Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America's Alliances | An Interview with Mira Rapp-Hooper

Description

Join Mara Karlin, Merrill Center executive director and professor, as she interviews Mira Rapp-Hooper, senior fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, on her new book, Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Perils of America's Alliances.

For the first century-and-a-half of its existence, the U.S. had just one alliance—a valuable but highly controversial military arrangement with France. Largely out of deference to George Washington's warnings against the dangers of "entangling alliances," subsequent American presidents did not consider entering another until the Second World War. Then everything suddenly changed. Between 1948 and 1955, U.S. leaders extended defensive security guarantees to twenty-three countries in Europe and Asia. Seventy years later, the U.S. had allied with thirty-seven.

In Shields of the Republic, Mira Rapp-Hooper reveals the remarkable success of America's unprecedented system of alliances. When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the U.S. lost the adversary the system was designed to combat. Its alliances remained without a core strategic logic, leaving them newly vulnerable.

Today the alliance system is threatened from without and within. China and Russia seek to break the U.S.' alliances through conflict and nonmilitary erosion. Meanwhile, U.S. politicians and voters are increasingly skeptical of alliances' costs and benefits and believe the U.S. may be better off without them. But what if the alliance system is a victim of its own quiet success?

This event is hosted by the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.