Both in campaigning and in office, Donald Trump has elevated the subject of burden-sharing among American allies, partnerships and institutions as a question of U.S. foreign policy. The issue is not new; U.S. leaders have grappled with ensuring adequate allied contributions since creating a truly global postwar network. However, by the 2016 election the issue of burden-sharing had come to a head: war fatigue from Iraq and Afghanistan combined with economic woes and growing perceptions of an increasingly unstable world, with some Americans believing that the United States was doing too much without seeing immediate returns.

The president’s critique is not unfounded. American power today differs from its heights in 1945, or even 1990. The United States will need help shouldering the maintenance of a liberal international order that has increased global security, prosperity and freedom these past seven decades. Nevertheless, the manner in which an American administration approaches the burden-sharing issue matters. Trump has pointedly called for NATO allies to pay more for defense and his team at the United Nations has circulated a potential policy to make foreign aid contingent on alignment with U.S. positions, so that aid dollars “only go to America’s friends.”

Though increased action among allies and partners is necessary, to simply demand greater burden-sharing is insufficient. Policymakers confront two central questions if they are to promote effective burden-sharing: first, how to ensure other stakeholders do step forward, rather than leave a vacuum around an issue; and, second, how to protect and advance U.S. interests if burden-sharing cedes the initiative to others.

Demands for increased activities from partners must be coupled with coordination and a measure of U.S. leadership for an effective burden-sharing campaign. A number of cases, therefore, reveal bases for eliciting burden-sharing of the quality and variety the United States should want—as well as the risks of forcing burden-sharing via disengagement. The notion of compelling other nations into taking actions—particularly by arousing skepticism around U.S. credibility—is a recipe for shortchanging American interests.

Consideration of both UN peacekeeping operations and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria illustrate how effective burden-sharing requires continued U.S. commitments in order to spur burden-sharing over inaction. Furthermore, the success of the Global Fund, the worsening of some crises in the Middle East, such as in Yemen, and the mixed record of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), similarly demonstrate that leadership creates the leverage necessary for Washington to advance U.S. interests when others do step up to act.

Americans may legitimately want others to do more, but how that aim is pursued matters. Nowhere is this more evident than the debate over NATO.

Even before the signing of the Washington Treaty, concerns around NATO burden-sharing arose. U.S. military planners worried that an American security guarantee would perpetually deter defense spending by the new European allies. This concern dogged the allies throughout the Cold War. Disagreements flared almost immediately in the Senate’s “great debate” over deploying troops to Europe without additional European support in the Korean War, a peripheral interest to many European leaders.

Disagreements resurfaced in the 1960s as Western European economies recovered from their postwar devastation. The Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations repeatedly sought to navigate clashes between security interests in Europe and trade or balance of payments deficits. Compounded by the strains of Vietnam, both the security and economic arrangements boiled over in the Nixon administration with the resulting shifts of the Nixon Doctrine and the shocks to the Bretton Woods system.

Though the transatlantic partners were in sync on détente and then counterbalancing in face of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, disagreements surrounding approaches to European security, particularly around the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, maintained a measure of tension between the Euro-Atlantic allies. The subsequent Soviet collapse transformed the global security environment; yet, it did not take long for a new generation of burden-sharing issues to emerge. The Clinton administration at first evidenced ambivalence on respective roles and responses on Balkans crises. Others, like then-French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, derided the U.S. “hyperpower.” During this period even Paul Wolfowitz admitted a “need to believe that others are doing their share.”

Frustrations persisted in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Under both presidents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forewarned of a potential “two-tiered alliance” at the 2008 Munich Security Conference and the “the growing difficulty for the United States to sustain current support for NATO if the American taxpayer continues to carry most of the burden in the Alliance” in his 2011 farewell address at NATO. Jeffrey Goldberg further captured this sentiment in President Obama’s derision of “free-riders” in his revealing 2016 article “The Obama Doctrine” in The Atlantic.

Surviving these crises, NATO’s story reminds that the organization has been and remains, like many of America’s global partnerships, inherently reformable—provided the United States engages with tangible and realistic ambitions. Without initial U.S. involvement, no effective collective defense organization would have developed in Europe sufficient to manage the Soviet threat. Without continued engagement that same organization would not have changed as needed, for instance, to be a stalwart partner in Afghanistan. NATO and the broader transatlantic partnership certainly require further shifts to manage today’s era of resurgent great power competition; however, this past precedent emphasizes the need for active U.S. leadership and reasonable agenda-setting. Pragmatic engagement will yield practical results.

Peacekeeping by the United Nations offers an important example of what burden-sharing means and what elicits it. During the Cold War, UN peace operations were confined to interposing a deployment between formerly warring parties. The clash of the Cold War superpowers as veto-wielding United Nations Security Council (UNSC) members meant that was all the traffic would bear. In settings like Cyprus and Lebanon, long-standing deployments kept additional military duties off the U.S. plate through decades of the Cold War. The Cold War’s end ushered in more numerous and ambitious UNSC mandates—as the United States and Russia were more often willing to align on authorizing peace operations. In the 1990s, along with a couple of dramatic failures marred by murky mandates (in Bosnia and Rwanda, where excessive impartiality left atrocities to occur on peacekeepers’ watch), an array of peace operations took hold with a variety of governance and post-conflict goals beyond the traditional interpositional model.

Before even addressing questions of who pays what and who contributes how many troops, peace operations are by nature an exercise in burden-sharing benefiting the United States. With collective defense, expeditionary and stabilization deployments globally, the U.S. military footprint is immense. Whether midwifing a new nation in East Timor or containing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UN peace operations provide for other functions to be outsourced with quite limited U.S. roles. A February 2018 Government Accountability Office study found that a hypothetical U.S. peacekeeping operation in the Central African Republic of the same size and duration as the UN’s Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) operation would cost the United States some eight times more than its share for MINUSCA. And this good bargain affords the United States a major voice as a member of UNSC’s permanent five (P-5) on what missions will and will not be approved to boot.

Neither this innate value of UN peacekeeping fulfilling functions in place of larger U.S. operational roles, nor a better bargain for the financial shares other countries shoulder are possible absent U.S. leadership. First, the efficacy of peace operations requires vigorous U.S. diplomacy to craft viable mandates at the Security Council, as well as U.S. pressure for stronger coordination at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York and in the field (especially after Bosnia and Rwanda).

Second, as for equable cost-sharing among nations, two key rounds of talks in the tenures of Richard Holbrooke and Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassadors to the UN are illustrative.

In the former case, some $1.3 billion in U.S. back dues to the UN were amassed by 1998, due to U.S. withholdings. The lion’s share was for peacekeeping—due to concerns about inefficacy and lack of accountability to U.S. command and control in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Legislation crafted by SeNATOrs Jesse Helms and Joseph Biden tied the release of arrears to meeting reforms, most prominently lowering the U.S. share of the UN’s regular budget to twenty-two percent and of the peacekeeping budget to twenty-five percent. As recounted by Suzanne Nossel in these pages seventeen years ago, the late Ambassador Holbrooke mounted a campaign in New York and foreign capitals to cajole other nations to increase their dues rates. He visited the New York missions of tiny countries that U.S. permanent representatives had seldom seen. Moreover, sweeteners in other areas of aid and policy were offered in demarches in capitals worldwide. Holbrooke adeptly portrayed himself as good cop (quite a trick for those who knew him) by inviting Helms to speak at an informal session of the UNSC—embodying the bad cop requiring concessions. Holbrooke almost met the goal of twenty-five percent, and convinced Helms to revise the legislation and let the arrears flow to the UN (chiefly to repay other nations for their troop contributions to peace operations).

The U.S. share has floated upward over time—a bone of contention for Congress, which has capped appropriations at twenty-five percent, accruing arrears again. Nikki Haley was an estimable U.S. envoy under Trump—speaking clearly about Russian intransigence, securing tough sanctions on North Korea, contributing to nuclear talks and addressing humanitarian issues like South Sudan. The UN’s regular and peacekeeping budget dues scales are renegotiated every three years, and were in December 2018. In the 2016–2018 scale, peacekeeping dues rates were 28.47 percent for the United States (compared to a twenty-four percent share of world GDP), followed by China and Japan at 10.25 and 9.68 percent respectively. Haley stressed the goal of a 25 percent U.S. rate for peacekeeping, yet the equivalent of the Holbrooke campaign in New York and world capitals was not launched.

Apart from the P-5 and rotating elected members of the UNSC, other nations receive no greater “say” on peacekeeping in return for agreeing to higher dues rates. Therefore, favors to countries provide honey to accompany the vinegar of demanding they pay more. The record of the Holbrooke campaign indicates that achieving outcomes close to your stated goals requires many months of leadership and carrot-and-stick diplomacy. In short, peacekeeping by nature offloads burdens from the United States, and can even reduce the U.S. share of the bill without losing its “say”—but only when the United States offers strong, clear, constructive leadership.  As such, the U.S. effort in Haley’s final weeks on the job yielded only modest fruit in a late December 2018 deal setting the 2019–2021 peacekeeping dues scale.  While China’s rate went up from 10.25 to 12 percent, largely just as a function of its economy’s size, the United States rate was lowered only a small amount, from 28.43 percent in 2018 to 27.89 percent (a good bit above the desired 25 percent).

Some fifteen years ago, the United States launched a bipartisan policy under George W. Bush to take on pandemic diseases, such as HIV—which was wiping out the most economically productive and reproductive generation in many Sub-Saharan African nations—and malaria. At the same time, as it stood up massive bilateral programs like the President’s Emergency Program For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), the United States supported the development of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The Global Fund is a public-private partnership financing projects to combat HIV, TB and malaria—to great effect. As of September 2018, a conservative estimate suggests it has saved twenty-seven million lives since it started operating in 2002.

The Global Fund extends the reach of the United States by coordinating closely with the bilateral programs; for instance, PMI has chosen to only work in countries the Global Fund supports in order to leverage impact. Moreover, in recent years, in a division of labor, the Global Fund has focused on buying commodities (e.g., drugs, diagnostic equipment or anti-malarial bed nets) at scale, facilitating the bilateral programs’ work on the operational plans of, and technical assistance to, implementing countries.

Other major donor nations have taken to funding “horizontal” health systems and women’s health as priorities rather than “vertical” programs on these three most devastating infectious diseases, but the Global Fund keeps these countries engaged on the latter. Because Congress limits the U.S. contribution to thirty-three percent of the Global Fund’s budget, the Global Fund propels burden-sharing. Other donors step up because they know that U.S. pledges will only be disbursed if matched at least twofold by them.

This leveraging mechanism was evident in September 2016 in donors’ commitments for a three-year replenishment period (2017–2019). Comparing pledges to those three years earlier, while the United States went up by seven percent, those of the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Norway, the European Commission and Canada rose in their own currencies by eighteen to forty-six percent, as did Japan and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in U.S. dollars.

In an era where U.S. executive and legislative branch leaders emphasize burden-sharing, as the next three-year replenishment approaches in October 2019—with France committing robustly itself as the pledging conference's host—the Global Fund is a tested vehicle to ensure other donors step up.

The Global Fund reveals not only how Washington can win substantial burden-sharing from others by stepping up and shouldering responsibilities, but also how shaping the agenda is crucial to achieving the content and qualities that the United States seeks. The Global Fund requires implementing countries employ a multi-stakeholder decisionmaking group of government, civil society and private sector actors. The board governance in which the United States partakes is also multi-stakeholder in nature. Delegations on the board include donor countries, private sector and foundation donors, Global North and Global South implementing NGOs, and representatives of disease-affected communities. Nonetheless, through the PEPFAR ambassador sitting on the board, the United States as the donor of some thirty-three percent of the Fund’s resources has a distinct influence on the Fund’s strategy and work. How the United States uses that influence has prioritized results-based work, transparency, an inspector general’s pronounced independence, the aggressive recovery of any misspent resources (working with Global North and private sector delegations) and also a prominent voice for civil society to hold implementing governments to account (working with the NGO and affected communities' delegations). Nor has the U.S. voice been diluted by other donors stepping up. South Korea shifted from being beneficiary to a significant donor. Yet a 2018 decision to provide a non-voting seat to donors pledging over $10 million, namely South Korea, did not entail diminishing U.S. weight on the board.

In short, not only do U.S. investments and leadership in fighting infectious diseases through the Global Fund win partners to share the burden, but they shape the strategy, character and impact of programming the Global Fund underwrites. The approach and vehicle deserve replication. When done adroitly, U.S. diplomacy can expand the efforts of others without diminishing U.S. influence.

Looking to the Middle East, U.S. policy under the current and past administration shows the consequences of relinquishing a degree of strategic engagement to shape decisions and outcomes. That the United States sought to pull back its involvement in the Middle East in the last administration was no surprise. Barack Obama ran on ending the war in Iraq. Once in office, a “Rebalance to Asia” was intended to refocus American foreign policy. However, under both Presidents Obama and Trump, as the heat rose on the long-simmering Saudi-Iranian geopolitical rivalry and ISIS rocked the region, the United States found itself unable to look away. Instead, Washington turned to burden-sharing, shrinking its own direct involvement.

Given the leading U.S. role in the counter-ISIS coalition, the United States did not fully withdraw from the Middle East. At the end of the Obama administration, over four thousand U.S. troops remained in the fight against ISIS. Nonetheless, belief in America as a lasting regional actor waned. Jeffrey Goldberg captured Obama’s desire to turn away from a zone of “Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all.’” Trump has shown similar disinterest in active regional engagement. In the words of Martin Indyk in a piece for The Atlantic, Trump may “embrace America’s Middle East partners, autocrats and democrats alike… But it’s their job to assume the burdens of dealing with this troubled place, not his.”

With this shift, others are certainly doing more. From Saudi Arabia to Turkey, local players continue to increase their activities to fill the void left by Washington. Yet, whether these initiatives meet U.S. national interests is dubious. In Riyadh, a more activist foreign policy has had ramifications across the Gulf. Diplomatically, Saudi Arabia maintains its isolation campaign against neighboring Qatar. Militarily, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Saudi war in Yemen has come at the cost of over seventeen thousand civilian deaths and nearly three million displaced.

While increasingly recognized as a humanitarian and moral catastrophe, a distant blockade and civil war might seem remote from American interests. Yet, to focus on Yemen, as Andrew Exum notes, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) persists as a terrorist cell “with the demonstrated will and capability to strike the United States”; the Saudi campaign there “has distracted both the United States and its key partners—namely, the Emiratis—from the fight against AQAP.” Yemen’s continued spiral into what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” impacts assessments of the United States as a humane actor as Washington provides critical support for Riyadh’s military operations through airborne refueling, munitions and intelligence sharing.

Beyond the Gulf, similar dilemmas are unfolding in Syria. From Obama’s reluctance to engage to Trump’s reiterated intention to withdraw, America’s involvement in an effective resolution of that conflict remains tenuous. Even before Trump announced his decision to remove forces from Syria, neighboring Turkey had actively interceded militarily.

Yet, the interests of Turkey, an increasingly fraught partner under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, do not align with American priorities. Even based in a narrow view of U.S. interests in Syria—the lasting defeat of ISIS for counterterror aims—Turkish hostility toward Kurdish fighters, the best opponents of ISIS and a reliable partner of Washington, is troubling. Preventing the looming clash need not require an extensive or open-ended U.S. military commitment. It required consistent diplomacy to, as Joshua Geltzer has written, “manage Turkish fears and Syrian Kurdish ambitions.” This essential ingredient has been lacking in a burden-sharing method that suggests ever-decreasing U.S. involvement in the conflict’s resolution. Such a perception, as Trump and National Security Advisor John Bolton are discovering, affords little leverage to pursue American objectives as Erdogan flouts U.S. demands and Kurdish leaders look to Damascus.

Burden-sharing devoid of U.S. leadership may push others to step up. Yet, thus far it has borne out little evidence that the resulting policies promote American interests in the region. Lacking U.S. engagement to set the agenda and deconflict challenges among regional powers, local actors are incentivized to pursue their own aims, regardless of the impact on the United States—and we should not be surprised if we dislike the outcome.

The announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 yielded a flurry of predictions of Chinese dominance of the East Asian economic order. The late SeNATOr John McCain lamented the “opening for China to rewrite the economic rules of the road.” Beijing indeed appeared ready to capitalize on the opportunity to push its own trade arrangement—the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—that it had promoted since 2011. Yet, one year later eleven Asia-Pacific nations signed the revised Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which involved neither RCEP nor China.

Given the prevailing fears, the CPTPP ought to be heralded as a burden-sharing victory. As Mireya Solís and Jennifer Mason have written, “as the United States retreats from its traditional role as champion of trade liberalization, the successful conclusion of the CPTPP has illustrated that other countries can and will step in to fill the void and provide trade leadership.”

When Washington stepped back, Tokyo stepped up. Japan took the lead in salvaging this new agreement from the ashes of the TPP, and the United States certainly benefited. As Matthew Goodman has noted, “the trade and investment rules in areas such as e-commerce and SOEs [state-owned enterprises] established in the CPTPP help advance U.S. objectives even without [American] participation.”

Yet, even in this successful outcome, the CPTPP agreement falls short of achieving the best result for U.S. national interests. While the agreement bolsters a rules-based economic order, its final form eliminated or changed twenty-two provisions most sought by Washington, particularly around investment and intellectual property.

Nor would seeking to join this new trade deal ensure that the United States will achieve its broader economic and foreign policy objectives. As the Japanese minister for the TPP11, Toshimitsu Motegi, stated in April 2018: “The eleven participating countries share the thinking that it would be extremely difficult to take out part of the TPP and renegotiate or change it.” U.S. disengagement on TPP, consequently, has left some $2 billion in income on the table for U.S. firms outside the CPTPP zone.

If not present to promote its own interests, the United States can, at best, hope for beneficial outcomes only if its objectives match those of other nations. Burden-sharing by withdrawal, consequently, may foist the costs of solving problems on other nations, but it also surrenders the initiative to shape the responses to those challenges, and thereby maximize benefits for Americans.

What lessons emerge as to what kind of U.S. leadership and institutions win the quantity and quality of burden-sharing the United States desires? Some cases assessed here offer models, while others offer cautionary tales.

Recognize innate burden-sharing in some institutions. NATO seeks to prevent the immense human and financial cost of Americans fighting wars on the Eurasian landmass, as they were forced to in World Wars I and II. The very existence of UN peacekeeping shifts the burden for implementing deployments away from the world’s largest military power, enabling Washington to play to its comparative advantages of deterrence, defending allies and denial of aggressors. So too, the Global Fund encourages other nations toward participating in a highly-focused effort on the most devastating three diseases to help reduce and ultimately end the epidemics by contributing two dollars for each dollar from the United States.

Value institutions where U.S. influence is weighty and use that influence. The United States need not, cannot and should not lead on each and every issue. However, it should capitalize on the institutions and fora that are aimed at and suited to critical challenges, and in which it wields strong influence. The United States is the undisputed, institutionalized leader of NATO. Our allies, in truth, value when Washington serves as an active agenda-setter. One should take care not to drive them toward alternative arrangements—ones that could prove either insufficient to the task or ambivalent to American interests. UN peacekeeping, imperfect as it may be with misconduct by some troops or unresolved civil strife in nations with deployments, complements U.S. military commitments. Continuing to seek a longstanding goal since Holbrooke’s time of no more than twenty-five percent share is highly justified, but the outcome of the United States once again amassing arrears, of earning opprobrium from others and of under-resourced operations must be averted. The Global Fund accords the United States a significant voice on crucial issues of global health, which it uses to seek results, accountability, transparency and civil society participation in national plans and implementation.

To get burden-sharing, use honey as well as vinegar. The Holbrooke initiative to win changes in the U.S. share of the regular and peacekeeping funding was a tour de force. It displayed the vinegar (congressional conditionality on funding and its personification in the form of Helms) and offered honey (engaging the smallest players, offering concessions on other nations’ priorities and speaking to African concerns in the UN Security Council—including HIV/AIDS). Persuasion and carrots complement demands by providing a more legitimate foundation for winning help that meets U.S. needs.

Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Pulling out of NATO or obfuscating the certainty of the Article V commitment in the North Atlantic Treaty would hurt U.S. interests more than an alliance with some free-riderism. When NATO allies agree to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defense by 2024, those forming tangible plans deserve recognition—and the time necessary to get there. By paying thirty-three percent of the Global Fund’s budget, the United States persuades other donors to contribute two-thirds to a cause they might not otherwise underwrite, offering an additive benefit to consequential U.S. bilateral programs against epidemics as health security threats. When Richard Holbrooke got the U.S. share of the peacekeeping dues from over thirty-one percent to twenty-six percent in December 2000, it made sense to seize the achievement, even if short of the twenty-five percent ideal goal. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership has removed a U.S. voice inside the tent and lost earlier concessions of value to the United States (e.g., on intellectual property). Japan and others are leaving an empty seat at the table for the United States—like that left for Elijah at the Passover dinner. But even if Washington returns, it will find fewer benefits than before.

Avoid outsourcing action without ensuring shared aims and strategy. Holding Saudi Arabia’s coat while it intervenes in Yemen is just such a case. Instead of an ally serving as regional surrogate or stabilizer in the best vision of the Nixon Doctrine, Saudi Arabia’s actions have worsened humanitarian conditions in Yemen and undermined American counterterror objectives. The United States is sharing intelligence for targeting and refueling Saudi aircraft—without employing its leverage to dissuade decisions with which it may disagree. Devolution of European security decisions, peace operations and fighting pandemic disease to others without preserving a voice in decisions might yield similar poor results, if the burden is picked up at all.

Burden-sharing is not just the vogue du jour. It has been a long-standing U.S. desire and is much merited. Yet qualitative, beneficial burden-sharing requires leadership. That leadership necessitates recognizing a venue that amplifies U.S. influence. It requires using American influence in collective enterprises effectively to advance our security and economic interests. And it requires persuasion as much as tough love. Without a strategy based on such an understanding, Americans are likely to discover a world in which other states let crises go unheeded or act without regard for U.S. objectives. Burdens can be shifted, but U.S. strategic vision and initiative cannot be outsourced in large part to other actors.

Mark P. Lagon is chief policy officer at Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, distinguished senior scholar at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and co-editor of Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions.

Will Moreland is an associate fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and contributor to The Marshall Plan and the Shaping of American Strategy.

Image: Reuters