“The repercussions of providing little assistance to keep the Strait of Hormuz functioning are going to be wide and deep for Europe and America,” he added in that post. “I consider myself very forward-leaning on supporting alliances, however at a time of real testing like this, it makes me second guess the value of these alliances. I am certain I am not the only senator who feels this way.”
Steve Schmidt recognized the Senator found his "need for 'relevance'" as "a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made." So as President Trump continued to criticize NATO, Graham began second-guessing the alliance. In an opinion piece appearing in The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria argued that the President has "set off a chain reaction" by successfully leaning on our European allies to ramp up their defense spending. He notes
America’s dominance within NATO has given Washington enormous advantages. The U.S. has more than 30 military bases across Europe, and these have allowed it to project power not just in Europe but in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. U.S. operations in the Middle East, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently with Iran, have depended heavily on access, basing and overflight rights in Europe. Often NATO countries have allowed the U.S. to use their facilities even when they disagreed with the war being waged. But as Europeans see that America is unreliable or even hostile, they will feel less need to accommodate Washington.
Zakaria explains that "Europe may refuse" if "Washington wants to relax pressure on Moscow in a bargain with" Putin or "hesitatie" if the President "wants to intensify pressure on Iran or China." And
For American defense companies, this could be a major loss.
For American strategy, it could be larger still. Weapons sales are not just
commercial transactions. They create habits of cooperation and shared strategy.
There is a final danger. We speak easily of “Europe” spending more, but defense budgets are still national. And most European governments are broke. As analyst Liana Fix notes in Foreign Affairs, the country with the greatest capacity to spend is Germany. And it is now beginning to do so on a remarkable scale.
This is necessary. Germany has been too passive for too long. It is a liberal democracy deeply embedded in Europe, and there is no reason to fear some aggressive impulse hiding in its political DNA. But size and power matter in international politics. A Germany that spends vastly more than its neighbors will inevitably create anxiety in France, Poland and the smaller countries around it.
The genius of America’s post-1945 strategy was that it solved this problem. It made it unnecessary for European countries to think and act like traditional great powers. Under the U.S. umbrella, France and Germany did not have to balance each other. The U.S. damped down the intra-European rivalries that had produced centuries of catastrophic war. It created a system that was stable, peaceful and pro-American.
Lindsey Graham supported Ukraine and Israel and was an unabashed "hawk" in an age, and with a President, which is not clearly defined by "hawk" vs. "dove." The foundation of President Trump's foreign policy is not internationalism or isolationism. It is unilateralsim and a hostility toward nations whose leaders Trump is not personally fond of. Lindsey Graham never really understood that, or is appetite for genuflecting to power was too much to overcome.
