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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Real Reason the U.S. Can’t Stop Free-Riding

Washington needs to stop indulging U.S. allies and clients.

Stephen Sestanovich wants the administration to stop trying to get allies and clients to do more for themselves:

It should be a great strategy. But in the real world free-rider problems are often insoluble. Somebody–usually the biggest player in the game–has to pay more, suck up the extra cost, and write it off as the price of leadership. American policymakers have been doing this for decades. They considered it the only way to get things done. (They often discovered the cost was less than they feared.)

By over-haggling, the Obama administration has kept our alliances from working well [bold mine-DL]. New members of the team might start by worrying less about bearing too much of the burden—and more about solving the problem.

This is a very strange way to think about what makes an alliance “work.” The U.S. has a lot of allies and clients, many of which do little or nothing useful for the U.S. and rely entirely on the U.S. to bail them out in the event of a regional crisis. These allies and clients naturally prefer that the U.S. take responsibility for “solving the problem,” since it means that they can avoid the risks and costs that “solving the problem” entails, and Washington for the most part indulges them in this. However, these allies and clients will also often view the “problem” differently than Washington does, and they will complain and drag their feet until the U.S. agrees to do whatever it is that they think needs to be done. That is what is happening in the case of the relationship with Turkey: Turkey is resisting U.S. pressure to contribute to the campaign against ISIS on its doorstep until the U.S. agrees to indulge its preoccupation with regime change in Syria.

When judged from the American perspective, these relationships aren’t “working” very well at all, but they often are “working” very well for the allies and clients at our expense. As long as the allies and clients aren’t whining, the relationships are are perceived to be functioning properly, but this gets everything backwards. The U.S. maintains these relationships because they are supposed to benefit American interests in some way, but far too often maintaining the relationship becomes an end in itself and pushes the U.S. into pursuing policies that have nothing to do with U.S. security. In fact, these relationships are frequently lopsided and dysfunctional, and the American insistence on “leading” in response to virtually every crisis is partly to blame. The reality is that the U.S. has too many security dependents that could be doing a lot more for their own security and the security of their respective regions, but they are actively discouraged from picking up more of the slack whenever American politicians insist that the U.S. must bear the burdens of “leadership.” Sestanovich maintains that Obama has been trying to reduce free-riding, he can’t have been trying very hard. Obama has erred in his management of these relationships, but his error has usually been to cave in to allied and client demands too often and to have the U.S. play the part of “indispensable nation.”

If Obama had really been interested in reducing the cheap- or free-riding tendencies of allies and clients, he wouldn’t have facilitated a Libyan war that France and Britain wanted but could not have waged without U.S. support. He wouldn’t rush off to “reassure” supposedly nervous allies and clients of undying American support whenever they make noises about being neglected. This is the real absurdity of the “leading from behind” slogan: the U.S. is still the one doing almost all of the work in “solving the problem,” but wants to be perceived as sharing the burden with a large number of “partners.” We are seeing something like this on display again in the war against ISIS: the bombing campaign is predominantly an American operation, but one that is vaguely “supported” by many others. The U.S. is still being played for a sucker, but at least Americans can console ourselves that the other governments playing us for suckers are no longer complaining about our waning “credibility.”

Needless to say, encouraging more of this behavior by allies and clients is the last thing the U.S. should be doing.

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