In WSJ today: Hegseth announces a review of U.S. forces in Europe and threatens NATO cuts.

This is not new; the administration has been antagonizing NATO allies since taking office. Since before taking office.

What caught my eye was this statement:

Trump “gave our allies a test: to support America when we asked for their help,” Hegseth said. “And too many failed it.”

Put aside for the moment that this test was administered by a president whose unnecessary trade wars are surpassed in foolishness by his own unnecessary war. Why are we giving our allies tests?

Trump is maddening because he often does get to a valuable insight, and then does precisely the opposite of what needs to be done. He was right that competition with China would be a defining American challenge for generations to come. Then he started a trade war that only demonstrated China’s strong bargaining position, showed weakness in supporting Taiwan, and has driven other nations into China’s embrace. He is right that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a threat to the United States and our allies and interests, but he started a war of choice that entrenched a hardline regime and demonstrated Iran’s ability to use the world’s fossil-fuel dependence as a weapon (and also significantly depleted America’s hard and soft power). And, he is right that America’s allies should increase their own defense commitments. But the petulant and belligerent way the administration is going about it means that our friends who increase defense spending will be responding not to American leadership but its absence. We are tearing apart our alliances just when we most need to strengthen them.

The origin of the term “Cold War” to describe the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the ideologies they represented, is typically pegged to 1947. In that year, Walter Lippmann used it in essays and a book and Bernard Baruch used it in a speech. George Orwell used it in a more general sense in 1945. That idea crystallized the defining global struggle and was the frame for understanding everything from scientific progress to civil rights to proxy hot wars under every administration from Truman through Reagan/Bush.

In retrospect, it is astonishing that the basic elements of it were understood and already in vigorous debate by 1947 — fewer than two years after V-J day, as the nation was just emerging from the most terrifying war in history, a war that devoured human lives by the millions, the defining frame for the rest of the century had been grasped. That frame took hold in American thought, not only among elites but among the entire public, and we prevailed.

We are now a decade or more into the defining conflict of our time. Autocracy is rising around the world, including in nations like the United States once assumed to be strongholds of liberal democracy. It is more diverse than and not so bound up in ideology as Soviet communism, which can make it more difficult to spot: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran look different and have different goals, and it’s easy to think of them as separate threats in separate regions. But they are consolidating their authority at home, collaborating with one another, and extending their influence. The world they are making will not be one in which the American idea thrives, and asserting democracy and human rights globally is more than our interest; it is our duty.

But unlike the generation of the 1940s, we do not have a clear and crystallized understanding of the world. We do not see the threads. Trump, of course, seems determined to undermine American strength. Hegseth’s tantrum is just the latest example, and every interaction the administration has with a foreign power is a national humiliation. For our part, Democrats do not pay nearly enough attention to this challenge. It is still a widely-held Democratic position that we should be drawing down military investment and that we can wave away concerns, for example, about competition with China.

And that is because we do not understand the stakes. Our ability to provide more care and opportunity to all Americans, to fight for human rights abroad, and to provide critical humanitarian and development aid to all peoples depend completely on our ability to shape the world we live in. For generations, we have lived with a strong economy, military and diplomatic clout, and a global order that allows Americans to project our ambitions — for good, but also sadly for ill — everywhere. We are taking that inheritance for granted. There is no future of expanding prosperity and dignity for all of us if we sleep while autocrats work.

And so the question is: what is the frame that can focus and drive American leadership in this century? I don’t believe our foreign-policy thinkers are less bright than the post-war generation, but mere months after the fall of the Third Reich they were already clear-eyed and focused on the threat, and they brought the public with them. It has been thirty-seven years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and we have been drifting for all that time.