In 1963, Charles de Gaulle asked a question that Washington never really answered: would an American president actually trade New York for Paris? Would the United States be willing to risk its own cities in the defence of Europe's? He did not wait to find out. France built its own nuclear deterrent, the force de frappe, and three years later pulled out of NATO's integrated military command altogether. The alliance did not collapse. But it caved in, quietly, from the inside, for one member no longer trusted the guarantee but had begun hedging.

That is the part of alliance politics that people tend to overlook. Treaties do not fail in a single dramatic breach. They cannot stand the accumulation of small doubts that each member state develops, which each turn leads to the creation of a plan B, until the plan B is the actual policy and the treaty is just a piece of paper.

A similar thing is stirring right now. President Trump has publicly hedged on Article 5, NATO's founding promise........

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