Why American Hegemony Is Here to Stay JOHN M. OWEN I t is inevitable that allies be dissatisfied with one another. Sovereign states become allies by trading autonomy for security; they are perpet­ually tempted to cheat their allies by giving up less autonomy, i.e., acting unilaterally. Glenn Snyder distinguishes two types of unilateral behavior within alliances, namely, entrapment and abandonment. 1 In the early days of the Cold War, some Americans feared that Europeans would for a third time draw them into a massive foreign war; all through the strug­gle with the Soviet Union, other Americans feared that Europeans might abandon them for neutrality. Europeans, meanwhile, feared early on that the u.s. nuclear umbrella might spring a leak – that Americans might not sacrifice New York for Berlin. Ironically, by the 1980s many Europeans feared that Washington was too ready to risk Berlin, New York, and the entire world in order to vanquish the u.s.s.r . Power, Ideology and the Transatlantic Alliance Power disparities within an alliance magnify the risks of abandonment and entrapment, so an alliance as lopsided as nato has always felt these problems acutely. During the Cold War, America needed Europe less than Europe needed America. And America could stop the Europeans from fighting a war, as in the Suez in 1956, while the Europeans could not stop America, as in Vietnam after circa 1965. Once the Soviet threat van­ished in the late 1980s Europeans cut military spending proportionally more than the United States, so that today nato is more unbalanced than ever. The statistics and anecdotes indicating u.s. military primacy today need no recounting here. Suffice it to say that Europeans are keenly aware that the United States needs their military contributions less than ever, 1. Glenn H. Snyder,»The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics«, World Politics 36(July 1984), 461–95. ipg 1/2003 Owen, American Hegemony 71