There are conversations that rearrange the furniture in your head, and my hour with Ivo Daalder—Obama’s ambassador to NATO, now at Harvard’s Belfer Center—was one of them. I asked him whether we’re actually living through the most dangerous moment of our lifetimes or whether the algorithm just makes it feel that way. His answer: unless you were alive before 1914, you have never seen a world like this one. And he showed his work. Force is back as the normal way states settle arguments—by his count, this administration has now used it against eight countries, every one of them unprovoked. China is a peer competitor whose interests are not ours. And the United States, the country that built the postwar architecture on the theory that preventing war is cheaper than fighting it, has stopped believing its own blueprint. When the man who sat in the NATO chair tells you that an American exit from the alliance “is not science fiction anymore,” you sit with that for a minute.
Nowhere is the cost of that unbelief written more plainly than Ukraine. Daalder walked me through the whole ledger, including the parts that indict people he worked for. In 1994 we persuaded Kyiv to hand over the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for assurances on paper. In 2008 we dangled NATO membership we never intended to deliver. In 2014 Russia took Crimea and we answered with sanctions and a shrug—and he named the internal fight: Biden, Kerry, and Ash Carter wanted lethal defensive aid, and they lost the argument. Every autocrat on earth read the lesson, and so did every threatened democracy: treaties are negotiable, borders are negotiable, but nobody invades a nuclear power. That’s the proliferation bomb we planted ourselves. And now the abandonment caucus spans the spectrum—a majority of Republicans call NATO unimportant for the first time since the late 1940s, while parts of the online left write alliance withdrawal into their platforms and recite the Kremlin’s own NATO-expansion alibi back to us as analysis. The horseshoe isn’t a metaphor anymore. It’s a voting bloc.
And it’s not confined to Europe. The same doctrine that shrugs at Kyiv dreams of “owning the Western Hemisphere”—Monroe inverted from a defensive promise into an acquisitive one, from the Caracas raid to whatever this administration is building toward ninety miles off Florida this very week. Daalder’s deepest warning wasn’t about any one map, though. It was about the machinery that makes all of it possible: the industrial-scale disinformation—Moscow’s oldest export, now with Beijing and Doha franchises—that turned Brexit into a proof of concept and keeps teaching Americans to hate the alliances that kept them safe. Other democracies have built antibodies; we’ve built engagement algorithms.
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