Should the USA reduce its role as the world's security guarantor?
No: not now, not without a named substitute force and a realistic timeline to build it.
Lee Kuan Yew and Ben-Gurion anchor the case: no allied force in the Indo-Pacific can replace US deterrence in any near-term window. Keynes adds that when the anchor power withdraws, the order does not rebalance; it breaks, and everyone pays more to rebuild than to maintain. Schmidt sharpens this: European NATO capacity took thirty years to construct, and Asia has not started.
Mahathir's objection is real. American guarantees have been selectively applied, and 1998 showed Washington using financial institutions as leverage against the states it claimed to protect. But his case for managed multipolarity assumes substitute institutions exist to manage it. They do not.
The council splits on whether dependency can ever be corrected without a crisis forcing it. Schmidt argues it must be; Lee Kuan Yew argues the correction kills the patient before the cure works.
Confidence summary: High aggregate confidence in the near-term verdict; genuine disagreement persists on whether long-term dependency is a stable foundation for any alliance.
1. The core argument
The most important thing to understand about this question is that it contains a hidden assumption: that the order the United States underwrites can survive American withdrawal if that withdrawal is managed carefully enough. Every member of this council, in different ways, rejects that assumption. Keynes put it plainest: withdrawal does not redistribute order, it dissolves it. The Paris settlement of 1919 was the template, not the exception. A dominant power that exits the architecture it built does not leave behind a stable void that others fill proportionally. It leaves behind a race among the least constrained actors to fill it first.
What anchors the council's verdict is the absence of any substitute. When Washington suspended military aid and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine in 2025, it did not create space for European leadership to step in cleanly. It created a signal that commitments are conditional, which every adversary from Moscow to Beijing read immediately. The US Indo-Pacific Command has no allied substitute in place, and NATO's collective 2 percent GDP milestone, real as it is, reflects thirty years of incremental construction in Europe, not a model that can be replicated in Asia on any timeline that deters near-term miscalculation. The answer to the question as posed is no. Not now. Not without a named substitute force and a realistic schedule to build it.
2. How each member frames it
Lee Kuan Yew begins not from principle but from the geometry of power in small states. Singapore invited American military access after Britain left east of Suez precisely because he understood that a security vacuum is not neutral territory: it is an invitation. What the cards could not capture is his deeper point about signals and timescales. Credibility is not built in the moment you need it; it is built in the years before. Beijing's reading of the 2025 Ukraine suspension was not a diplomatic assessment. It was a threat calculation. Lee accepts that dependency is uncomfortable, but he would reject Schmidt's framing that discomfort is the same as danger. In his view, the timeline for building autonomous Asian deterrence is measured in decades, and the timeline for adversary miscalculation is measured in months.
Helmut Schmidt accepts Lee's diagnosis of the timeline problem but refuses his conclusion. The neutron bomb episode in 1978 is his load-bearing example: Carter cancelled the programme without consulting Bonn, and Schmidt absorbed the political cost of a defence posture he had publicly defended. That was dependency without autonomy, and it nearly destroyed his government. Schmidt's fuller argument, which the card compressed, is that the goal is not to make retrenchment unnecessary but to make it survivable. Europe spent thirty years building that survivability. Asia has not started. He would support sustained US engagement on one condition: that engagement comes with a formal transition plan that funds allied capacity rather than perpetuating client relationships.
John Maynard Keynes frames the question as a problem of institutional design, not military positioning. His Bretton Woods experience taught him that durable international order requires institutions robust enough to function when the dominant power is distracted, weakened, or domestically captured. He would press this council harder than the card suggested: the question is not whether America should retrench, but whether anyone is redesigning the institutions now, before the retrenchment forces the issue. He is candid about the limit of his own position. He cannot specify what those redesigned institutions look like; he can only insist that the failure to design them is the real policy error, and that the cost of that failure falls hardest on the weakest states.
David Ben-Gurion carries the sharpest personal experience on this council. Suez 1956 was not a theoretical lesson. Israel coordinated with two great powers, executed a military campaign successfully, and was then ordered out by Eisenhower in seventy-two hours. The guarantee evaporated not because it was insincere but because the guarantor's interests shifted. His response, building Dimona, pursuing the peripheral strategy, was not recklessness. It was the only rational hedge for a state that could not afford to be wrong. But he is honest about the condition underneath all of that hedging: it worked because the international order still constrained the strongest players enough to make rules partially meaningful. Ukraine's experience in 2025 is, on his reading, the proof that the order is weakening. Once it weakens past a threshold, small states cannot hedge their way to survival.
Hannah Arendt introduces the sharpest conceptual distinction in this debate. Power, in her account, is not the same as force. Force can be projected by a single actor. Power requires people acting in concert. What the United States built after 1945 was not just a military umbrella; it was a form of collective action expressed through shared institutions and acknowledged rules. Her statelessness from 1933 to 1951 is not incidental to her argument: she knows from experience what it means to lose the political membership that makes rights real and enforceable. Her warning is that when the ordering power withdraws its commitment to the institutions it founded, what remains is not a more equal distribution of power among states. It is domination by whoever is least bound by rules, which is never the smallest state in the room.
Mahathir Mohamad makes the most uncomfortable argument on this council, because he is the only member who explicitly names what the other five treat as background noise: American dominance was never a neutral public good. The IMF conditions of 1998, which he refused, were not disinterested economic advice. They were instruments of strategic pressure from a Washington-anchored financial system, applied to a state that had done nothing to threaten the rules-based order. His case for managed multipolarity is not naivety about power; it is a demand that mid-size states be honest about the costs of the current arrangement before declaring it irreplaceable. His candid limit is that he cannot name the institutions that would manage a multipolar transition, and in May 2026, with no substitute force in the Indo-Pacific and adversaries already testing the rules, that gap is the weakest point in his position.
3. Where the council agrees
The most surprising point of agreement is that American retrenchment is already happening regardless of what any policymaker decides. The 2025 suspension of aid and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine was not debated in this council as a hypothetical; it was treated as a fact that adversaries have already absorbed into their calculations. All six members agree that the damage from that signal cannot be undone simply by reversing the policy, because credibility is not symmetric: it takes years to build and hours to destroy.
The council also agrees, across deep ideological differences, that abrupt withdrawal creates vacuums that the most aggressive actors fill first. This is not a point about American virtue. It is a structural claim about how power distributes when a dominant actor exits. Keynes grounds it in the 1919 settlement. Ben-Gurion grounds it in Suez. Arendt grounds it in the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The specific mechanisms differ; the outcome is the same.
Finally, all six agree that 23 of 32 NATO members meeting the 2 percent threshold is a real but insufficient achievement. It is insufficient because NATO capacity, however genuine, does not transfer to Asia, and because the institutional commitment behind that capacity still depends on American political will to hold the alliance together.
4. Where the council splits
The line is between those who treat long-term dependency as a structural risk to be corrected and those who treat the correction itself as more dangerous than the dependency. Schmidt and Mahathir hold the first position: a guarantor relationship that can be suspended by one election cycle is not a stable foundation for any state's security, and the longer allies delay building autonomous capacity, the more painful the eventual correction becomes. Lee Kuan Yew and Ben-Gurion hold the second: the timeline for building autonomous deterrence in Asia is decades, and adversaries do not wait for transitions to complete before testing them. The correction may be theoretically necessary and practically fatal.
Arendt and Keynes occupy a distinct third position that sharpens rather than resolves this split. Both locate the real failure upstream, in the institutions. But neither can specify what redesigned institutions would look like or who would build them, which means their position, compelling as a diagnosis, provides no operational guidance for the policymaker sitting across from this table today.
5. For a policymaker to decide on
The concrete choice is this: announce a formal, phased transition strategy for the Indo-Pacific, including explicit funding commitments for allied capacity-building and a named timeline, accepting that adversaries may read any announced retrenchment as weakness regardless of its form; or hold current commitments publicly unconditional while negotiating burden-sharing privately, accepting that this delays allied autonomy indefinitely and ties American security policy to domestic political cycles that allies cannot control. Both options carry real costs. Neither does not is not available.