What Alliances and International Organizations Can Help Defray the Costs and Burdens of This Strategy?
Another bitter lesson of the past fifteen years, and especially the period since September 11, is how the alliances and international organizations that served American purposes so well during the Cold War are so poorly suited to the needs of the twenty-first century. The United Nations and NATO, at least as they are now structured, are at worst constraints on the expansion of a liberal world security system and at best marginally relevant, although NATO remains a useful framework through which European military establishments can be modernized and synchronized. At the same time, ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” are flimsy structures upon which to make long-term commitments. The skeletal alliance for Iraq is falling apart, either because of policy differences, as in the case of Spain, or, as in the case of Poland, simply because limited military capabilities have been exhausted. And, as noted above, the bilateral security partnerships that have long characterized U.S. policy in East
