The case for small, agile allies: Strategic realism for a paradigm of distributed deterrence.
There is a compelling and underappreciated case for prioritising smaller, agile partners within the architecture of American alliances. The pull toward large, economically powerful partners is understandable. They reduce per-unit costs of collective defence, consolidate decision-making, and project weight. But size, as the primary variable in alliance selection, misses something. Smaller allies routinely provide advantages that larger partners cannot, do not or will not, and Washington has been slow to account for this despite its undeniable success in forming those partnerships.
Alliance management carries fixed costs. Coordinating with each additional partner requires diplomatic investment, interoperability efforts, intelligence sharing arrangements, and ongoing political maintenance. A principal power that manages relationships with a smaller number of significant allies can concentrate these investments more efficiently and can also perform more effective conflict management within the alliance. The more productive question is not how many allies the United States maintains, but what each one actually contributes relative to the costs of managing the relationship. Smaller allies, when well-chosen, routinely punch above their weight and can become pivotal to regional and sectoral policies and architectures.
The structural case for agility
Smaller states that have made deliberate choices about their defence posture tend to offer three things that larger partners provide unevenly: specialised capabilities (including in regional and cultural competencies), political reliability, and genuine flexibility at the operational level.
Their defence establishments, precisely because they cannot afford to be comprehensive, may have developed deep competencies in particular domains. Estonia’s investments in cyber resilience, Romania’s ongoing development of missile defence infrastructure, and the Baltic states’ integration of territorial defence with NATO planning have produced contributions that are qualitatively distinct from what larger allies offer.
Some allies can deliver world-class capabilities in intelligence and economic networks despite their size, such as Singapore and the Netherlands, or they may possess elite specialised units that are highly valuable for the continuous low intensity operations that characterise modern-day hybrid conflict, outside of ‘returns to form’ such as the war in Ukraine. Such countries may also be more diplomatically nimble, using their lower geopolitical profile and unthreatening demeanour to go to places and speak to peoples that a principal power may find more difficult to do.
These are not supplementary contributions at the margins of alliance capability; in specific scenarios, they are central to it. The easiest example to consider is the advantage of basing rights in key geographic regions, where smaller states without the headaches of complex populations can serve as ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’.
Political reliability may matter even more, and it is consistently underweighted. Large allies with complex domestic politics, significant economic ties to potential adversaries, porous politics, or coalition governments sensitive to public opinion and status anxiety (such as for former empires) can introduce uncertainty into collective commitments at precisely the moments when clarity matters most.
Smaller states that have organised their national security posture around a clearly perceived threat and which have developed a true strategic security partnership tend to maintain more consistent positions across political cycles. Policy alignment is also easier, though this may be offset by the effort of managing high numbers of partners in a multilateral setting. Their reliability is baked into their strategic situation, not dependent on which coalition happens to be in government. When a principal power is calibrating coalition dependability ahead of a crisis, that difference becomes fundamental.
Flexibility operates at both the political and operational levels. Smaller allies typically have shorter decision chains, less bureaucratic inertia in their defence establishments, and greater capacity to adapt force posture rapidly in response to changing circumstances. Even in the economic realm, small states can more easily push through innovative new approaches and pilot technologies that the principal can then scale. In contingencies where tempo matters, that responsiveness can determine outcomes. The United States benefits from partners who decide and act quickly. Smaller states with focused strategic purposes are generally better at this than larger ones juggling more diffuse national interests and more restive domestic politics.
The Bucharest strategic springboard
Romania illustrates the structural argument with particular force. Bucharest sits at a convergence of geographic imperatives that would be difficult to replicate through any amount of diplomatic architecture. It controls the lower Danube corridor, anchors NATO’s South-Eastern flank, provides one of the primary overland logistics axes into and out of Ukraine, and offers sovereign Black Sea access at a moment when that littoral has become a primary theatre in the broader contest over European security. None of this is incidental. Romania’s geographic position confers strategic weight that no amount of diplomatic manoeuvring can manufacture elsewhere.
American planners have absorbed this reality quietly and practically. The expansion of Mihail Kogălniceanu air base, now the largest NATO construction project in Europe, is the most visible expression of it. The Deveselu missile defence installation adds another layer, positioning Romania as a hard-power node in a South-Eastern flank where Turkey’s reliability has grown more variable and Bulgaria’s political environment has complicated firm institutional commitments. Washington’s investments in Romanian basing infrastructure reflect a judgment that geographic position, when combined with a willing and stable host government, produces deterrence value that is difficult to generate elsewhere on the map.
The Black Sea dimension sharpens the argument. Since 2014, and decisively since 2022, the Black Sea has moved from the periphery of European security discussions to near the centre of them. Ukrainian export corridors, regional energy infrastructure, and the maritime dimension of NATO’s Eastern deterrence posture all run through this basin. In other materials, I have also pointed out that this area is the border between NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the security role of the SCO for its members will likely come to the fore in the next decade. Romania, as the Alliance’s principal Black Sea coastal state, is the indispensable anchor of any coherent maritime strategy for the region, including for the EU. Bucharest has exercised that position with notable restraint and consistency, seeking capability transfers and practical integration rather than leveraging its geographic advantages for outsized political returns. That posture makes Romania an unusually productive partner.
The negotiating dimension also merits attention. Because Romania’s strategic value is genuine but its overall weight within NATO’s internal deliberations is modest, Washington retains meaningful asymmetry in the bilateral relationship. Agreements on basing, access, and operational cooperation can be structured on terms that reflect American requirements rather than ones negotiated under pressure from a counterpart with comparable institutional leverage. Responsible American statecraft should recognise this asymmetry and use it.
Rethinking the metrics of allied ‘value-creation‘
The policy implication is not that the United States should devalue its major European partners or abandon the effort to bring larger allies to more serious defence investment. What Washington actually needs is an analytical framework that weighs operational agility, geographic positioning, political consistency, and specialised capability alongside the headline numbers. On those criteria, a number of smaller allies score considerably better than their position in the informal hierarchy of alliance politics would suggest.
Smaller allies that perform well against these criteria should receive accelerated access to Foreign Military Sales, priority placement in combined planning processes, and senior-level engagement that reflects their operational centrality rather than their GDP ranking. They also deserve to be taken seriously as sources of strategic insight about their own regions. Countries that have lived with the threat landscape that American strategy is designed to address often understand the operational environment more precisely than partners whose exposure is more abstract.
This argument should not be confused with a different kind of revisionism that gained currency in European capitals during the recent period of NATO burden-sharing pressure, most notably in Berlin. Germany and others proposed that development assistance and security sector reform expenditures should count toward NATO’s defence spending benchmarks, effectively redefining the metric to make existing budgets appear more compliant. That proposal was a response to political pressure, not a contribution to strategic clarity. The case made here runs in the opposite direction. Rather than diluting the content of allied commitments to satisfy a numerical threshold, it asks Washington to evaluate what allies actually deliver in operationally relevant terms. A Romania that hosts critical infrastructure, maintains consistent basing access, and invests in interoperable capabilities is contributing meaningfully regardless of where its budget line falls relative to another ally. A partner that reclassifies overseas development assistance as defence spending is not truly doing that, despite the potential benefits. The distinction matters, and American policymakers should resist frameworks that obscure it.
More broadly, the United States would benefit from signalling, consistently and concretely, that it evaluates allies on the basis of what they actually contribute to shared objectives rather than on their headline economic weight alone. That signal has value beyond the bilateral relationships it governs. It communicates to potential partners that strategic seriousness is recognised and rewarded, and it reinforces the credibility of American commitments to allies who have organised their defence posture around the assumption of American reliability. In an era when that assumption is periodically questioned, the signal matters. Scale is not irrelevant but treating it as the primary measure of allied value is a category error. The partners that deliver specialised capabilities, consistent commitment, and operational flexibility in critical geography are doing real work. American policy should stop undervaluing them.
Photo: Dreamstime.
