The administration travels next week to the annual NATO summit, and as is now the habit of every such gathering, the question of American commitments will be reopened. I would offer a brief observation, less for those who will sit at the table than for those who will read the dispatches.

A standing alliance is a covenant, and covenants matter to free nations precisely because they are not trivially abandoned. The American word, given over decades, is a national asset that pays returns in the small moments — the foreign leader who consults before acting, the rival who hesitates before testing — that no single year's report can quantify. Those who would casually break it for the satisfaction of a quarter's negotiation do not understand the cost of what they are trading.

That said: a covenant is not a marriage to one's neighbor's quarrels. The Republic may, with full preservation of its honor, ask its partners to attend to their own burdens — to spend on their own defense, to maintain their own readiness, to share the costs of the common protection in some proportion to the benefits each derives. Asking is not abandoning. Renegotiating terms, in good faith and in the open, is not betrayal.

Steady judgment. Steady temper. Steady speech. That counsel I gave once, and I will offer it again before any summit at which the American interest is weighed against the American word.