The End of Alliances by Rajan Menon

From the Publisher

Why should the United States cling to military alliances established during the Cold War when the circumstances are now fundamentally different? In The End of Alliances Rajan Menon makes the bold claim that our alliances in Europe and Asia have become irrelevant to the challenges the United States faces today and are slowly dissolving as a result.
The dissolution of our alliances will not, Menon emphasizes, culminate in isolationism. The United States will, and must, be actively involved beyond its borders, but by relying on contingent alignments and on coalitions whose membership will vary depending on the issue at hand. America, he reminds us, engaged the world in a variety of ways for more than 150 years before entering into formal military alliances after World War II. While a strategy that ceases to rely on alliances will mark a dramatic shift in American foreign policy, states routinely reassess and reorient their strategies. The United States, which studiously avoided alliances for much of its history only to embrace them during the Cold War, is no exception.
The End of Alliances predicts that the coming change in American strategy will force our traditional allies to rethink their choices and create new patterns in world politics. The controversial argument advanced by Menon will provoke debate among foreign policy specialists and the general public.

The New York Times - Mick Sussman

…Menon is a level-headed analyst, and though his prescription for an updated grand strategy is tentative, his diagnosis of the ills besetting the current one is persuasive.

Foreign Affairs

Alliances have been the cornerstone of U.S. foreign relationssince the 1940s. Even now, they remain the foundation for global security cooperation. But in this provocative book, Menon asserts that such formal military ties are destined to fade away. It is not a return to isolationism that will drive the dissolution of alliances but rather a slow -- and, to Menon's mind, welcome -- strategic reorientation of the United States' global position, with more informal and shifting alignments of states. Menon's thesis is based partly on his reading of the past: the United States has always been ambivalent about security commitments and maintaining a long-term overseas military presence, a national orientation only temporarily overcome by the Cold War. The new security environment, Menon goes on to argue, marked by the rise of terrorism and the absence of threatening great powers, makes alliances dispensable. Moreover, Washington's European and Asian allies are now economically revived and able to provide for their own security. In the end, Menon offers a clear picture of the global shifts that have thrown the role of alliances into question, but his argument that the costs of alliances are rising relative to their benefits is less convincing. Nor does he explore the role of the U.S. alliance system in facilitating cooperation among the advanced democracies. Today's alliances may have outlived their historical causes, but their usefulness remains.

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