A Forty-Year Commitment

On the 8^th of September, Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh took up the gavel of the UN General Assembly and opened its eighty-first session with a reminder to the great powers before him, describing “a situation where trust is in deficit”, a diagnosis that would have troubled the leaders who gathered in San Francisco eighty-one years ago to draft the Charter.¹ Rahman had chosen a theme that captured the mood of the moment: “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation.” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the rebuilding of trust in the multilateral system as “the defining challenge of our time.”²

^‍Thomas Hobbes would have understood this anxiety, and he might have predicted it. Hobbes left England in 1640, as the tension between Crown and Parliament turned toward civil war, and he spent the next decade in exile in Paris where he wrote his account of political order.³ Leviathan delivered a verdict on agreements unsupported by power that generations of students have committed to memory: “covenants without the sword are but words, and of not strength to secure man at all.”⁴ The UN commands no sword of its own. Instead, its authority depends on the willingness of countries to honor commitments. By Hobbes’s account, the UN should have collapsed long ago. But eight decades after its founding, it survives (imperfect and often frustrating), sustained by the expectation among nations that promises made today will be kept tomorrow.

The Atlantic alliance shares that same promise. When the foreign ministers of twelve nations gathered in Washington in 1949 to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, they established a promise, pledging in Article 5 to act “in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.”⁵ Like the UN, NATO’s guarantee rests on the credibility of the governments that extend them, and the decision to purchase weapons systems from an ally is an example of that trust. 

Edmund Burke, during the French Revolution in 1790, described society as “a partnership” whose obligations bind “those who are living’… “and those who are to be born.”⁶ Modern defense procurement creates a partnership exactly like this. The U.S. plans to fly the F-35 through 2088 and expects to spend more than $2 trillion on the fleet, which means the aircraft accepted by allied forces will be maintained by engineers who have yet to be born.⁷ Intelligence integration and industrial cooperation become interconnected through shared dependencies long after the original contract is signed.

For most of the postwar era, the United States enjoyed this dynamic. Every major sale reinforced NATO, uniting allied militaries within American doctrine and establishing the United States into every aspect of European security.⁸ The arrangement relied on the assumption that the United States would remain a dependable partner across decades regardless of political cycles. Allied governments argued with Washington over burden sharing, but non questioned America’s commitment itself. That confidence became a strategic asset, allowing defense ministries on both sides of the Atlantic to plan far into the future with the assurance that few alliances in history have enjoyed. 

That confidence is now being questioned in allied capitals. In March 2025, defense ministers in Portugal and Canada said publicly that they would explore alternatives to the F-35 in light of statements from Washington about its commitments to allies, and in August of that year, Spain’s defense ministry confirmed that it was choosing instead to buy the Eurofighter and the Franco-German Future Combat Air System.⁹ The European Union created a €150 billion loan for joint procurement that caps outside components at 35%.¹⁰ Taken together, these decisions reflect a continent pricing political risk into choices that were once automatic. The question facing Washington is the same that Rahman placed before the General Assembly: whether the trust that sustained the great alliance for eighty years can serve as the foundation for its next chapter. 

Trust is a Strategic Asset

Europe’s movement toward strategic autonomy developed across multiple American administrations, as America pushed allies to carry more of the burden of their own defense. At the Wales Summit in September 2014, six months after Russia took Crimea, allied leaders pledged to raise their defense spending to meet the “2% guideline within a decade.”¹¹ Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 accelerated that defense spending increase. European Allies and Canada raised their defense spending from 1.4% of combined GDP in 2014 to 2.3% in 2025, and at The Hague in June 2025 the alliance committed to invest 5% of GDP in defense spending by 2035.¹² 

Every government that plans for contingencies decades into the future confronts the problem Kenneth Waltz placed at the center of international politics. “In anarchy, security is the highest end” Waltz wrote in 1979. “Only if survival is assured can states safely seek such other goals”.¹³ Structural realists understand that states operating under uncertainty must plan around hard capabilities because intentions can shift quickly. Modern weapons systems translate that insight into procurement decisions. Even the remote possibility that access to critical capabilities could become subject to future disagreements introduces risks that responsible planners need to account for, and this has become one of the main drivers of European industrial policy. 

This approach to risk mitigation was discussed by Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince at the end of 1513, after the Medici had returned to power in Florence and imprisoned him on a false suspicion of conspiracy.¹⁴ From his family farm outside the city, he turned to the question of who’s soldiers a price could trust: “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe.”¹⁵ Machiavelli’s auxiliaries were troops lent by a powerful neighbor, and his warning concerned the dependence they created as much as their conduct on the battlefield. This understanding of self-reliance informs every European ministry now asking whether its most important capabilities rest beyond its control. 

John Locke supplied the constructive counterpart to Machiavelli’s warning. In the Second Treatise, published in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, Locke asked why free individuals would ever surrender any portion of their independence to a common authority, identifying insecurity of the state of nature, where “the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure.”¹⁶ According to Locke, individuals join political society to reduce uncertainty while preserving the liberties they value most. European defense integration reflects a similar approach. 

Common procurement and pooled financing strengthens collective capacity while reducing exposure to decisions made in Washington. And European initiatives have paired that ambition with a continued commitment to interoperability with NATO.¹⁷ The debate in Europe has moved from whether Europe should develop greater military self-reliance to how that capacity should be organized and how it will coexist with the alliance’s established institutions. 

For the U.S., this presents a problem largely of our own making. Washington spent decades encouraging Europe to invest in defense, and it now confronts the predictable consequence that a more capable Europe acquires greater freedom of action. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian officer who fought against Napoleon and spent his final years writing his book On War, would have recognized the pattern immediately. “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means,” he wrote, and the corollary is true in peacetime, as military capability always carries political implications.¹⁸ The burden sharing that America pushed for has now resulted in a Europe that increasingly exercises more of its own judgement. Washington now faces a choice where it can treat European autonomy as an erosion of American leadership, or it can help shape a framework where Europe’s growing capabilities reinforce transatlantic cohesion. That choice gets to the heart of how durable partnerships preserve trust once the dependence that united them begins to fade. 

The Philosophy of Trust

Long before theories of deterrence and alliance politics were formalized, experts wrestled with the problem that now confronts the Atlantic community: what sustains cooperation among political communities after the circumstances that brought them together have changed? Read in sequence, four bodies of through offer something close to an answer. Thucydides explains how trust erodes, Aristotle identifies the kind of partnership capable of surviving that erosion, David Hume describes how such a partnership comes into being, and modern strategic theory demonstrates why it holds. 

Thuydides, and Athenian general, wrote his history after experiencing tremendous failure. He arrived too late to save Amphipolis from the Spartan commander Brasidas, reflecting: “It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis.”¹⁹ Exile gave him access to both sides of the war, as we often learn more about power in defeat than we do in victory. His most famous judgement locates the origins of the Peloponnesian War in expectation as much as in aggression: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.”²⁰ Thucydides understood that once confidence is shaken, it alters behavior long before relations break down. Europe’s procurement decisions follow that pattern, and they are best understood as the hedging of prudent allies, the ordinary response of governments that can no longer take tomorrow for granted. 

Aristotle explains why that hedging is so relevant for the Atlantic alliance. In the eighth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, which survives as the substance of his lectures at the Lyceum, he discussed the differences between friendships grounded in utility and in shared virtue, observing that utility carries the seed of its own dissolution: “when the motive of the friendship is done away, the friendship is dissolved, inasmuch as it existed only for the ends in question.”²¹ For much of the postwar era, the industrial dimension of the Atlantic relationship rested on utility. Europe needed American capability, and Washington valued the influence that came with supplying it. As European dependence diminishes, the utility that once held that dimension together diminishes with it. Aristotle also offered a more hopeful observation: “Equality and likeness are friendship.” He regarded the friendship of equals alike in virtue as the most complete and enduring form of that bond.²² A Europe that approaches the United States as a capable peer creates the conditions for that kind of relationship, one that could prove more resilient than an arrangement built on utility alone. 

David Hume explains how such a partnership comes into being. Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature in his late twenties, and it contains a strong account of the nature of cooperation.²³ Hume traced social order to convention, the gradual accumulation of expectation formed through repeated interaction, and he regarded even formal promises as conventions of this kind. “Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other.”²⁴ Each rower adjusts to the other, and the rhythm they establish becomes self-sustaining because each has learned what to expect. Trust is a habit formed through commitments honored over time. Joint development programs and common technical standards serve as the examples of the trust in the Atlantic alliance, and every year they add to the confidence that no summit communique can replicate. 

The twentieth century reveals the endurance of these observations. Thomas Schelling who shared the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis” showed that the credibility of a commitment functions as a strategic asset, that governments must build deliberately and maintain at real cost.²⁵ Robert Axelrod extended the argument through a celebrated series of computer tournaments in which competing strategies played the prisoner’s dilemma against one another. “For cooperation to prove stable” Axelrod concluded, “the future must have a sufficiently large shadow,” meaning that each party must expect to keep dealing with the other and recognize that breaking that trust will carry a price tomorrow.²⁶ The implication for Washington is that weapons systems with a forty-year service life lengthens the shadow of the future only when the buyer believes the underlying relationship will last forty years. 

These thinkers offer a clear understanding of Europe’s pursuit of greater defense autonomy. It is exactly what Thucydides would predict from allies facing an uncertain future, and marks what Aristotle would recognize as the fading of a friendship grounded in utility. But if Washington invests in the conventions Hume described and lengthens the shadow of the future that Axelrod measured, a more capable Europe can become the foundation of a partnership between equals with stronger foundations than the dependence it replaces. 

After Dependence

For most of the postwar era, American policymakers regarded European dependence as the natural outcome of American leadership. The United States possessed the world’s largest defense industrial base with the most sophisticated military technology, and the political will to underwrite the security of a continent exhausted by two world wars. Shared weapons systems produced shared operational concepts, and decades of combined exercises built professional friendships among officers. Every procurement decision reinforced a bond where American and European security grew more intertwined. 

Alexander Wendt, writing in 1992 as the certainties of the bipolar world dissolved, challenged the realist assumption that anarchy compels states into competitive power politics. He argued that the consequences of anarchy depend on the expectations that’s construct through interaction: “Anarchy is what states make of it.”²⁷ The Atlantic alliance offers confirmation of this concept where seventy-five years of joint planning and shared sacrifice have produced a security community in which conflict among members have become almost unimaginable. Those shared expectations were built on material dependence, and as that dependence diminishes, the expectations will require more deliberate attention. Political leaders across Europe now ask whether critical capabilities should remain contingent on decisions made in Washington. 

From Washington, the temptation will be to read this evolution through a commercial lens. Declining market share for American defense firms would carry real economic impact. Max Weber, speaking to students in Munich in January 1919, as revolution challenged a defeated Germany, identified the sources that political authority draws its legitimacy from, belief in the validity of law and in competence “based on rationally created rules.”²⁸ Legitimacy of that kind attaches to institution, and it survives changes of leadership because it relies on rules that outlive individuals who administer them. Arms sales have functioned for decades as one of the great institution-building tools of the Atlantic alliance. Their strategic value has always exceeded their financial value because they shape how allied nations fight together. 

If Washington approaches Europe’s industrial transformation as a contest for contracts, the result will be a widening gap between American and European defense bases, with European governments accelerating their industrial autonomy while American policymakers defend an increasingly unstainable model of dependence. The more constructive path begins with the recognition that Europe’s growing capabilities are here to stay. Burden sharing was always meant to produce a stronger alliance, and the U.S. now bears the responsibility for ensuring that the stronger Europe we requested strengthens our transatlantic bond. Washington must ask how a more capable Europe can remain deeply invested in a common strategic enterprise, and we will find that the future of American influence depends on the quality of the institutions that bind our alliance together. 

Rebuilding Trust Through Interdependence

Hugo Grotius understood the dangers of broken trust. Imprisoned in 1618 after Maurice of Nassau and his allies overthrew the States General, Grotius escaped in March 1621 by hiding in a trunk that his wife Maris had arranged to have carried out of the fortress, claiming it was a shipment of books. He fled to Paris, where he composed De iure belli ac pacis, published in 1625 and still regarded as a founding text of international law.²⁹ In its chapter on good faith between enemies, Grotius outlined that promises bind even in war, citing Augustine’s idea that “when faith is pledged, it must be kept even with an enemy against whom war is being waged.”³⁰ The principle, which lawyers express in the phrase pacta sunt servanda, became a cornerstone of the law of nations. If good faith binds adversaries in war, it binds allied in peacetime with greater force, and an alliance whose members doubt one another’s reliability has lost something more important that military advantage. 

Trust between states is often described as an emotional quality, strengthened by reassuring speeches and weakened by criticism. But durable trust emerges from institutions that make cooperation consistently worthwhile for all participants, so preserving the relationship remains the most rational course even during periods of disagreement. The Atlantic alliance has reached a moment that calls for those institutions. A stronger European defense industrial base will produce greater strategic autonomy and greater autonomy will produce a more balanced partnership. Resisting that evolution will confirm Europe’s fears that dependence has become a vulnerability, while shaping it would allow Europe’s expanding capabilities to develop within a deeply integrated transatlantic framework. 

For the U.S. to shape Europe’s development, we will need to replace dependence with interdependence, and idea that Montesquieu championed after he returned from years of European travel in 1731 to his estate at La Brede, outside Bordeaux, and devoted most of the next two decades to writing The Spirit of the Laws.³¹ In its twentieth book, he advanced the idea that shaped two centuries of liberal thought: “Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and this their union if founded on their mutual necessities.”³² This concept of commerce applies also to the defense industries of allies. During the Cold War, asymmetry favored stability because the United States held overwhelming military and industrial advantages. American and European industries now confront common challenges in AI and advanced manufacturing, and America’s strengths in each of these fields are amplified when combined with Europe’s scientific depth and expanding defense investment. Reciprocal dependence of the kind that Montesquieu described would give each side of the Atlantic a stake in the other’s success. 

The foundations of that arrangement already exist in Cameri in northern Italy, where Leonardo operates one of only two F-35 final assembly lines outside the U.S. in partnership with Lockheed Martin, where the factory has assembled aircraft for the Netherlands as well as for Italy.³³ At Weeze, near Germany’s boarder with the Netherlands, Rheinmetall has built a plant to produce at least four hundred F-35 center fuselage sections in cooperation with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.³⁴ Martha Finnemore has shown that states learn their interests through the norms and institutions of the international society they inhabit, which suggests that shared production can shape how governments define their interests over time.³⁵ When development take place on both sides of the Atlantic, cooperation becomes embedded in domestic economic life as well as in military planning. Political leaders then gain powerful reasons to preserve the partnership because disruption imposes direct costs.

America’s greatest achievements have followed this pattern. When George Marshall rose at Harvard’s commencement in 1947 and declared that “it would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically,” asking that the effort be “a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all European nations.”³⁶ The European Recovery Program that followed delivered roughly $13.3 billion to sixteen Western European countries between 1948 and 1952, and it required recipients to coordinate their recovery through the Organization for European Economic Cooperation.³⁷ Marshall’s insistence on European ownership created commercial relationships that survived decades of political disagreement, because they understood that influence endures longest when partners participate out of a clear recognition of mutual benefit. 

Rebuilding the Atlantic Partnership

The United States requires a strategy that accepts Europe’s growing autonomy while ensuring that autonomy develops within a resilient transatlantic framework. The philosophical tradition examined in these pages points toward three principles, each grounded in how trust endures and each capable of translation into policy within the next several budget cycles. 

• America needs a transatlantic defense industrial base. Aristotle held that the most enduring partnerships unite equals in a common enterprise, and Washington should pursue co-development and reciprocal investment with the seriousness it devoted to export promotion. Cameri and Weese demonstrate that American platforms can be built and sustained in Europe while the United States retains its technological leadership. The next step is to extend that model into joint research and development so that the systems of the 2040s are designed together from their inception, and to treat European production of shared platforms as an alliance asset that strengthens deterrence on both sides of the Atlantic. 
• We also need institutionalization of long-term assurance. Allies purchasing systems that will serve for half a century need confidence that sustainment and modernization will remain available across administrations. The U.S. already maintains reciprocal defense procurement agreements with a range of allied governments, opening each party’s defense market to the other’s suppliers.³⁸ Washington should build on that foundation with binding multilateral compacts that guarantee access to spare parts and technical data for the full operational life of the platform, supported by transparent export procedures and predictable mechanisms for consultation. These commitments convert good faith into written convention, and every year in which they are honored adds to the confidence that Hume described. 
• America need competition through technological ecosystems. Future military advantage will depend on AI and software integration. By leading the development of common transatlantic standards in these fields, the U.S. can ensure that interoperability deepens even as procurement decisions diversify. Shared standards lengthen the shadow of the future because every government that builds to them acquires a lasting stake in the relationship that produced them. 

These principles reflect a broader truth about American power, that leadership has always rested on the nation’s capacity to organize coalitions and align the interests of democratic societies confronting shared challenges, and the share of European defense budgets spent on American equipment was only ever one expression of that capacity. The Atlantic alliance became the most successful security partnership in history because it accomplished far more than collective defense, fostering cooperation that came to define the entire political community. 

The Task Ahead

John Ruggie, who would later serve as UN Assistant Secretary-General in a post Kofi Annan created for him argued in 1982 that the postwar economic order had survived repeated predictions of its demise because it rested on a shared social purpose among the states that built it. He called that purpose “embedded liberalism,” a settlement that reconciled openness abroad with stability at home, and he showed that regimes anchored in shared purpose can absorb dramatic shifts in the distribution of power.³⁹ Europe’s growing defense industrial capacity marks another shift which will be shaped by decisions taken in allied capitals over the coming decade, and a stronger Europe offers the United States the opportunity to build a more durable partnership defined by reciprocity and trust reinforced through deliberate choice. 

When Khalilur Rahman reminded the General Assembly that we are in a trust deficit, he offered a warning that applies across the Atlantic alliance. In the same address, he observed that “trust cannot simply be requested. It must be earned.”⁴⁰ The United States faces the task of designing an alliance equal to the strategic realities of 2050. The arrangements of 1949 and the procurement patterns of 1999 can serve as foundations, because trust among allies is earned as Rahman described through commitments honored over time and institutions that give every member a reason to keep faith. 

Immanuel Kant, who was born in the Baltic port of Konigsberg and taught at its university for four decades, published Perpetual Peace in 1795.⁴¹ He cast the essay in the form of a peace treaty modeled on the Peace of Basel that Prussia had concluded with revolutionary France earlier that year.⁴² Its second definitive article holds that “the law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states,” and its first supplement predicts that “the spirit of commerce, which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state.”⁴³ Kant understood that lasting peace depends on institutions capable of sustaining cooperation among free peoples over time, and he trusted interdependence to give those institutions their strength. The Atlantic alliance, a federation of free states bound by commerce and common purpose has come as close to this vision as any arrangement in history. If trust served as the invisible foundation of the first Atlantic order, rebuilding that trust through purposeful interdependence may become the defining task of the next and the most important answer that the United States can offer to the challenge Guterres placed before the world this September.

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^{1  “‘This Is Not 1945’: General Assembly President Gavels Open New Session Aimed at Restoring Global Trust,” UN News, September 8, 2026, https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168293
2  Khalilur Rahman, “Remarks at the Opening of the Eighty-First Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (speech, United Nations Headquarters, New York, September 8, 2026), https://www.un.org/pga/81/documents/speeches/opening-statement/; “‘This Is Not 1945,’” UN News. On the end of the Secretary-General’s term on December 31, 2026, see Bruno Cardoso Reis et al., “What’s at Stake at UNGA 2026?,” Brookings Institution, September 23, 2026, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/whats-at-stake-at-unga-2026/
3  Stewart Duncan, “Thomas Hobbes,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified March 1, 2025, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/
4  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), chap. 17, Standard Ebooks, https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/text/chapter-17
5  North Atlantic Treaty, April 4, 1949, art. 5, NATO, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm; Charter of the United Nations, June 26, 1945, art. 51, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-7
6  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), excerpted in “1.14: Edmund Burke—Excerpts from Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790,” Political Science Theory, Western Washington University, LibreTexts, https://bit.ly/4hFs5cF
7  U.S. Government Accountability Office, F-35 Sustainment: Costs Continue to Rise While Planned Use and Availability Have Decreased, GAO-24-106703 (Washington, DC: GAO, April 15, 2024), https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106703
8  Alexander Lanoszka, Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022)
9  Ryan Finnerty, “Portugal Suggests It May Pass on F-35 Acquisition, Questioning US Reliability,” FlightGlobal, March 14, 2025, https://www.flightglobal.com/fixed-wing/portugal-suggests-it-may-pass-on-f-35-acquisition-questioning-us-reliability/162224.article; “Spain Favors European Options Over US-Made F-35 Fighter Jets,” The Defense Post, August 6, 2025, https://thedefensepost.com/2025/08/06/spain-european-fighter-jets/
10  Council of the European Union, “SAFE: Council Adopts €150 Billion Boost for Joint Procurement on European Security and Defence,” press release, May 27, 2025, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/05/27/safe-council-adopts-150-billion-boost-for-joint-procurement-on-european-security-and-defence/
11  NATO, “Wales Summit Declaration,” September 5, 2014, para. 14, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_112964.htm
12  NATO, “Defence Investment and NATO’s 5% Commitment,” last updated June 29, 2026, https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/defence-expenditures-and-natos-5-commitment; NATO, “The Hague Summit Declaration,” June 25, 2025, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_236705.htm
13  Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 126
14  Cary Nederman, “Niccolò Machiavelli,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified December 6, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/
15  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. W. K. Marriott (London: J. M. Dent, 1908), chap. 12, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232
16  John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), §123, in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, vol. 1, chap. 16, doc. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s3.html
17  Council of the European Union, “SAFE.”
18  Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham (London: N. Trübner, 1873), bk. 1, chap. 1, sec. 24, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1946
19  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, 5.26, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.5.fifth.html
20  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.23, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.1.first.html21  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, bk. 8, chap. 3, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html
22  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 8, chap. 8
23  David Hume, “My Own Life” (1776), para. 6, Hume Texts Online, https://davidhume.org/texts/mol/
24  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), 3.2.2.10, Hume Texts Online, https://davidhume.org/texts/t/3/2/2
25  “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2005,” NobelPrize.org, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2005/summary/; Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674840317; Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 2, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246742/arms-and-influence/
26  Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); excerpted as “The Evolution of Cooperation,” in Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, ed. Anatoly Gromyko and Martin Hellman (New York: Walker, 1988), https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axelrod.pdf
27  Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 395, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300027764
28  Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 79; an abridged adaptation of the Gerth and Mills translation appears in Classical Sociological Theory and Foundations of American Sociology, Open Oregon State, https://open.oregonstate.education/sociologicaltheory/chapter/politics-as-a-vocation/
29  Jon Miller, “Hugo Grotius,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified January 8, 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grotius/
30  Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace [De iure belli ac pacis], trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), bk. 3, chap. 19, LONANG Institute, https://lonang.com/library/reference/grotius-law-war-and-peace/gro-319/
31  Hilary Bok, “Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified April 2, 2014, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/
32  Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1750), bk. 20, chap. 2, in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, vol. 1, chap. 4, doc. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch4s2.html
33  Tom Kington, “Italy F-35 Maintenance Hub Opens for International Customers with Norwegian Jet,” Defense News, July 15, 2022, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/07/15/italy-f-35-maintenance-hub-opens-for-international-customers-with-norwegian-jet/
34  Rheinmetall, “F-35 Fuselage Factory in Weeze,” news release, July 4, 2023, https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/media/news-watch/news/2023/7/2023-07-04-rheinmetall-f35-fuselage-factory
35  Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)
36  George C. Marshall, “The Marshall Plan Speech” (commencement address, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, June 5, 1947), George C. Marshall Foundation, https://www.marshallfoundation.org/the-marshall-plan/speech/
37  Congressional Research Service, The Marshall Plan: Design, Accomplishments, and Significance, CRS Report R45079 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 18, 2018), https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R45079.html
38  U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Pricing and Contracting, “Reciprocal Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy Memoranda of Understanding,” https://www.acq.osd.mil/asda/dpc/cp/ic/reciprocal-procurement-mou.html
39  John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–415, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300018993; Lindsay Shingler, “A Tribute to John Ruggie,” UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, November 10, 2021, https://ucigcc.org/news/a-tribute-to-john-ruggie/
40  “‘This Is Not 1945,’” UN News; Rahman, “Remarks at the Opening.”
41  Michael Rohlf, “Immanuel Kant,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified July 31, 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
42  Frederick Rauscher, “Kant’s Social and Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified June 8, 2026, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-social-political/
43  Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1795), second definitive article and first supplement, Constitution Society, https://constitution.org/2-Authors/kant/perpeace.htm and https://constitution.org/2-Authors/kant/1stsup.htm}