Foreign Affairs has published a remarkable article. Under the title, “A Post-American Europe: It’s Time for Washington to Europeanize NATO and Give Up Responsibility for the Continent’s Security,” the authors, Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson, make, in essence, one simple argument: the US should leave Europe’s defense to the Europeans because it is no longer in Washington’s interest to do their job for them. Moreover, Logan and Shifrinson add, the Europeans clearly have the resources – economically and demographically – to look after themselves.

This is a smart piece written in the idiom of Realism, that is, the broad school of thinking about international relations and geopolitics which is based on two premises: that states’ interests can be defined and understood rationally, and that most of the time, state leaderships seek to act according to such interests. Logan and Shifrinson also strive to be realistic in the broader sense of the term, acknowledging, for instance, that Russia is not poised to “sweep across” Europe’s NATO member states and poses no hegemonic threat to them. These qualities make their intervention stand out among the “value” pep talks and ideological scaremongering that, unfortunately, often pass for policy analysis now.

Apart from its refreshing quality, there are other reasons to pay attention to this article. Foreign Affairs, belonging to the influential Council on Foreign Relations, is the older of the two journals (the other being Foreign Policy) that set or reflect the agenda of debate among the US international policy establishment (aka, courtesy President Obama’s former National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, “the Blob”). Logan is the Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian-conservative think-tank. Shifrinson is a prominent, though in today’s climate certainly not universally loved, expert on US foreign policy who has repeatedly taken unpopular positions, such as reminding the West that promises made to Russia after the end of the Cold War were indeed broken and........

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