The American Delian League

Alliances as Extortion Rackets

With all of the news around the self-inflicted collapse of the American economy over the past few days, I missed one of the most radically disastrous declarations from the Trump Administration about their fundamental foreign policy views until someone pointed it out to me on Bluesky.

CEA Chairman Steve Miran, speaking at the Hudson Institute earlier today, laid out what the administration is referring to as tariffs as a form of ‘burden sharing.’

For those of you unfamiliar with burden sharing as it relates to the field of international affairs, it revolves around attempting to correct an inherent problem in alliance structures wherein smaller security partners essentially have their defense subsidized by larger security guarantors.

For instance, a long-term problem in NATO has been the understanding of European nations of defense as a result of Washington being able to credibly deter any Article 5 threat to the alliance. Until the war in Ukraine, a country like Spain never really had a reason to spend more than 1% of its GDP on defense because why would they?

Which gets you into a rather nasty problem that when the primary security guarantor (America) wants to shift their priorities, they need to find a way to convince those smaller nations to spend more on their defense to make up the difference from the shifting resources. Hence, burden sharing.

It has been a problem for quite some time, in which the United States has complained to Europe, and Europe has broadly ignored us, and in return, D.C. has attempted to use a variety of carrots and sticks to get Europe to spend more.¹

What the United States has never done is extort our allies for their defense. Steve Miran’s conception of ‘burden sharing’ is just that: an extortion racket targeting our allies.

His full section on proposed ideas for ‘burden sharing’ is worth seeing in full here:

—First, other countries can accept tariffs on their exports to the United States without retaliation, providing revenue to the U.S. Treasury to finance public goods provision. Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods.

—Second, they can stop unfair and harmful trading practices by opening their markets and buying more from America;

—Third, they can boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S., buying more U.S.-made goods, and taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here;

—Fourth, they can invest in and install factories in America. They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country;

—Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods.

These ideas would transform genuine security partnerships like NATO (and other U.S. alliances) into an imperial construct akin to a contemporary Delian League.

For those of you who don’t read Thucydides once a year (you should), the Delian League was a large collection of Greek² city-states that were ‘allied’ to Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

The Delian League was initially created in an ad-hoc fashion by Athens as a coalition of Greek city-states that were taking the fight to Persia to liberate other Greek city-states. The Delian League, in turn, established a central treasury (at the island of Delos, hence the name) to provide for the common defense, since fighting the Persian Empire was a rather resource-intensive undertaking.

As time went on, Athenian power grew, and as they became overwhelming, the primary security guarantor of the alliance—they simply used the taxes collected at Delos for themselves. The reasoning (at least as the Athenians took great pains to tell others) was that it was due to burden sharing.³

After all, they were the primary power fighting Persia and providing security for Hellas; why shouldn’t they collect taxes from all of the smaller states they were protecting?

Athens would go on to restrict the fleets, militaries, and independence of those ‘allies,’ which, as you would expect, created quite a bit of resentment.

The turn towards short-term attempts to accrue financial gains from leveraging their power against weaker city-states left Athens in a position where her friends were quick to leave and abandon her at the first opportunity. While the episode at Melos is the most well-known example of Athenian imperial attitudes, the Athenians spent as much time fighting their own ‘allies’ as they did the Spartans.

Early in the war, one of the most innovative Spartan generals—Brasidas—took notice of the inherent weakness in the Athenian alliance structure and began to foment revolts in the Athenian periphery. Given the deep hatred of Athenian imperialism that had sprung up across their empire, it wasn’t a particularly difficult sell, and most city-states that Brasidas approached went over without a fight.

Athenian forces found themselves quickly overwhelmed by the roiling conflicts that began to roil their alliance structure, and he likely would have mortally wounded the Athenian war effort had he not met an early end at the Battle of Amphipolis.

The inertial force, however, would eventually collapse in on Athens, and despite their overwhelming material advantages at the outset of the conflict, they would end the war with just one ally, Samos, still standing with them.

Why would we emulate this? Why would our NATO partners stand alongside us in the future if we’ve made such similar absurd demands of them? What alliance and feelings of fraternity can be created around demands that our allies pay directly into our treasury?

The most thinly veiled excuse that putting money directly into Washington’s coffers to pay for global public goods is as laughable a pretext as the idea that Athens moved the Delian League’s treasury from Delos to Athens.

Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, and Brussels understand exactly the intent behind what Miran is proposing—and will adjust their foreign policies accordingly.

What possible reason could Japan have to put their necks out for the United States during a conflict in the Pacific when we are demanding that they simply sit there and take our tariffs, because in reality, they owe us for the privilege of being our allies?

Why would the Europeans not just simply look toward their own defense when being with Washington means they need to pay us back by only purchasing from our defense industries? What South Korean servicemember wants to die alongside their American counterparts for the great honor of funding a new artillery plant in Texas?

Any adversary of the United States can very easily see—like Brasidas once did—that the entire imperial project that the Trump Administration is engaging in could collapse in on itself by the clever act of peeling off our allies from us with nothing more than the promise that they could be free.

In a lesser remembered speech by Pericles that followed his famous Funeral Oration—he remarked that regardless of what the intent was when Athens first formed their alliances, they had become an Empire. In the end, they died alone.

1. Due to the War in Ukraine, European NATO countries are now spending significantly more on their defense, and this isn’t an issue anymore, but it’s an easy example. If you’re from Europe and want to yell at me, try to make an aircraft carrier that doesn’t need a ramp first.

2. Yes, I know there wasn’t yet a pan-hellenic sense of Greek identity in Thucydides—that came with Xenophon’s generation. I’m still saying Greek for the sake of simplicity. Shut up.

3. It did not help the believability of their argument when they were using the funds collected from the treasury (which they relocated to the Parthenon) for public works projects in Athens.