If not now, when is a good time for a US troop withdrawal from Europe?
Critics of a reduced US role in NATO can’t explain why it needs to maintain a substantial military posture across the Atlantic.
Stephen Wertheim is a historian of the United States in the world. He is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute. He is also a Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Stephen specializes in U.S. foreign relations and international order, particularly concepts of global politics from the late nineteenth century to the present. He is author of a book forthcoming from Harvard University Press that reveals how, in the years prior to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, U.S. officials and intellectuals first decided that the United States should become the supreme political-military power in the postwar world. Full bio.
Critics of a reduced US role in NATO can’t explain why it needs to maintain a substantial military posture across the Atlantic.
The former vice president also doesn’t have much to say about the Obama administration’s foreign policy failures.
Hawks hated the Iran nuclear deal because they feared not that it would fail to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, but that it would succeed — and thereby deprive the United States of a rationale to dominate the region and discipline its foe.