‘The US Can’t Go It Alone.’ Yes, It Can

Just before the start of the Second Gulf War in 2003, British Prime Minister Tony Blair approached me as a Conservative member of the House of Lords and asked for my and my colleagues’ support in approving the deployment of British forces to Iraq to, amongst other things, assure that weapons of mass destruction were not developed in that country. Because the Conservatives had a majority in Their Lordships’ House, we had the ability to delay matters inconveniently, and the Prime Minister did have a legitimate need for our cooperation. I was happy to agree; I assumed we would simply get rid of Saddam Hussein and assure his replacement with someone less provocative towards the West. It was impossible to foresee that the American governor of Iraq would dismiss into unemployment all of the armed and constabulary forces in the country while permitting them to retain their firearms and munitions, a formula for a bloodbath and political chaos.

What struck me most vividly about the opponents of that war was not that they foresaw any of what actually happened, but that they objected that “The United States can’t go it alone.” Of course they could, and along with the British, they did, but the take-away from those far-off days was the tenacity of the opinion that the United States had to be constrained by a collegial web of its so-called allies to guide it. This was the most vivid appearance I have witnessed of this unctuous notion that the Western Alliance had to be like a great mastiff that would do the work and takes the risks while the sage Europeans, veterans and connoisseurs of international affairs for centuries, would hold the leash and give the orders.

We are now seeing where this self-serving dilution of the necessary nature of the Western alliance ends. Most of the European governments were grumpy over Greenland, to which the so-called allies grossly overreacted (and it was a pleasure to see the belligerent leftist Danish Prime Minister get a rap on her knuckles last week on the snap election that she called). Except for most of those with recent memories of the joys of Soviet occupation European governments responded to President Trump’s request for a token show of solidarity with the contribution of some vessels that would accompany the US Navy in clearing the Strait of Hormuz with fatuities to the effect that it was not their war, and they had not been consulted.