With populism running wild in Europe and in the United States – the Brexit and American presidential candidate Donald Trump questioning U.S. alliances being just two obvious examples – suddenly people are asking the big questions about the future of Western institutions that should have been asked after the Cold War ended. Both the Brexit and Donald Trump seem to be driven by a nativist element, but that doesn't diminish the value of the implicit questions that they are posing. Americans should listen to Donald Trump, while examining the Brexit, and ask themselves if the United States shouldn't withdraw from NATO and other military alliances.

Of course, such a US withdrawal would be much more consequential for NATO and other US alliances than is the Brexit for the European Union. Britain is not even the largest economy in the EU. The United States accounts for three-quarters of the defense spending of NATO countries, and it is very unlikely that those allies – all much closer to zones of conflict than is the United States – will be defending the superpower rather than vice versa. Since World War II, the United States has provided security, formally or informally, for an ever-widening number of ever more prosperous nations in Europe and East Asia, but has gotten few commercial or other considerations in return. Many of these nations or blocs have not ever fully opened their markets to US trade, finance, and investment.

Such one-sided alliances were justified by American elites and the foreign beneficiaries of such security welfare as being in the American interest too. Really?

George Washington, who preferred neutrality as a foreign policy, warned against the United States forming "permanent alliances," and Thomas Jefferson cautioned against getting bogged down in "entangling alliances." In fact, Jefferson wrote 1799, "I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe…"

But times have changed right? Rapid advances in communication and transportation have led to a more interdependent world, which compels the United States, as an exceptional nation in world history, to monitor disturbances in faraway and even insignificant places, so that they don't snowball into larger threats – for example, the rise of another Adolf Hitler to threaten Europe. Thus, shouldn't the views of America's founders on foreign policy go the way of the powdered wig?