierarchies and public displays of compliance, even when the long-term effect is to subordinate — even weaken — coalitions.
While the Trump approach to alliance may reflect a Soviet mindset, the political and economic realities of today’s “bloc” members bear little resemblance to Eastern Europe under the Warsaw Pact. U.S. allies have scale, capital and options. Even if decoupling from U.S. systems carries in the short term economic pain, they can push back and reduce reliance, diversify suppliers, harden industrial capacities, compartment sensitive cooperation, and — over time — shift parts of their economic and technology relationships elsewhere. And such efforts are already underway.
If Washington turns allied dependence into a tool of coercion, it should not be surprised when allies invest in escape hatches. It is the coalition advantage — interoperability, shared planning, trusted intelligence, industrial coordination — that has been America’s asymmetric edge. Erode that, and you don’t need Beijing to pry the alliance apart; Washington does the work for it.
The danger here isn’t that we’re returning to the 1800s. The danger is more modern, more bureaucratic and more corrosive. The United States is flirting with a mentality that treats allies as managed dependencies. The Soviet Union tried it. It gained control, lost legitimacy and ended up trapped inside a system that could not adapt without breaking.
Brian O’Neill is a retired CIA executive who has served in such leadership roles as deputy director of analysis at the National Counterterrorism Center and as executive editor of the President’s Daily Brief. He now teaches national security at Georgia Tech and contributes to the journal “Just Security” and other outlets.
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