| Summary/Abstract |
In their ambitious article, Joshua Alley and Matthew Fuhrmann ask how “alliance commitments affect US military spending.” Their answer: each alliance, on average, adds $11–$22 billion to the annual defense budget. Given the number of US defense pacts, that would mean formal alliances accounted for over $735 billion of the 2019 defense budget.1 This finding, if true, suggests that Donald Trump was right to claim that alliances are “much too costly for the US.”2
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