For the past 75 years, the United States has pursued a historically anomalous strategy toward alliances. Traditionally, alliances were forged as highly contingent, time-bound partnerships, but after World War II, the United States went about establishing permanent ones, including NATO and bilateral alliances such as those with South Korea and Thailand. This practice had some use during the Cold War, because it consolidated U.S. dominance on its side of the Iron Curtain. But after the Soviet