Steve Walt imagines how America would pick allies if we could start over:
If one could really start from scratch, I doubt we'd give security guarantees to Taiwan, even in a period when we're worrying about the Asian balance of power. It's too small, and will be increasingly difficult to protect over time. But most of America's other Asian allies would still be valuable, and we'd probably be courting them today even if we didn't already have strong ties. As noted, one could make a case for NATO as a limited security partnership, but I doubt we'd try to build an elaborate multilateral institution in 2012 if it didn't already exist. The United States would still need allies to maintain a balance of power in the Persian Gulf, but it's not entirely clear we'd pick the same allies we currently have.
Robert E. Kelley, whose post sparked Walt's discussion, defends his initial list of Top 11 allies. A counterintuitive take on the Muslim world:
I do think we have really overhyped the ME in the last decade. Elsewhere I argued that we broadly misread 9/11 as the first step in a ‘long war’ of waves of salafist extremists coming after us. That just didn’t happen. Binladenists are scary, but there aren’t that many of them, and 9/11 was a one-time sucker punch when we weren’t paying attention, not the start of massive umma-wide uprising. So Turkey is not as valuable to America as we think perhaps. It is important for the EU and Israel, but not so much for US. Insofar as Egypt sits astride the canal and is the heartland of Arab thought, which is where the pathologies of 9/11 are worst, it too ranks above Turkey – only just though. I would probably put Turkey in at 12. But the real story of American commitment in the Muslim world should be Indonesia. Not only is it valuable as a bulwark against Islamic extremism where the majority of the world’s Muslims live (SE Asia), it’s also a valuable hedge against China, and it’s the fourth largest country on earth.
More follow-up from Kelley here.
The Dish 