# When should U.S. allies walk away? For junior partners, there are several conditions that provide compelling reasons to walk away from an alliance—I’ll just brush over three of the most relevant. First, the threat on which the alliance was originally based diminishes or disappears, thereby reducing the security benefit that made it worthwhile. Second, the costs of the alliance start to outweigh the benefits, so foreign-policy autonomy suffers or the risk of entrapment in unwanted conflicts increases. Third, the interests of the partners diverge. State strategic objectives change, the distribution of power shifts, or alternatives provide greater security and freedom of action. Together, these changes alter the original cost-benefit calculation of the alliance. It is in the end, a strategic ledger of the advantages and disadvantages that the alliance brings. Around seventy years is long for any alliance, and, well... Trump. It’s understandable that there’s a willingness to take a closer look at the conditions to walk away from the alliance. All three reasons pretty much apply to South Korea and Australia. For South Korea, the original rationale for the alliance has changed dramatically. The alliance was established to protect an impoverished and incapable state to defend itself from an aggressor (without going into revisionist justifications). South Korea is today an advanced industrial and military power and can readily defend itself. At the same time, the alliance increasingly connects Seoul to Washington’s self-initiated confrontational contest with China. It’s almost as if it’s payback time, and the U.S. has decided to serve up South Korea to contest China, as it serves up Ukraine to contest Russia. This is not in South Korea’s interests. For Australia, the calculation is different, but similar. Australia faces no equivalent of North Korea: the direct and immediate military threat. Geography and common sense is all that is needed to provide its security. Australia, however, equates its security with an international system led by the U.S. and seeks to sustain that system. Unfortunately, middle powers do not choose or influence the international system. It is folly for Australia to base its strategy on nostalgia. Those days are gone. > The only result of tying the country to the U.S. is a slow lynching as the economy weakens without China, and the country struggles within the noose of security trade embargoes and sanctions compliance. So both South Korea and Australia have reasons to end the alliance. This begs two questions: Why don’t they, and when should they? There are ample balanced arguments to support maintaining an alliance with the U.S. Yet, in face of Trump, and the broader risks inherent in supporting an America intent on contesting China, they’re not exactly as convincing as they once were. Part of the reason why it’s near impossible to contemplate leaving is that modern U.S. alliances are much deeper than agreements to fight together. Over time, they became embedded in an intricate web of institutions, epistemic networks, professional relationships, and leadership circles that reach into almost every aspect of national life. Military officers train together and build careers around interoperability; diplomats and officials develop shared assumptions about threats and appropriate policy responses; politicians cultivate relationships with allied governments; academics and think tanks participate in common intellectual and funding networks; defense industries become tied to particular weapons systems and supply chains; and journalists, business leaders, and policy elites move within overlapping transnational circles. The alliance is not simply something the state has, but part of how its governing class understands the world and its place within it. Ending an alliance requires more than deciding that the strategic ledger no longer adds up: it requires challenging an entire ecosystem of institutions, interests, careers, relationships, and ideas that has grown around it. Then there’s the intelligence component. The U.S actively intervenes in the domestic politics of states to preserve strategically important relationships, including through covert political influence, intelligence operations and support for sympathetic elites or governments. For Australians, Gough Whitlam is the classic example. He challenged U.S. intelligence activities at Pine Gap, and was removed in “the dismissal” in 1975. Subsequent revelations—including those of CIA contractor Christopher Boyce—showed American efforts to destabilize and remove Whitlam. Direct CIA responsibility remains disputed, but the episode demonstrates the larger point: once an alliance is embedded in intelligence and security institutions, opposition involves active institutional resistance rather than merely political disagreement.  South Korea has its own comparable examples, from Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan—it would require a much longer piece to go through each one! This leads us to when a junior partner should—if it actually can—leave an alliance. Here, history gives us better guidance. A useful historical example is Charles de Gaulle’s France. In the mid-1960s, de Gaulle concluded that the Soviet threat was less significant than the U.S. made it out to be, and that NATO’s integrated command imposed constraints on French autonomy. In 1966, he withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command, removed French forces from NATO command, and required foreign forces to leave French territory, and reclaimed independent control over France’s nuclear deterrent. De Gaulle did this _before_ a crisis forced the decision and without abandoning cooperation altogether: France remained a NATO member and negotiated arrangements for cooperation should war occur. De Gaulle’s example shows that alliance relationships don’t need to be a binary choice between complete dependence and complete abandonment. France remained an important partner with increased strategic autonomy. The broader lesson is that, if the strategic ledger changes, sooner rather than later matters. Alliances become progressively harder to escape as military systems are integrated, intelligence networks deepen, defence industries become dependent upon common platforms, bases and infrastructure proliferate, and successive generations of political and military leaders build their careers within the relationship. Waiting until the alliance actually produces the feared outcome—entrapment in war, loss of strategic autonomy, or confrontation with a vital economic partner—is waiting too long. So this leads to the question, when should South Korea and Australia make a move? The smart choice would be to have the debate—a serious debate right now!!! Understandably, neither is currently thinking about it out loud. Sure, there are rumblings but there always were rumblings—peaceniks, hippies, commies, true believers, whatever you want to call them. In mainstream politics, there is surprisingly little serious debate—although that is changing around the edges. This probably goes back to the intelligence component. Those questions ain’t asked when you know they can’t be. So I guess, for now, such questions will be left to the peaceniks, hippies, commies, true believers, as well as the few feckless expatriate wannabe fiction writers who host hardly-accessed algorithmically-bleeding blogs. *** I love pizza - [Buy Me a Coffee](https://buymeacoffee.com/junotane)! ## Related articles - [[2026-10-09 The liberal-international order is dead|The liberal-international order is dead]] - [[2026-09-10 After Iran - Seoul's post-imperial interregnum|After Iran: Seoul's post-imperial interregnum]] - [[2026-10-05 In Seoul, Trump is an opportunity|In Seoul, Trump is an opportunity]] - [[2026-04-25 After Iran - Who'll be the last US ally to jump?|After Iran: Who'll be the last US ally to jump?]]