Chapter the Twenty-Sixth: In Which the Philosophy Is Finally Asked to Prove Itself
Being the Natural Consequence of Several Years of Excellent Advice
There is a particular species of self-sufficiency that is less a philosophy than a performance — and performs best, it must be said, when nothing is actually required.
The man who has decided he needs no one is, in ordinary circumstances, a compelling figure. He moves through rooms with the particular confidence of someone who has resolved, in advance, all dependencies. He does not owe. He is not owed. He has examined the ledger of alliance and found it unflattering and closed it. There is something almost admirable in this — or there would be, if the circumstances were to remain ordinary.
They do not, of course, remain ordinary. They never do. This is the one detail the philosophy declines to address.
What the philosophy addresses instead is the ingratitude of others. Their failure to contribute proportionally. Their habit of accepting the umbrella without inquiring as to its cost, or its owner’s continued willingness to hold it. These complaints are legitimate, in the narrow sense that most complaints are legitimate — there is always something to which they point. The question is what one does with them.
One option is to renegotiate. To sit across from the allies and say: here is what this arrangement costs me, here is what I require in return, here is where the terms must change. This is the work of alliance maintenance. It is slow, thankless, and produces no applause.
The other option is to say, loudly and with evident satisfaction, that alliances are bad deals. That the allies are freeloaders. That a country of sufficient power and virtue requires no partners, or requires them only on terms so favorable as to constitute no partnership at all. This option produces applause immediately and consequences later.
Later has arrived.
The allies heard the philosophy. This is the part that seems to have surprised everyone except the allies. They sat in the summits and read the statements and watched the interviews and absorbed, with the attentiveness of people whose defense arrangements were under discussion, every word. And when the moment came — when the request arrived, urgent and unambiguous, for ships and coalitions and collective action in a waterway through which the world’s oil moves — they produced a document.
The document expressed support. For the general concept. Of ensuring passage. At some future point. Subject to planning not yet commenced.
It contained no ships.
This has been called betrayal, which is the wrong word entirely. Betrayal requires a prior commitment to violate. What the allies had, going into this moment, was a prior speech — several years of prior speeches, in fact — explaining to them clearly that their commitments were not valued. They are not betrayers. They are students. The lesson was delivered plainly, and they have applied it with a faithfulness that ought to inspire something in its author, though perhaps not pride.
The President has said he will remember who stepped forward. He has noted that NATO faces a very bad future. He has said he will manage without them — Israel, the Gulf states, that should be sufficient, it will not be too long.
One observes this and feels, not satisfaction exactly, but recognition. The specific recognition of watching a man discover that a philosophy has weight only when it has no occasion to be tested.
There is a category of belief that flourishes precisely in the absence of its consequences. The conviction that one requires no one is easiest to hold when one has, in fact, everyone — when the alliances are intact, the coalitions assembled, the mutual obligations quietly humming in the background like infrastructure one has not yet thought to inspect. It is a pleasant thing to stand at the center of a system and announce that the system is unnecessary. The system, after all, is still running. The announcement costs nothing. The allies absorb it with the particular patience of people who have long practice absorbing things, and the summits continue, and the hotlines remain open, and the belief is never asked to prove itself.
Until it is.
The freedom from obligation is quite comfortable until one is in need of an obligated party. This is not a paradox — it is simply the definition of obligation, which has never meant anything except that it persists when inconvenient. An alliance that holds only when nothing is at stake is not an alliance. It is a social arrangement among people who happen not to need each other yet. The work of building something that holds under pressure is different work entirely, and it is done in the years of maintenance, the years of sitting across tables and making concessions and returning phone calls and attending the summits one would rather not attend. It is, in short, the work one declined.
That power, in isolation, is a different thing than power in a system — and that the difference becomes apparent at the precise moment one would most prefer it not to.
He spent years telling the allies what they were worth.
They have, at last, agreed with him.