STRATEGIC

Option III: “Agile America”: Adapt and Compete in a Changing World 187
and relationships in booming areas of East and South Asia, Latin
America, and Africa.
• NATO and the G-7 are indispensable lynchpins of Euro-
Atlantic security and prosperity, 3 and the United States must
work hard to strengthen and maintain such institutions. These
organizations remain important, but the United States reaps less
benefit from each than in the past, and might invest a bit less in
maintaining them. The G-7 has been largely supplanted by the
G-20 (an international forum for the governments and central
bank governors from 20 major economies founded in 1999) in
its role of global economic stewardship. G-7 members no longer
represent the world’s leading economies. From a military standpoint,
Russia is not the Soviet Union, and the Europe of 2017
does not resemble the ravaged continent on which NATO was
formed in 1949. NATO and the G-7 are useful in maintaining
Western cohesion (more so if China becomes a Western adversary),
but neither organization includes all of the friendly Western
nations or the important, friendly democracies with whom the
United States needs to coordinate economic and military policy.
The United States should remain in NATO and do its fair share,
but the Europeans who benefit most from NATO must now take
the lead in deterring Russia and providing for their own security.
This is even more true as Britain leaves the EU. Further expansion
of NATO would not serve the U.S. interest. In the long term,
the United States should seek to build a trilateral alliance with
Asian allies and European allies to better address 21st-century
U.S. security needs. 4 Meanwhile, the busy U.S.-NATO calendar—a
relic of Western diplomacy in the last century and before
the Information Age, should certainly be pruned. 5
3 The Group of Seven (G-7) includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, and the United Kingdom, and meets annually to discuss global economic governance,
international security, and energy policy.
4 Binnendijk, 2016.
5 The United States now participates in eight major NATO events per year, including ministerial
conferences and side meetings of the allies’ defense and foreign ministers, but not