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THE UNQUIET FRONTIER
 THE UNQUIET FRONTIER

Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of

American Power

JAKUB J. GRYGIEL
A. WESS MITCHELL

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD
 Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,
New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire OX 20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Jacket image courtesy of Shutterstock / Typeface by Lost Type
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-691-16375-8
Library of Congress Control Number 2015954474
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT & ScalaSansOT
Printed on acid-free paper.∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
FOR PRIYA AND ELIZABETH
 CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

CHAPTER 1 1
INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN POWER AT THE GLOBAL
FRONTIER

CHAPTER 2 15
AMERICA’S DEPRIORITIZATION OF ALLIES

CHAPTER 3 42
REVISIONIST POWERS’ PROBING BEHAVIOR

CHAPTER 4 77
RESPONSES OF U.S. ALLIES

CHAPTER 5 117
THE BENEFITS OF ALLIANCES

CHAPTER 6 155
RECOMMENDATIONS

NOTES 191
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 207
INDEX 217
 ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1.1. U.S. FRONTIER ALLIES WORLDWIDE 2

FIGURE 1.2. SPYKMAN’S RIMLANDS 6
FIGURE 4.1. MILITARY EXPENDITURES IN SELECT ASEAN 83
COUNTRIES
FIGURE 4.2. GROWTH OF DEFENSE BUDGETS IN GCC STATES 85
FIGURE 4.3. DEFENSE SPENDING INCREASES IN CEE 88
COUNTRIES
FIGURE 4.4. MENU CARD: ALLIED COPING STRATEGIES 112
FIGURE 5.1. U.S. AND ALLIES’ MILITARY SPENDING 139
FIGURE 5.2. FORWARD-DEPLOYED FORCE DEPLOYMENT 147
EFFECTS IN THE GEORGIA SCENARIO
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the many months since we began the research that led to this
book we have formed debts too extensive to repay here. We are
especially grateful to Nadia Schadlow for her encouragement, ideas,
and support, as well as to her colleagues at the Smith Richardson
Foundation, Marin Strmecki and Allan Song, for providing the
grants to the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where this
project was conceived, researched, and written. We are indebted to
CEPA chairman Larry Hirsch for his friendship and tireless
commitment to deepening U.S. strategic thinking to navigate a more
dangerous world. School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
colleagues Charles Doran and Eliot Cohen heard various iterations of
arguments presented here and offered support and comments. SAIS
deans Vali Nasr and John Harrington also made possible a
sabbatical for Jakub that helped when we made our final writing
push.
This book would not have come into being without Adam
Garfinkle’s agreement to publish an early version of the argument as
an article in The American Interest. We’re also grateful to The
National Interest for publishing a subsequent article in which many
of the recommendations in this book were first aired. We received
critical appraisals and suggestions from Aaron Friedberg and Colin
Dueck that helped to sharpen key parts of our argument. We are
grateful to our colleagues at CEPA, especially Peter Doran and Ilona
Teleki, for creating a supportive intellectual environment for
creative thinking about Central and Eastern European and global
geopolitics, as well as to Milda Boyce at CEPA and Starr Lee at SAIS-
JHU for seamless administration, planning, and trips.
A small army of CEPA research assistants fielded an array of
unquenchable inquiries. We’re grateful to Leah Scheunemann for
her enthusiasm and efficiency in tracking down everything from
Asian defense expenditures to arcane trivia on interwar diplomacy.
Jennifer Hill collected much of the data on which our main security
sections were built, and Octavian Manea provided help with
international military comparisons. Victoria Siegelman, Michal
Harmata, Stephanie Peng, Koen Maaskant, and Virginijus
Sinkevičius helped with notes and charts, and Alexander Bellah
sharpened our understanding of Chinese military thinking. This
book would not have seen the light of day without the support of
Eric Crahan and the team at Princeton University Press, Ben Pokross
and Ali Parrington. Anita O’Brien helped with the copyediting and
Maria DenBoer compiled the index. Finally, we would like to thank
the numerous officials in allied capitals in East Asia and Central and
Eastern Europe as well as colleagues in Washington for providing
the sobering insights on the disarranged state of global geopolitics
that gave us the understanding and urgency to write this book.

NOTE TO READERS
Two things have changed since we began writing this book. First,
the pace of the geopolitical dynamics that we set out to describe has
accelerated. Rising powers have become more aggressive, U.S. allies
have become more nervous, and the United States has found itself
confronted with crises in multiple regional theaters. Second, the risk
of war between revisionist powers and the United States and its
allies has become more real. The ingredients for a military
confrontation between great powers—an event that has not
occurred since the 1940s and that has been virtually unthinkable for
the past twenty-five years—now exist in the western Pacific and in
Central and Eastern Europe, and the conditions for a major regional
war are present in the Persian Gulf. From the vantage point of 2015,
the probing behavior on the part of America’s rivals as well as the
coping responses of frontline allies that are described in this book
have become less theoretical or futuristic. Our argument is
becoming a reality, and the speed and seriousness of events support
our thesis. While this is reassuring for us as authors, it is worrisome
for U.S. policy makers concerned with ensuring national security.
THE UNQUIET FRONTIER
 CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN POWER
AT THE GLOBAL FRONTIER

It is by the combined efforts of the weak, to resist the reign of force and
constant wrong, that in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred
years, liberty has been preserved and finally understood.
—Lord Acton

What is the value of allies at the outer frontier of American power?

Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has
maintained a network of alliances with vulnerable states situated
near the strategic crossroads, choke points, and arteries of the
world’s major regions. In East Asia, Washington has built formal and
informal security relationships with island and coastal states dotting
the Asian mainland: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, the
Philippines, as well as midsized offshore powers Japan and
Australia. In the Middle East, it has maintained a special
relationship with democratic ally Israel and security links with
moderate Arab states Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and
United Arab Emirates (UAE). And in East-Central Europe, in the
period since the Cold War, the United States has formed alliances
with the group of mostly small, post-communist states—Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria—that line the Baltic-to-Black-Sea corridor
between Germany and Russia.
Figure 1.1. U.S. frontier allies worldwide.

Despite their obvious geographic and political dissimilarities,

these three regional clusters of U.S. allies share a number of
important strategic characteristics (see figure 1.1). All are composed
of small and midsized powers (most have between five and fifty
million inhabitants and small landmass). Most are democracies and
free market economies deeply invested in the Bretton Woods global
economic and institutional framework. All, to a greater extent than
other U.S. allies, occupy strategically important global real estate
along three of the world’s most contested geopolitical fault lines.
Most sit near a maritime choke point or critical land corridor: the
Asian littoral routes (South China Sea, North China Sea, Sea of
Japan, Straits of Taiwan, Straits of Malacca); the Persian Gulf and
eastern Mediterranean; and the Baltic and Black Seas and space
connecting them that underpins the stability of the western Eurasian
littoral.
Perhaps most important from a twenty-first-century U.S.
strategic perspective, all these allies are located in close proximity
to larger, historically predatory powers—China, Iran, and Russia,
respectively—that are international competitors to the United States
and within whose respective spheres of influence they would likely
fall, should they lose some or all of their strategic independence.
None of these states is militarily powerful; with the important
exceptions of Japan and Israel, they lack a realistic prospect for
military self-sufficiency in any protracted crisis. As a result, all look
to the United States, either explicitly or implicitly, to act as the
ultimate guarantor of their national independence and security
provider of last resort.
The view has begun to take root in the United States that these
sprawling alliances are a liability—either because of the costs that
they impose through the necessity of maintaining a large military
and overseas bases or because of the perils of entrapment in
conflicts involving faraway disputes. Maintaining extensive,
expensive, and binding relationships with exposed and militarily
weak states located near large rivals, we are told, will cause more
problems than they are worth in the geopolitics of the twenty-first
century. Citing nineteenth-century Britain’s alleged aloofness to
foreign states, domestic critics of alliances counsel Washington to
spurn continental commitments to small and needy allies. Echoing
Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, these critics warn that the
United States must avoid intervening in conflicts that aren’t “worth
the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,” whether that conflict
be in Estonia or in the South China Sea.
But these views are wrong—and dangerous. For the past sixty
years U.S. foreign policy has pursued exactly the opposite course,
and for good reason. The United States has deliberately cultivated
bilateral security linkages with small, otherwise defenseless states
strewn across the world’s most hotly contested regions, militarily
building them up and even providing overt guarantees to them. In
fact, it has often seemed to value these states precisely because of
their dangerous locations. During the Cold War America’s overriding
imperative of containing the Soviet Union lent geopolitical value to
relationships with even the weakest allies, which in turn utilized
U.S. support to strengthen regional bulwarks against the spread of
communist influence. In the unipolar landscape that followed, the
United States surprised many foreign policy analysts by not only not
dismantling this globe-circling alliance network (as would be
expected of a great power after winning a major war) but actually
expanding it through the recruitment of new allies from among the
former communist zone of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In
both structural environments, allies have been the “glue” of the
U.S.-led global order: in the Cold War by containing the Soviet
Union and in the post–Cold War period by sustaining the benefits of
stability and prosperity that the Cold War victory helped to create.
These alliances have not been cheap for America to maintain, in
either financial or strategic terms. To a greater extent than in
relationships with large, wealthy, insulated states like Britain,
Germany, or Australia, American patronage of frontier states like
Poland, Israel, and Taiwan entails potential strategic costs, insofar
as such states lie at the outer reaches of American power and
require recurrent demonstrations of physical support vis-à-vis
would-be aggressors. To underwrite the independence and security
of these states, the United States has for decades made available a
wide array of support that includes both “normal” alliance
mechanisms—formal or informal security guarantees, military
basing, coverage under the U.S. nuclear umbrella—as well as other
special forms of support targeted to the needs of these states, such
as military funding, troop exercises, forward naval deployments,
technology transfers, access to special U.S. weapons, and various
forms of economic, political, and military aid. In the diplomatic
realm, Washington has paid a kind of “sponsorship premium” for
these states, providing backing and support in the regional disputes
in which many inevitably find themselves embroiled. The more
exposed the ally, the higher this sponsorship premium is.
Not surprisingly, critics of an active U.S. foreign policy have
often complained about the expense and risk required for
maintaining these alliances.1 But despite this criticism, America’s
commitment to these states has remained steady for the better part
of seventy years, making it one of the most consistent tenets of
modern U.S. foreign policy. And in both strategic and economic
terms, it would be hard to argue that the United States has not
gotten a good return on this investment. By exerting a strong,
benign presence in formerly unstable regions, U.S. patronage of
alliances in East Asia, the Middle East, and East-Central Europe has
helped to contain and deter the ambitions of large rivals, suppress
regional conflicts, keep crucial trade routes open, and promote
democracy and rule of law in historic conflict zones. In East Asia,
the U.S. presence facilitated pathways of financial investment that
contributed to the creation of some of the world’s most dynamic
economies and major engines of global growth while guarding the
sea-lanes through which the majority of U.S.-bound energy supplies
and consumer goods pass. In East-Central Europe, U.S. efforts to
propel NATO and European Union (EU) expansion effectively
eliminated the geopolitical vacuum that had helped to generate the
conditions for three global wars in the twentieth century—two hot
and one cold. And in the Middle East, U.S. engagement has helped
to contain regional cycles of instability and prevent their spillover
into global energy markets and the American homeland. In both the
bipolar and unipolar international settings, allies have been
indispensable to maintaining the global order that has allowed for
the peace and prosperity of the “American” century.
Part of the reason U.S. patronage of states in these regions has
been so successful is that U.S. allies and potential challengers have
understood that it is unlikely to change suddenly, in large part
because of how deeply encoded in contemporary American strategic
thinking has been the support of small allies. Since the turn of the
twentieth century the United States has invested its strategic
resources in a combination of naval power and, after two world
wars, “defense in depth” through a presence in the Eurasian littorals
—what the mid-twentieth-century American strategist Nicholas
Spykman called the global “rimland” (see figure 1.2). This pattern of
forward engagement is not only the basis for American investment
in allies located in the three hinge-point regions, it is a central tenet
of U.S. foreign policy. Building on this foundation, America, though
primarily a maritime power like Britain, has avoided the island
dilemma of being perceived as fickle, retiring, and unreliable—in
short, of becoming a second “perfidious Albion.”

Figure 1.2. Spykman’s rimlands.

Source: Mark R. Polelle, Raising Cartographic Consciousness: The Social and Foreign
Policy Vision of Geopolitics in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
1999), 118.

But there are signs that America may be beginning to rethink its
approach to alliances. In recent years U.S. policy makers’ view of
the relative costs and benefits of maintaining far-flung small-ally
networks has begun to shift. The change is partly fueled by
adjustments in global geopolitics and the “rise” or resurgence of
revisionist states, many of which claim to have historic spheres of
influence that overlap with the regions where America’s alliance
obligations are highest and its strategic reach most constrained.
Another driver has been the changing U.S. economic landscape and
constraints on the U.S. defense budget, which call into question
whether the United States will continue to maintain the force
structures that have made its geographically widespread alliances
possible to begin with. Finally, and perhaps most important,
Washington appears to be deprioritizing many of its longest-
standing relationships with traditional allies in pursuit of grand
bargains with large-power rivals, if necessary over the heads of its
allies.
The net effect of these changes in the geopolitical, economic, and
political realms has been to challenge the central paradigm on
which the United States has based its strategy for managing global
alliances since the Second World War. What value do alliances hold
for America in the twenty-first century? Do the benefits of alliances
that led the United States to accumulate them during bipolarity and
unipolarity still apply under conditions of contested primacy? How
does a great power that has accumulated extensive small-power
security commitments maintain them when the geopolitical
landscape becomes more competitive? What do geopolitically
vulnerable allies like Israel, Poland, or Taiwan have to offer America
amid the rise of large powers? Is it still worth paying the economic
and strategic costs to provide for their security? If so, how should
the United States rank the importance of the weapons, bases, and
funding that sustain these alliances alongside other national security
priorities in an era of constricted budgets? Would the United States
be better off reducing its commitments to these states and
maintaining a freer hand in global politics, as critics claim?
These are the kinds of questions that are likely to confront
American diplomats and strategists with growing frequency—and
urgency—in the years ahead, as the shift from the post–Cold War
global order accelerates. Such questions are not new in the history
of international politics, but they are relatively unfamiliar to the
U.S. policy establishment, which has arguably not had to reexamine
the fundamentals of American grand strategy in many decades. In
recent years Washington has been slow to study the geopolitical
changes that are under way in the world and respond to them in a
strategic way. Increasingly the U.S. foreign policy agenda seems to
be driven by a combination of crisis management—Iran, Syria,
North Korea—and a political agenda that takes the basic contours of
the U.S.-led international system for granted and focuses on
achieving laudable but unrealistic and outright silly goals, such as
global nuclear disarmament. Both approaches tend to magnify the
apparent advantages of partnering with large powers on ad hoc
issues as the preferred template for U.S. foreign policy over the near
term while deferring for a later day bigger questions about how to
sustain U.S. leadership in the international order.
But American grand strategy cannot remain on autopilot forever
—geopolitics is forcing its way onto the agenda. Rivals and allies of
the United States alike perceive that changes are afoot in America’s
capabilities and comportment as a great power and are responding
purposefully to the opportunities and threats that these changes
present. This is partly driven by the hypothesis of American
“decline.” In many of the world’s capitals, it is taken as an article of
faith that the United States is slipping from its decades-long position
of global preeminence and that the long-standing U.S.-led
international system will eventually give way to a multipolar global
power configuration. It is also driven by the perception that,
declining or not, the United States is simply not interested in
maintaining the stability of frontier regions—that the alliances it
inherited from previous eras will be a net liability in an age of more
fluid geopolitical competition.
U.S. retrenchment from these regions creates a permissive
environment for rising or reassertive powers. All three of America’s
primary regional rivals—China, Iran, and Russia—possess
prospective spheres of influence that overlap with America’s
exposed strategic appendages in their respective regions. Should
China manage to co-opt or coerce the foreign policies of the small
littoral states surrounding it, Beijing would be able to alleviate
pressures on its lengthy maritime energy routes, shift strategic
attention to the second island chain, and focus more on landward
expansion. Similarly, should Russia, for all its economic
backwardness, manage to reinsert its influence into the belt of small
states along its western frontier, Moscow could consolidate its
commanding position in European energy security, regain access to
warm-water ports, and stymie NATO and EU influence east of
Germany. Should Iran manage to gain greater influence among its
small Arab neighbors, particularly those along the Persian Gulf
coastline, it would be able to enhance its ability to disrupt
international oil supplies.
In all three cases, America’s rivals stand to gain in potentially
significant ways from U.S. retrenchment. But these powers face a
dilemma. While they may sense that changes are under way in the
international system and even imagine enlarged opportunities to
revise the status quo, they don’t want to incur the potentially high
costs of a direct confrontation with the United States. Sensing an
opportunity, they want to revise the regional order, but they are
uncertain about the amount of geopolitical leeway they have and
therefore the degree of license they can take in safely challenging
the status quo. From the standpoint of these revisionist powers, the
United States may be in retreat, by choice or necessity, but it is
unclear by how much. And this makes it risky to pick a direct fight.
Even in the era of sequestration, America retains many hegemonic
capabilities and characteristics—including the forward-deployed
system of alliances and security commitments that America
continues to maintain in their own neighborhoods—that present real
obstacles to aspirant powers.
Rising powers therefore have an incentive to look for low-cost
revision—marginal gains that offer the highest possible geopolitical
payoff at the lowest possible strategic price. That means not moving
more aggressively or earlier than power realities will allow. And
that, in turn, requires getting an accurate read of global power
relationships. How deep is the top state’s power reservoir? How
spendable are its power assets? How determined is it to use them to
stay on top? And how committed is it to defending stated interests
on issues and areas that conflict with the riser? Would-be powers
need to understand the likely answers to these questions before they
act.
Historically, rising powers faced with this dilemma have found
creative ways to gauge how far they can go in a fluid international
system before encountering determined resistance of the leading
power. One way would-be revisionists have done so historically is to
employ a strategy of what might be called “probing”—that is, using
low-intensity tests of the leading power on the outer limits of its
strategic position. The purpose is both to assess the hegemon’s
willingness and ability to defend the status quo and to accomplish
gradual territorial or reputational gains at the expense of the leading
power if possible. These probes are conducted not where the
hegemon is strong but at the outer limits of its power position,
where its commitments are established (and potentially extensive)
but require the greatest exertion to maintain. Here, at the periphery,
the costs of probing are more manageable than those of confronting
the hegemon directly, which could generate a strong response by
the leader.
Probing, though not widely studied, is the natural strategy for
many revisionist powers. This was the technique a rising imperial
Germany used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
as it concocted low-intensity diplomatic crises to test British resolve
and alliances in various regions. There is growing evidence to
suggest that the rising and resurgent powers of the twenty-first
century are using this same strategy. The Russo-Georgia War (2008),
the Hormuz Straits crisis (2012), the Senkaku Islands dispute
(2013), the Ukrainian War (2014–present), the Baltic Sea air and
naval tensions (2015), and the Spratly Islands confrontations (2015)
are all examples of an increasingly frequent category of strategic
behavior by revisionist powers to assess U.S. strength and level of
commitment to defending the global security order. Although the
exact nature of the tools involved in these crises may differ, the
basic principle is the same: to avoid high-stakes challenges to
America itself while conducting low-intensity reconnoitering of
remote positions on the U.S. strategic map.
U.S. allies find themselves on the receiving end of these probes.
Owing to their exposed geography, allies in frontier regions like
Central Europe, littoral East Asia, and the Persian Gulf are some of
the most security-conscious states in the world. Leaders there
analyze local and global power shifts for signs of changing threat
possibilities. Their first instinct is to look to America for
reassurance, in keeping with the long-standing assumption of U.S.
strategic support that has been the fail-safe centerpiece of their
foreign policies for decades. But faced with the combination of
mounting pressure from rising neighbors and growing indications of
decreased political support from Washington, these states have
begun to reexamine the full range of coping mechanisms available
to states in their exposed positions. For the first time in decades they
are contemplating new strategic menu cards in the quest for
backups to, alternatives to, or possibly even eventual replacements
for their decades-long security links with Washington. Like small
states at previous moments of uncertainty in the history of
international relations, they are exploring a variety of options, from
military self-help and regional security groupings to so-called
Finlandization and even bandwagoning with the nearby rising
power.
Though still in its early phases, this emerging trend of allied
reassessment and repositioning holds profound implications for
long-term U.S. national security interests. Together the cycles of
revisionist probing and allied anxiety could fundamentally alter the
security dynamics of global geopolitics, undermining factors of
stability that have provided for the peace and prosperity of the
world’s most strategically vital regions, to the benefit of the United
States and the world, since the Second World War. Such stability has
not been the norm for most of these regions’ histories. While a
continuation of current trends would not necessarily bring an
overnight deterioration in global stability (though that is certainly
possible), it would impose steep costs on U.S. interests and values
down the road, bringing reactivated regional security dilemmas that
could ultimately drive up the costs of U.S. diplomacy; a more fragile
global alliance system, fueling the need for U.S. reassurance in
multiple places and stretching U.S. attention and resources; less
support for U.S. missions, as allies that are worried about their own
security devote less energy or will to help the United States in
international missions; and, most dangerously, emboldened
revisionist powers, fueled by the sense of uncertainty in frontier
regions to accelerate probes of the allied periphery in hopes of low-
cost gains.
This is not a world the United States should want to see emerge.
Yet in many ways it is a world that current U.S. policy is helping to
create.

***
In 2010 we began to write about the emerging changes that are
under way in America’s allied frontier in a series of opinion pieces
and analytical briefs for the Center for European Policy Analysis. In
a spring 2011 article for The American Interest magazine, we
described the growing tendency toward allied insecurity, revisionist
probing, and the linkages between these dynamics as nascent
phenomena, capable of being addressed if dealt with creatively and
aggressively by U.S. policy. We continued developing this line of
thinking, including elaborations of the methods of our rivals and
possible counter-strategies for the United States and its allies, in
subsequent articles for The American Interest and The National
Interest. When we first wrote about these issues our arguments were
novel and somewhat controversial. In the period since, as signs of
the growing global disorder have increased, other scholars have
embraced our thesis.2 To further test our assumptions, we conducted
two years of additional research, visiting the capitals of key U.S.
allies in East-Central Europe and East Asia and talking with U.S. and
allied diplomats and military officers.
What we found was alarming. The dynamics of allied insecurity
and rival probing in frontier regions are intensifying. The American
alliance network is in a state of advanced crisis. Many long-standing
U.S. allies believe that the United States, for reasons of either
decline or disinterest, is in the process of pulling back from decades-
long commitments and inaugurating a multiregional diplomatic and
military retrenchment. In the three years since our first article was
published, a steady succession of U.S. actions—cancellations of
regionally deployed U.S. weapons systems, reductions in forward-
deployed U.S. combat units, lessening of U.S. diplomatic support for
traditional allies, participation in tacit bilateral bargaining with
large authoritarian states, a much-touted but under-resourced Asian
“pivot”—have seemed to confirm their suspicions.
Defenders of current U.S. foreign policy dispute that any one of
these decisions has harmed American credibility. But it is the
aggregate effect of the decisions, across regions and alongside U.S.
defense budget reductions, that has convinced many U.S. allies that
a downward shift in the strategic, political, and material
foundations of American power is now under way. These allies see
signs of advanced decay in the U.S. extended deterrence that
undergirds the stability of their regions. America’s rivals have taken
note of these things too. Leaders in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran are
increasingly cocky: they perceive the opening of a more permissive
environment, are convinced of the justness of their revisionist
ambitions, and believe in the inevitability of an eventual American
retrenchment from the regions that matter most to them. For these
players, even a seemingly decrepit Russia, confidence in their own
power potential is at an all-time high at exactly a moment when the
confidence of their small neighbors (and maybe even of America
itself) in U.S. power and credibility is at an all-time low. Perhaps as
a result, over the past year U.S. opponents have steadily ratcheted
up their probes, which in some cases—such as Russia in Ukraine—
have turned violent and in other cases—such as China in the South
China Sea—are coming perilously close to military confrontation.
We are at a dangerous moment in global geopolitics. The
international system that the United States has built and maintained
for the past several decades is still in place, but it is very fragile. For
the first time in the post–Cold War era, the continuation of this
system can no longer be taken for granted; virtually every element
in its foundation is increasingly in question. If current trends hold,
the U.S.-led global alliance network could unravel in coming years
through a combination of external pressure from opportunistic
powers convinced that America is in decline, internal pressures of
allies that are unconvinced America will still support them in a
crisis, and the failure of U.S. statecraft to prove both views wrong.
Such an unraveling could undo in a few years what it took America
three generations to build.
Should such an unraveling occur, it would have far-reaching
negative consequences for U.S. national security, the American
economy, and the wider world as we have known it for more than
half a century. Unfortunately, U.S. leaders do not appear to be fully
aware of this unfolding reality or the extent of its implications for
the United States. This void in U.S. strategic thinking reflects a lack
of understanding not only about the perceptions of America’s allies
and the intentions of its rivals but also about how U.S. moves are
interpreted competitively. Moreover, it reflects a general memory
loss about why the United States is involved in the world’s strategic
crossroad regions to begin with and the benefits we derive from
maintaining a robust presence in these places. Most of all, it reflects
a crisis of confidence in our own ideals and power potential at a
moment in world history when a diminished American global role
could fuel negative (and avoidable) geopolitical adjustments
worldwide. This void in both strategy and confidence must be filled
if America is to thrive and prosper in this emerging new world.
The purpose of this book is to make the strategic case for
America’s frontier alliances—why they matter, how we are losing
them, and what America needs to do to preserve them for a new era.
We argue that, far from a hindrance, America’s global networks of
frontline allies are essential elements in its success and prosperity as
a great power. If anything, the changes that are under way in the
international system, particularly the emergence of more assertive
rival powers to contest U.S. leadership, have enhanced the strategic
value of these alliances to the United States in the twenty-first
century.
In chapter 2 we track the deterioration that has occurred in the
foundations of America’s relations with many of its longest-standing
allies over the past few years, both through a weakening of the
political bonds with Washington and through diplomatic and
military probes at the hands of U.S. rivals.
In chapter 3 we examine the nature of revisionist probing and
the form that it takes in various regions. Drawing on historical
examples of imperial Germany’s use of low-intensity colonial crises
to challenge Britain and its allies in the early twentieth century, we
argue that rising powers are employing similar techniques in the
global periphery to test America’s resolve in the twenty-first
century.
In chapter 4 we examine how U.S. allies are responding to the
combination of probes and America’s deprioritization of alliances by
reconsidering their “menu cards” of options for surviving
geopolitical change. Using historical examples such as Central and
Eastern European states during the interwar period of the 1930s, we
argue that U.S. allies, to an extent largely overlooked in
Washington, are now considering a wide range of coping
mechanisms to prepare for the possibility of U.S. retrenchment and
examine the effects that their strategic choices could have over time.
In chapter 5 we assess the benefits of frontier alliances for the
United States both historically and today. Referring to earlier work
of strategists such as Sir Harold Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, and
Walter Lippmann, we argue that, for the United States as a maritime
power of global reach, using forward-deployed alliances in the
rimlands of Eurasia is a cost-effective tool for managing the
international system that is preferable to the strategic alternatives
now being presented for U.S. foreign policy.
In chapter 6 we conclude by reviewing the options at America’s
disposal for reversing the erosion of its frontier alliances and
countering the probes of its rivals to ensure stability in the early
decades of the twenty-first century. We offer recommendations for
how the United States can revitalize its credibility and capabilities
of itself and its allies in the world’s most critical regions.
 CHAPTER 2
AMERICA’S DEPRIORITIZATION OF
ALLIES

Assist your allies as you promised and do not sacrifice friends and kindred to
their bitterest enemies, and drive the rest of us in despair to some other
alliance.
—Corinthians’ speech at Sparta, Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will
succeed…. The traditional divisions between nations … make no sense in an
interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of
a long-gone Cold War.
—President Barack Obama, United Nations General Assembly, September 23,
2009

Great-power rivalries are first and foremost contests for allies. Since
the beginning of international relations, to upstage an opponent,
polities vied for the military and diplomatic support of others.
Strategic loneliness has always been deemed dangerous in a self-
help world. To have allies is no guarantee of victory, but to engage
in strategic rivalry alone can be a deadly disadvantage. As
Thucydides recounts, before their direct clash Athens and Sparta
were jockeying to show support to their allies and to attract to their
side new ones in search of strategic advantage. The contest for states
located at the frontier between the competing great powers was
particularly heated because it is there that conflicts take shape.
In recent years the United States has been tempted to ignore the
historic need for strong alliances, especially those with the most
exposed states at the periphery of our power. Washington often
seems to think of great-power rivalries as dyadic affairs, with the
other states as dispensable accessories rather than as the strategic
prizes. This is nothing new. For millennia states have viewed fixed
commitments of friendship with other states as a mixed blessing, to
be accumulated or discarded as changes in the external environment
dictate. Not surprisingly, leaders have tended to see alliances,
particularly those involving binding treaty obligations, as beneficial
in times of war but of questionable value in seasons of peace. This
has been especially the case for maritime great powers, whose
relative geographic insulation makes the strategic imperative of
maintaining alliances seem less pressing and their costs more
onerous, until the emergence of a threat renders them essential—by
which point willing and capable allies are often hard to find. Hence
Great Britain famously allowed its various continental alliances
during the European dynastic struggles of the eighteenth century to
lapse, only to hastily cobble together new coalitions for each new
conflict—a pattern that held constant in British foreign policy, with
few interruptions, until the early twentieth century.
It is certainly not the case that the United States is somehow ill
suited for alliances. On the contrary, the democratic nature of the
United States, combined with geographic separation from the world,
give it structural advantages in establishing and maintaining
alliances; there is no better friend, no worse enemy, than the United
States. But in our policies there is often an underlying strand of
doubt about the necessity and importance of allies, and at times,
like the present day, this doubt becomes more prominent.
On closer examination, there are deeply rooted sources of the
American temptation to deprioritize alliances. Geography,
technology, and ideology tempt us to think that we do not need
allies to compete effectively in global geopolitics. In addition, in
recent years domestic political pressures have emerged that generate
doubts about U.S. overseas commitments. The Obama
administration’s rhetoric and actions—partly a reflection of these
pressures—have been perceived, correctly in our view, as
downgrading the importance of allies.

THE THREE TEMPTATIONS

America’s deprioritization of alliances antedates the Obama
administration. In fact, there is a recurrent American temptation to
avoid alliances, rooted in the sense of safety that stems from
geographic distance, technological superiority, and ideological
conviction. These factors give the United States the luxury of
strategic choice, a blessing that distinguishes it from small and
midsized powers for whom territorial security is of ten the only
concern and goal. The United States can choose, or so it is argued,
between widely different foreign policy objectives, ranging from
humanitarian interventions to preventive wars in distant lands.
Moreover, this strategic luxury seems to carry also a spectrum of
choices of how to pursue these objectives, from backing our allies
with “boots on the ground” to “coming home” militarily and
diplomatically. The luxury of choice is, however, also a curse
because it introduces doubt about the reliability of the United States
as an ally; the wider the spectrum of possible strategic options, the
greater the perception of untrustworthiness. The same reasons that
tempt the United States to disengage from distant allies generate in
U.S. allies the suspicion of a weaker American commitment.
At various moments in history different mixes of these three
broad drivers, namely, geography, technology, and ideology, enter
the grand strategy debate, pushing the argument of alliance
deprioritization. The outcome is that the strategic necessity of
transoceanic commitments is discounted and the costs of keeping
the most vulnerable frontier allies secure are deemed higher than
the potential benefits.

Geography
The most enduring source of temptation is geography. A uniquely
fortunate geographic condition of the North American continent,
abundant in natural resources and lacking the competitive political
environment of Europe and Asia, sets the United States apart from
other great powers. The safety of the oceanic moats separating
North America from Eurasia provided the young American republic
with some respite from European tribulations in the late eighteenth
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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 LETTER LII.
Blasphemous Conclusion of Mainauduc's Lectures.—The Effects
which he produced explained.—Disappearance of the Imposture.
The conclusion of the extraordinary book from whence I have
condensed the summary of this prodigious quackery, is even more
extraordinary and more daring than the quackery itself. It may be
transcribed without offence to religion, for every catholic will regard
its atrocious impiety with due abhorrence.
"I flatter myself," says this man at the close of his lectures, "you
are now convinced that this science is of too exalted a nature to be
trifled with or despised; and I fondly hope that even the superficial
specimen which you have thus far received has given you room to
suppose it, not a human device, held out for the sportive
gratification of the idle moment, but a divine call from the
affectionate creating Parent, inviting his rebellious children by every
persuasive, by every tender motive, to renounce the destructive
allurements of earthly influence, and to perform the duties which he
sent his beloved Son into the world to inculcate, as the only and
effectual conditions on which the deluded spirit in man should
escape future punishment. The apostles received and accepted of
those terms; disciples out of number embraced the doctrine, and by
example, by discourse, and by cures, influenced the minds of the
unthinking multitude, absorbed in sin, and rioting in obstinate
disobedience.—Again, the Almighty Father deigns to rouse his
children from that indifference to their impending fate, into which
the watchful enemy omits no opportunity of enticing them. To lead
our Saviour from his duty, the tempter showed and offered him all
this world's grandeur;—so he daily in some degree does to us. Our
Saviour spurned him with contempt, and so must we. Our blessed
Saviour, whose spirit was a stranger to sin, cured by perfect spiritual
and physical innocence, and by an uninterrupted dependence on his
Great, Omnipotent, Spiritual Father. He never failed. His chosen
apostles cured by relinquishing this world and following him. We
have but one example, that I can recollect, of their having failed,
and then Christ told them what was necessary to ensure success.
The disciples and the followers of the apostles performed many
cures, but how far they were checquered by failures I am not
informed. Paracelsus, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Robert Fludd, and several
others, experienced sufficient power in themselves to verify the
words of our Saviour; but were soon deprived of what was only lent
to urge them to seek for the great original cause. "Verily, verily," said
Christ, "the works which I do shall ye do also; and greater works
than these shall ye do, for I go unto my father." Valentine
Greatrakes, by obeying the instructions imparted to him in visions,
performed many cures; but ceasing to look up to the source, and
giving way to medical importunity, he administered drugs, and could
not expect success. Gasner, a moral and religious man, performed
many cures; he was shut up in a convent, through the ignorance of
his superiors, and the superstitious blindness of the age he lived in;
thence his progress was trivial, though his dawnings seemed to
promise much. Mesmer pillaged the subject from Sir Robert Fludd,
and found to a certainty the existence of the power: undisposed to
attend to our Saviour's information, he preferred loadstones and
magnetic ideas to the service of the Great Author; and after
performing several accidental cures, his magnetism and his errors
shared the fate of his predecessors. Doctor D'Eslon, his partner,
though a man of strong reason and impartiality, ascribed the power
which he experienced to the physical will of man; and after
performing some cures, he fell asleep. At length, after so many
centuries of ignorance, it has graciously pleased the Almighty Father
to draw aside the veil, and disclose his sacred mysteries to this
favoured generation. And when I shall be called home, it will, I
hope, appear, that for a bright and happy certainty of serving my
God, and living with my Saviour, I pointed out to you, my brethren,
the Almighty's real science, and that path to Heaven, which Christ,
the only perfect and successful one of this list, left to mankind, as
his last testament, and inestimable dying gift."[19]
This portentous blasphemy shows to what excess any kind of
impiety may be carried on in this country, provided it does not
appear as a direct attack upon religion. So infamous an impostor
would in our country quickly have been silenced by the Holy Office,
or, to speak more truly, the salutary dread of the Holy Office would
have restrained him within decent bounds. Was he pure rogue
undiluted with any mixture of enthusiasm, or did he, contrary to the
ordinary process, begin in rogue, and end in enthusiast?
It is a common observation, that a man may tell a story of his own
invention so often that he verily believes it himself at last. There is
more than this in the present case. Mainauduc pretended to possess
an extraordinary power over the bodily functions of others: it was
easy to hire patients at first who would act as he prescribed, and
much was to be expected afterwards from credulity; but that it
should prove that he actually did possess this power in as great a
degree as he ever pretended, over persons not in collusion with him,
nor prepared to be affected by their previous belief, but
unprejudiced, incredulous, reasonable people, philosophical
observers who went to examine and detect the imposition, in sound
health of body and mind, was more than he expected, and perhaps
more than he could explain. This actually was the case; they who
went to hear him with a firm and rational disbelief, expecting to be
amused by the folly of his patients, were themselves thrown into
what is called the crisis: his steady looks and continued
gesticulations arrested their attention, made them dizzy, deranged
the ordinary functions of the system, and fairly deprived them for a
time of all voluntary power, and all perception.
How dangerous a power this was, and to what detestable
purposes it might be applied, need not be explained. The solution is
easy and convincing, but it by no means follows that he himself
comprehended it. If we direct our attention to the involuntary
operations of life within us, they are immediately deranged. Think
for a minute upon the palpitation of the heart, endeavour to feel the
peristaltic motion, or breathe by an act of volition, and you disturb
those actions which the life within us carries on unerringly, and as
far as we can perceive unconsciously. Any person may make the
experiment, and satisfy himself. The animal magnetists kept up this
unnatural state of attention long enough by their treatment to
produce a suspension of these involuntary motions, and consequent
insensibility.
In a country like this, where the government has no discretionary
power of interfering, to punish villany, and of course where
whosoever can invent a new roguery may practise it with impunity,
till a new law be made to render it criminal, Mainauduc might have
gone on triumphantly, and have made himself the head of a sect, or
even a religion, had the times been favourable. But politics
interfered, and took off the attention of all the wilder and busier
spirits. He died, and left a woman to succeed him in the chair. The
female caliph either wanted ability to keep the believers together, or
having made a fortune thought it best to retire from trade. So the
school was broken up. Happily for some of the disciples, who could
not exist without a constant supply of new miracles to feed their
credulity, Richard Brothers appeared, who laid higher claims than
Mainauduc, and promised more wonderful things. But of him
hereafter.

[19] The translator thought the daring impiety of this whole

extract so truly extraordinary, that he determined to seek for it
in the original work, instead of re-translating it from D.
Manuel's Spanish. With much difficulty he succeeded in finding
the book: it is a large thin quarto volume, printed in 1798, with
a portrait of Mainauduc from a picture by Cosway. From this the
technical language of the summary has been corrected, and
the exact words of this extract copied, so that the reader may
rely upon their perfect accuracy.—Tr.
 LETTER LIII.
Methodists.—Wesley and Whitfield.—Different Methods of attacking
the Establishment.—Tithes.—Methodism approaches Popery, and
paves the Way for it.—William Huntingdon, S. S.
In the year 1729 a great rent was made in the ragged robe of
heresy. Wesley and Whitfield were the Luther and Calvin of this
schism, which will probably, at no very remote time, end in the
overthrow of the Established Heretical Church.
They began when young men at Oxford by collecting together a
few persons who were of serious dispositions like themselves,
meeting together in prayer, visiting the prisoners, and
communicating whenever the sacrament was administered. Both
took orders in the Establishment, and for awhile differed only from
their brethren by preaching with more zeal. But they soon outwent
them in heresy also, and began to preach of the inefficacy and
worthlessness of good works, and of the necessity of being born
again, a doctrine which they perverted into the wildest enthusiasm.
The new birth they affirmed was to take place instantaneously, and
to be accompanied with an assurance of salvation; but throes and
agonies worse than death were to precede it. The effect which they
produced by such a doctrine, being both men of burning fanaticism,
and of that kind of eloquence which suited their hearers, is
wonderful. They had no sooner convinced their believers of the
necessity of this new birth, than instances enough took place. The
people were seized with demoniacal convulsions; shrieks and yells
were set up by frantic women; men fell as if shot through the heart;
and after hours of such sufferings and contortions as required the
immediate aid either of the exorcist or the beadle, they became
assured that they were born again, and fully certain that their
redemption was now sealed.
 There may have been some trick in these exhibitions, but that in
the main there was no wilful deception is beyond a doubt. Duæ res,
says St Augustine, faciunt in homine omnia peccata, timor scilicet et
cupiditas: timor facit fugere omnia quæ sunt carni molesta; cupiditas
facit habere omnia quæ sunt carni suavia. These powerful passions
were excited in the most powerful degree. They terrified their
hearers as children are terrified by tales of apparitions, and the
difference of effect was according to the difference of the dose, just
as the drunkenness produced by brandy is more furious than that
which is produced by wine. All those affections which are half-
mental, half-bodily, are contagious;—yawning, for instance, is
always, and laughter frequently so. When one person was thus
violently affected, it was like jarring a string in a room full of musical
instruments. The history of all opinions evinces that there are
epidemics of the mind.
Such scenes could not be tolerated in the churches. They then
took to the streets and fields, to the utter astonishment of the
English clergy, who in their ignorance cried out against this as a
novelty. Had these men, happily for themselves, been born in a
catholic country, it is most probable that they might indeed have
been burning and shining lights. Their zeal, their talents, and their
intrepid and indefatigable ardour, might have made them saints
instead of heresiarchs, had they submitted themselves to the
unerring rule of faith, instead of blindly trusting to their own
perverted judgments. It was of such men, and of such errors, that
St Leo the Great said: In hanc insipientiam cadunt, qui cum ad
cognoscendam veritatem aliquo impediuntur obscuro, non ad
Propheticas voces, non ad Apostolicas literas, nec ad Evangelicas
auctoritates, sed ad semetipsos recurrunt; sed ideo magistri erroris
existunt, quia veritatis discipuli non fuere.
Thousands and tens of thousands flocked to hear them; and the
more they were opposed the more rapidly their converts increased.
Riots were raised against them in many places, which were
frequently abetted by the magistrates. There is a good anecdote
recorded of the mayor of Tiverton, who was advised to follow
Gamaliel's advice, and leave the Methodists (as they are called) and
their religion to themselves. "What, sir!" said he: "Why, what reason
can there be for any new religion in Tiverton? another way of going
to Heaven when there are so many already? Why, sir, there's the Old
Church and the New Church, that's one religion; there's Parson
Kiddell's at the Pitt Meeting, that's two; Parson Westcott's in Peter
Street, that's three; and old Parson Terry's in Newport Street, is four.
—Four ways of going to Heaven already!—and if they won't go to
Heaven by one or other of these ways, by —— they sha'n't go to
Heaven at all from Tiverton, while I am mayor of the town."—The
outrages of the mob became at length so violent that the sufferers
appealed to the laws for protection, and from that time they have
remained unmolested.
The two leaders did not long agree. Wesley had deliberately
asserted, that no good works can be done before justification, none
which have not in them the nature of sin,—the abominable doctrine
which the Bonzes of Japan preach in honour of their deity Amida!
Whitfield added to this the predestinarian heresy, at once the most
absurd and most blasphemous that ever human presumption has
devised. The Methodists divided under these leaders into the two
parties of Arminians and Calvinists. Both parties protested against
separating from the Church, though they were excluded from the
churches. Wesley however, who was the more ambitious of the two,
succeeded in establishing a new church government, of which he
was the heretical pope. There was no difficulty in obtaining
assistants; he admitted lay preachers, and latterly administered
ordination himself. The œconomy of his church is well constructed.
He had felt how greatly the people are influenced by novelty, and
thus experimentally discovered one of the causes why the
Established clergy produced so little effect. His preachers, therefore,
are never to remain long in one place. A double purpose is answered
by this; a perpetual succession of preachers keeps up that stimulus
without which the people would relapse into conformity, and the
preachers themselves are prevented from obtaining in any place that
settled and rooted influence which would enable them to declare
themselves independent of Wesley's Connection (as the sect is
called), and open shop for themselves. An hundred of these
itinerants compose the Conference, which is an annual assembly, the
cortes or council of these heretics, or, like our national councils, both
in one; wherein the state of their numbers and funds is reported and
examined, stations appointed for the preachers, and all the affairs of
the society regulated. The authority of the preachers is strengthened
by the system of confession,—confession without absolution, and so
perverted as to be truly mischievous. Every parish is divided into
small classes, in which the sexes are separated, and also the married
and the single. The members of each class are mutually to confess
to and question each other, and all are to confess to the priest, to
whom also the leader of each class is to report the state of each
individual's conscience. The leader also receives the contributions,
which he delivers to the stewards. The whole kingdom is divided into
districts, to each of which there is an assistant or bishop appointed,
who oversees all the congregations within his limits; and thus the
conference, which is composed of these assistants and preachers,
possesses a more intimate knowledge of all persons under their
influence than ever was yet effected by any system of police, how
rigorous soever.
While Wesley lived his authority was unlimited. He resolutely
asserted it, and the right was acknowledged. It was supposed that
his death would lead to the dissolution of the body, or at least a
schism; but it produced no change. The absolute empire which he
had exercised passed at once into a republic, or rather oligarchy of
preachers, without struggle or difficulty, and their numbers have
continued to increase with yearly accelerating rapidity. He lived to
the great age of eighty-eight, for more than fifty years of which he
had risen at four o'clock, preached twice and sometimes thrice a
day, and travelled between four and five thousand miles every year,
being seldom or never a week in the same place; and yet he found
leisure to be one of the most voluminous writers in the language.
The body lay in state for several days,—in his gown and band in the
coffin, where it was visited by forty or fifty thousand persons,
constables attending to maintain order. It was buried before break of
day, to prevent the accidents which undoubtedly would else have
taken place. For many weeks afterward a curious scene was
exhibited at his different chapels, where the books of the society are
always sold. One was crying "The true and genuine life of Mr
Wesley!" another bawling against him, "This is the real life!" and a
third vociferating to the people to beware of spurious accounts, and
buy the authentic one from him.
Wesley had no wish to separate from the Establishment, and for
many years he and his preachers opened their meeting-houses only
at hours when there was no service in the churches. This is no
longer the case, and the two parties are now at open war. The
Methodists gain ground; their preachers are indefatigable in making
converts: but there is no instance of any person's becoming a
convert to the Establishment;—waifs and strays from other
communities fall into it, such as rich Presbyterians, who are tempted
by municipal honours, and young Quakers who forsake their sect
because they choose to dress in the fashion and frequent the
theatre; but no persons join it from conviction. The meeting-houses
fill by draining the churches, of which the Methodists will have no
scruple to take possession when they shall become the majority,
because they profess to hold the same tenets, and to have no
objection to the discipline.
The Whitfield party go a surer way to work. They assert that they
hold the articles of the Church of England, which the clergy
themselves do not; and therefore they cry out against the clergy as
apostates and interlopers. The truth is, that the articles of this
Church are Calvinistic, and that, heretical as the clergy are, they are
not so heretical as they would be if they adhered to them. The
Whitfield Methodists, therefore, aim, step by step, at supplanting the
Church. They have funds for educating hopeful subjects and
purchasing church-livings for them, simony being practised with little
or no disguise in this country, where every thing has its price. Thus
have they introduced a clamorous and active party into the Church,
who, under the self-assumed title of Evangelical or Gospel Preachers,
cry out for reform—for the letter of the articles—and are preparing
to eject their supiner colleagues. In parishes where these
conforming Calvinists have not got possession of the church, they
have their meetings, and they have also their county rovers, who
itinerate like their Wesley-brethren. The Calvinistic dissenters are
gradually incorporating with them, and will in a few generations
disappear.
The rapidity with which both these bodies continue to increase
may well alarm the regular clergy; but they having been panic-struck
by the French Revolution and Dr Priestley, think of nothing but
Atheists and Socinians, and are insensible of the danger arising from
this domestic enemy. The Methodists have this also in their favour,
that while the end at which they are aiming is not seen, the
immediate reformation which they produce is manifest. They do,
what the Clergy are equally pledged to do, but neglect doing;—they
keep a watchful eye over the morals of their adherents, and
introduce habits of sobriety, order, and honesty. The present good,
which is very great, is felt by those who do not perceive that these
people lay claim to infallibility, and that intolerance is inseparable
from that awful attribute which they have usurped.
The Establishment is in danger from another cause. For many
years past the farmers have murmured at the payment of tithes;—a
sin of old times, which has been greatly aggravated by the
consequences of the national schism: since the gentry have turned
farmers these murmurs have become louder, and associations have
been formed for procuring the abolishment of tithes, on the ground
that they impede agricultural improvements. Government has lent
ear to these representations, and it is by no means improbable that
it will one day avail itself of this pretext, to sell the tithes, as the
land-tax has already been sold, and fund the money;—that is, make
use of it for its own exigencies, and give the clergy salaries,—thus
reducing them to be pensioners of the state. The right of assembling
in a house of their own they have suffered to lapse; and they have
suffered also without a struggle, a law to be passed declaring them
incapable of sitting in the House of Commons;—which law was
enacted merely for the sake of excluding an obnoxious individual.
There will, therefore, be none but the bishops to defend their rights,
—but the bishops look up to the crown for promotion. If such a
measure be once proposed, the Dissenters will petition in its favour,
and the farmers will all rejoice in it, forgetting that if the tenth is not
paid to the priest it must to the landholder, whom they know by
experience to be the more rigid collector of the two. When the
constitutional foundations of the church are thus shaken, the
Methodists, who have already a party in the legislature, will come
forward, and offer a national church at a cheaper rate, which they
will say is the true Church of England, because it adheres to the
letter of the canons. I know not what is to save the heretical
establishment, unless government should remember that when the
catholic religion was pulled down, it brought down the throne in its
fall.
It is not the nature of man to be irreligious; he listens eagerly to
those who promise to lead him to salvation, and welcomes those
who come in the name of the Lord with a warmth of faith, which
makes it the more lamentable that he should so often be deluded.
How then is it that the English clergy have so little hold upon the
affections of the people? Partly it must be their own fault, partly the
effect of that false system upon which they are established. Religion
here has been divested both of its spirit and its substance—what is
left is neither soul nor body, but the spectral form of what once had
both, such as old chemists pretended to raise from the ashes of a
flower, or the church-yard apparitions, which Gaffarel explains by
this experiment. There is nothing here for the senses, nothing for
the imagination,—no visible object of adoration, at which piety shall
drink, as at a fountain of living waters. The church service here is
not a propitiatory sacrifice, and it is regarded with less reverence for
being in the vulgar tongue, being thereby deprived of all that
mysteriousness which is always connected with whatever is
unknown. When the resident priest is a man of zeal and
beneficence, his personal qualities counteract the deadening
tendency of the system; these qualities are not often found united; it
is true that sometimes they are found, and that then it is scarcely
possible to conceive a man more respected or more useful than an
English clergyman—(saving always his unhappy heresy)—but it is
also true that the clergy are more frequently inactive; that they think
more of receiving their dues than of discharging their duty; that the
rector is employed in secular business and secular amusements
instead of looking into the spiritual concerns of his flock, and that his
deputy the curate is too much upon a level with the poor to be
respected by them. The consequence is, that they are yielding to the
Methodists without a struggle, and that the Methodists are preparing
the way for the restoration of the true church. Beelzebub is casting
out Beelzebub. They are doing this in many ways: they have taught
the people the necessity of being certain of their own salvation, but
there is no certainty upon which the mind can rest except it be upon
the absolving power of an infallible church; they have reconciled
them to a belief that the age of miracles is not past,—no saint has
recorded so many of himself as Wesley; and they have broken them
in to the yoke of confession, which is what formerly so intolerably
galled their rebellious necks. Whatever, in fact, in methodism is
different from the established church, is to be found in the practices
of the true church; its pretensions to novelty are fallacious; it has
only revived what here, unhappily, had become obsolete, and has
worsened whatever it has altered. Hence it is that they make
converts among every people except the Catholics; which makes
them say, in their blindness, that atheism is better than popery, for
of an atheist there is hope, but a papist is irreclaimable:—that is,
they can overthrow the sandy foundations of human error, but not
the rock of truth. Our priests have not found them so invincible; a
nephew of Wesley himself, the son of his brother and colleague,
was, in his own life-time, reclaimed, and brought within the fold of
the Church.
Wesley was often accused of being a Jesuit;—would to Heaven the
imputation had been true! but his abominable opinions respecting
good works made a gulf between him and the church as wide as
that between Dives and Lazarus. Perhaps, if it had not been for this
accusation, he would have approached still nearer to it, and enjoined
celibacy to his preachers, instead of only recommending it.
The paroxysms and epilepsies of enthusiasm are now no longer
heard of among these people,—good proof that they were real in the
beginning of the sect. Occasionally an instance happens, and when it
begins the disease runs through the particular congregation; this is
called a great revival of religion in that place, but there it ends. Such
instances are rare, and groaning and sobbing supply the place of fits
and convulsions. I know a lady who was one day questioning a
beggar woman concerning her way of life, and the woman told her
she had been one of my lady's groaners, which she explained by
saying that she was hired at so much a week to attend at Lady
Huntingdon's chapel, and groan during the sermon. The countess of
Huntingdon was the great patroness of Whitfield, and his preachers
were usually called by her name,—which they have now dropt for
the better title of Evangelicals.
Notwithstanding the precautions which the Methodists have taken
to keep their preachers dependent upon the general body, the
standard of revolt is sometimes erected; and a successful rebel
establishes a little kingdom of his own. One of these independent
chieftains has published an account of himself, which he calls God
the Guardian of the Poor and the Bank of Faith. His name is William
Huntington, and he styles himself S. S. which signifies Sinner Saved.
The tale which this man tells is truly curious. He was originally a
coal-heaver, one of those men whose occupation and singular
appearance I have noticed in a former letter; but finding praying and
preaching a more promising trade, he ventured upon the experiment
of living by faith alone, and the experiment has answered. The man
had talents, and soon obtained hearers. It was easy to let them
know, without asking for either, that he relied upon them for food
and clothing. At first supplies came in slowly,—a pound of tea and a
pound of sugar at a time, and sometimes an old suit of clothes. As
he got more hearers they found out that it was for their credit he
should make a better appearance in the world. If at any time things
did not come when they were wanted, he prayed for them, knowing
well where his prayers would be heard. As a specimen, take a story
which I shall annex in his own words, that the original may prove
the truth of the translation, which might else not unreasonably be
suspected.
"Having now had my horse for some time, and riding a great deal
every week, I soon wore my breeches out, as they were not fit to
ride in. I hope the reader will excuse my mentioning the word
breeches, which I should have avoided, had not this passage of
scripture obtruded into my mind, just as I had resolved in my own
thoughts not to mention this kind providence of God. 'And thou shalt
make linen breeches to cover their nakedness; from the loins even
unto the thighs shall they reach,' &c. Exod. xxviii. 42, 43. By which
and three others, (namely, Ezek. xliv. 18; Lev. vi. 10; and Lev. xvi.
4.) I saw that it was no crime to mention the word breeches, nor the
way in which God sent them to me; Aaron and his sons being
clothed entirely by Providence; and as God himself condescended to
give orders what they should be made of, and how they should be
cut, and I believe the same God ordered mine, as I trust it will
appear in the following history.
"The scripture tells us to call no man master, for one is our master,
even Christ. I therefore told my most bountiful and ever-adored
master what I wanted; and he, who stripped Adam and Eve of their
fig-leaved aprons, and made coats of skins and clothed them; and
who clothes the grass of the field, which to-day is, and tomorrow is
cast into the oven; must clothe us, or we shall soon go naked; and
so Israel found it when God took away his wool, and his flax, which
they prepared for Baal: for which iniquity was their skirts discovered,
and their heels made bare. Jer. xiii. 22.
"I often made very free in my prayers with my valuable Master for
this favour, but he still kept me so amazingly poor that I could not
get them at any rate. At last I was determined to go to a friend of
mine at Kingston, who is of that branch of business, to bespeak a
pair; and to get him to trust me until my Master sent me money to
pay him. I was that day going to London, fully determined to
bespeak them as I rode through the town. However, when I passed
the shop I forgot it; but when I came to London I called on Mr
Croucher, a shoemaker in Shepherd's Market, who told me a parcel
was left there for me, but what it was he knew not. I opened it, and
behold there was a pair of leather breeches with a note in them! the
substance of which was, to the best of my remembrance, as follows:

"'sir,
"'I have sent you a pair of breeches, and hope they will fit. I beg
your acceptance of them; and, if they want any alteration, leave in a
note what the alteration is, and I will call in a few days and alter
them.
'J. S.'

"'I tried them on, and they fitted as well as if I had been
measured for them: at which I was amazed, having never been
measured by any leather-breeches maker in London. I wrote an
answer to the note to this effect:

"'sir,
"'I received your present, and thank you for it. I was going to
order a pair of leather breeches to be made, because I did not know
till now that my Master had bespoke them of you. They fit very well;
which fully convinces me that the same God, who moved thy heart
to give, guided thy hand to cut; because he perfectly knows my size,
having clothed me in a miraculous manner for near five years. When
you are in trouble, sir, I hope you will tell my Master of this, and
what you have done for me, and he will repay you with honour.'
"This is as nearly as I am able to relate it; and I added:
"'I cannot make out I. S. unless I put I. for Israelite indeed, and S.
for Sincerity; because you did not 'sound a trumpet before you, as
the hypocrites do.'
 "About that time twelvemonth I got another pair of breeches in
the same extraordinary manner, without my ever being measured for
them."
Step by step, by drawing on his Master, as he calls him, and
persuading the congregation to accept his draft, this Sinner Saved
has got two chapels of his own, a house in the country, and a coach
to carry him backwards and forwards.
My curiosity was greatly excited to see the author of this book,
which is not only curious for the matter which it contains, but is also
written with much unaffected originality. I went accordingly to
Providence Chapel. It has three galleries, built one above another
like a theatre; for, when he wanted to enlarge it, an exorbitant
ground-rent was demanded: "So," says the doctor, as he calls
himself, "the heavens, even the heavens, are the Lord's; but the
earth hath he given to the children of men. —Finding nothing could
be done with the earth-holders, I turned my eyes another way, and
determined to build my stories in the heaven (Amos ix. 6.), where I
should find more room, and less rent." The place, however,
notwithstanding its great height, was so crowded, that I could with
difficulty find standing room in the door-way. The doctor was
throned on high in the middle of the chapel,—in a higher pulpit than
I have ever seen elsewhere: he is a fat, little-eyed man, with a dew-
lap at his chin, and a velvet voice; who, instead of straining himself
by speaking loud, enforces what he says more easily by a significant
nod of the head. St Jerome has almost prophetically described him,
—ante nudo eras pede, modo non solum calceato, sed et ornato:
tunc pexâ tunicâ, et nigrâ subuculâ vestiebaris sordidatus, et
pallidus, et callosam opere gestitans manum, nunc lineis et sericis
vestibus, et Atrabatum et Laodiceæ indumentis ornatus incedis;
rubent buccæ, nitet cutis, comæ in occipitium frontemque tornantur,
protensus est aqualiculus, insurgunt humeri, turget guttur, et de
obesis faucibus vix suffocata verba promuntur. His congregation
looked as if they were already so near the fire and brimstone, that
the fumes had coloured their complexions. They had as distinct a
physiognomy as the Jews, with a dismal expression of spiritual pride
in it, as if they firmly believed in the reprobation of every body
except themselves.
It would be rash, and probably unjust, to call this man a rogue. He
may fancy himself to be really divinely favoured, because, like Elijah,
he is fed by ravens,—not remembering that his ravens are tame
ones, whom he has trained to bring him food. The success of his
own pretensions may make him believe them. Thus it is: the poor
solitary madman who calls himself Ambassador from the Man in the
Moon, is confined as a madman, because he can persuade nobody
to believe him;—but he who calls himself Ambassador from the Lord
is credited, and suffered to go at large; the moment that madness
becomes contagious it is safe!
Huntington's success has occasioned imitators, one of whom, who
had formerly been a drover of cattle, insisted upon having a carriage
also; he obtained it, and in imitation of the S. S. placed upon it A. J.
C. for Ambassador of Jesus Christ! Then he called upon his
congregation for horses, and now threatens to leave them because
they are so unreasonable as to demur at finding corn for them. The
proof, he says, of their being true Christians is their readiness to
support the preachers of the Gospel. Another of these fellows told
his congregation one day after service, that he wanted 300l. for the
work of the Lord, and must have it directly. They subscribed what
money they had about them, and some would then have gone home
for more;—he said No, that would not do; he wanted it immediately,
and they must go into the vestry and give checks upon their hankers
—which they obediently did.—And the English call us a priest-ridden
people!
Morality, says one of these faith-preachers—is the great Antichrist.
There are two roads to the devil, which are equally sure; the one is
by profaneness, the other by good works; and the devil likes the
latter way best, because people expect to be saved by it, and so are
taken in.—You will smile at all this, and say
Que quien sigue locos en loco se muda,
Segun que lo dize el viejo refran:[20]
but you will also groan in spirit over this poor deluded country, once
so fruitful in saints and martyrs.

[20] That he who follows madmen becomes mad himself, as

the old proverb says.—Tr.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

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