The US and its allies at 250: Forging a new transatlantic democratic alliance for the 21st century

The US and its allies at 250: Forging a new transatlantic democratic alliance for the 21st century

This Ditchley conference, marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, created space for Americans of differing political persuasions to discuss, together with longstanding allies, the trajectory of the world’s most important country. We considered the future of the transatlantic alliance as we moved into an era of truly global geopolitics, with the extension of China’s ambitions and reach.
This was far from the first difficult patch that the alliance had faced, originally built through conversations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, including at Ditchley. The war years were characterised by deep division and argument amongst allies, not calm unity. The 1949 NATO alliance was a pragmatic grouping of those opposed to the Soviet Union, not a democratic alliance. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw the UK and France try to maintain their influence in the Middle East in defiance of the US. The UK had supported the US in the war in Korea but refused to participate in Vietnam, leaving the US deeply disappointed. And so the story continued, through the fall of the Soviet Union, past 9/11 and the invocation of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, the war in Iraq, and into contemporary challenges.
The transatlantic alliance faltered and reinvented itself multiple times. So how could we reinvent the alliance again? What were the essential interests and responsibilities of the US and its allies? And how would this alliance fit into what had become, like it or not, a global contest for power between China and the political West?
Adjusted for purchasing power parity, China’s economy was 1.4 times as large as that of the US, while the economic power of the US and its allies combined was roughly double that of China. The challenge for the US and its allies was coordination, underpinned by a shared vision for the world. If fragmentation of alliances were allowed to go too far, there was a risk of losing a contest for global leadership that should be winnable. So what were the projects that could bring us back together and restore confidence in each other?