In 1986—at a time when U.S.–Soviet relations began to thaw as a new reformist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came on the scene in the USSR—Melvyn Krauss made the case for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe. Krauss’s case for withdrawal had nothing to do with the incipient improvement of the bilateral relationship or the moderating policies of the Reagan administration in response to Gorbachev’s rise. In fact, Krauss’s motivation for calling for a U.S. withdrawal of troops from Europe, thus ending the “tripwire” for the U.S. nuclear guarantee for NATO countries, was because he felt the Europeans were chronically alliance free riders, with only meager defense spending; had gone soft on the Soviet threat, adopting a “détente-as-defense” strategy toward the USSR; and were not sufficiently supporting a more aggressive U.S. fight against Soviet-sponsored communism in the developing world.

Krauss argued that the Europeans’ détente-as-defense strategy, however, came about because once the Soviets were able to hit American territory with nuclear weapons and as they reached nuclear parity with the United States by the early 1970s, the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe was no longer credible. Krauss even quotes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, after he left office, making this cogent argument. Despite it being U.S. doctrine, even at the height of the Cold War, it made no logical sense to hold American cities and territory hostage to the holocaust of all-out nuclear war to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, as bad as that might have been. The Soviets could have made the decision to invade Western Europe, betting that the United States would not want to reply with nuclear weapons, which could then escalate to an all-out nuclear war with the USSR and annihilate both superpowers’ home territories.

Although Krauss advocated withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe and his opposition, in most cases, to using U.S. troops to directly battle communism in the developing world, as in the fiascos in Korea and Southeast Asia, he adopted these views for the wrong reasons. He viewed the American foreign policy debate on a spectrum with interventionist Wilsonian neo-conservatives at one end and right-wing and left-wing “isolationists” on the other end. He seemed to hold the middle ground of “strategic restraint.” His view was that a phased withdrawal of troops from Europe would free the United States for a more independent foreign policy, which would allow the United States to unilaterally intervene more aggressively against communism in the developing world, free of hectoring and opposition from the European allies.

However, instead of risking U.S. forces directly in potential quagmires in those backwater countries or pumping economic aid into them—which he correctly pointed out distorts those economies, relieves the impetus for badly needed free-market economic reforms, and instead fuels the growth of local governments instead of the private sectors—he advocated “trade over aid” by completely opening U.S. markets to those nations’ exports, so they could grow their economies so that their people could benefit from capitalism instead of going communist.

So far, so good. Krauss’s strategic restraint policy’s only kink was that he wanted to ramp up military aid to developing countries threatened by communism to help client governments or groups to fight the communists. First, such military aid, similar to economic aid, will also grow the local governments, and maybe in an even worse way. Krauss argued that infusing U.S. weapons and training would tame and professionalize local militaries and pointed to successes in El Salvador during the 1980s. However, I was in the El Salvadorean jungles, after Krauss’s book was written, when the government of El Salvador’s death squads were exposed. Also, the record of the infamous U.S. School of Americas demonstrates that local militaries can be trained in U.S. weapons, tactics, and restrained comportment and then do brutal things more efficiently in the field by leaving out the restraint.

Second, even worse, when the U.S. provides weapons, trainers, and tactics, it raises the stakes in any conflict. If the U.S.-sponsored government or group begins losing the war, the United States must decide whether to cut its loses or escalate its involvement, with the potential to insert U.S. troops or even “go nuclear.” For example, U.S. catastrophic direct involvement in Vietnam started by providing U.S. military assistance. Nuclear threats have been made by Dwight Eisenhower in Korea, Richard Nixon in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and Vladimir Putin in the current Russia–Ukraine War.

Therefore, more generally, Krauss’s policy prescriptions, along with those of many Cold Warriors, including all presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, seemingly wanted to fight communists in every backwater, no matter how insignificant, with either military aid or U.S. troops. There was little prioritization of what areas of the world were most important to keep free of communism; my choice would have been defending the world’s centers of economic power and high technology—that is, Europe and East Asia—and letting the Soviets have the non-strategic developing world. After all, the U.S. policy of containment was to contain Soviet expansion until the Soviet system collapsed or mellowed. The problem was that the containment boundaries were too extensive. And a containment-lite concept would have aided Europe and Japan only until they got back on their feet after the destruction of World War II, becoming rich enough to defend themselves. In the containment-lite strategy, letting the Soviets assume all the military, economic, and administrative costs of poor countries (where communist movements overwhelmingly tended to do best) might have collapsed the dysfunctional and unviable Soviet economic system sooner than it happened. And it certainly would have saved many U.S. and local lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and erosion during the Cold War of the republic’s checks and balances and civil liberties.

In this 1986 writing, Krauss was radical and innovative in calling for the United States to bring home troops from Europe, but he still wanted to fight the global battle, through copious amounts of military aid and trade, against communism in countries that didn’t matter to U.S. security. He, like other Cold Warriors, misguidedly believed that the United States strategically had to fight communism wherever it arose.

Unfortunately, the main laudable recommendation of his book, the phased withdrawal of troops from Europe, and thus removal of the tripwire for the U.S. nuclear guarantee, has now become more difficult politically after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The fear of Russia in Europe has spiked, and two new countries near Russia—Sweden and Finland—recently have been admitted to NATO.

Yet if logically analyzed, withdrawing U.S. forces from Europe counterintuitively still would be the best solution. Even before it invaded Ukraine, Russia today was not as powerful as was the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In addition, the intense war in Ukraine has burned massive amounts of Russian military weapons and equipment and an estimated 600,000 Russian casualties. Thus, despite the hysteria in Europe, Washington, and the media, the current Russian threat to any NATO country has been drastically reduced from that before the Russian invasion. And the Europeans—slackers for decades in defense spending because of their free-riding off the alliance’s U.S. nuclear guarantee, as Krauss thoroughly demonstrates in the book—have been scared into spending a little more than usual. Taking advantage of this European fear, the United States, with a gargantuan $35-trillion-dollar national debt, could announce that over a five-year period (as Krauss recommends), the United States would gradually withdraw all forces from Europe and exit NATO. The NATO allies have been wealthy enough to run a collective defense without U.S. help since the 1960s. Today, together, they ought to be able to successfully defend against a Russia that has a GDP less than Italy alone.

But given the European scare in Ukraine and the U.S. foreign policy elite’s continuing belief in what Krauss calls “Atlantic unity”—that is, that the NATO alliance is an end in itself rather than a means to U.S. security—this is an especially bad time to try to conduct a gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe. Analytically, however, it’s a great time to do so with Russia weakened and the hawks in the Republican Party somewhat muted by Donald Trump’s dislike of NATO.

However, despite Krauss’s hawkish unilateralism and desire to get out of Europe, only to meddle more in the developing world, he was courageous, as a conservative, for proposing such a radical idea when the Cold War was still churning onward. Also, he realized that alliances impede a more flexible U.S. foreign policy (not to mention potentially embroiling the United States in unneeded and costly wars, including the possibility of “going nuclear”).

Reading Krauss’s book made me wonder why the United States, after World War II, began negotiating the first permanent (and entangling) alliances in its history, including NATO, to create Pax Americana around the world, especially after it added nuclear weapons to its traditional intrinsic security of wide ocean moats and weak and friendly neighbors. These technological and geographical advantages likely make the United States the most intrinsically secure great power in world history—conventional attacks by countries with home addresses would be difficult across such great distances and, with the possibility of retaliation from the world’s most potent nuclear force, likely suicidal. Almost 40 years ago, during the Cold War, Krauss presciently saw that NATO had to go; instead, the U.S. foreign policy elites unwisely expanded it by providing a U.S. security guarantee to many more countries. But at least Krauss’s idea is still out there. Maybe diminishing European GDP as a percentage of the world’s total, the rise of East Asia, and the ballooning of U.S. debt will finally compel a reordering of U.S. security priorities among the regions of the world.