On the quiet withdrawal of bombers and the loud silence toward allies

CNBC reports that U.S. Air Force B-1 bombers, previously stationed in England, have been removed and used in strikes on Iran — with the President offering, after the fact, that 'we had a threat' as the governing explanation. I do not dispute that a sovereign nation may respond to a credible threat. What I do observe is that the manner of a response can itself become a diplomatic act, with consequences that outlast the sortie.

When I negotiated the treaty that ended our Revolution, and again when I concluded the agreement with Britain in 1794 that history has attached my name to, the central problem was never merely the terms on paper. It was whether the parties would believe, afterward, that those terms reflected a durable intention. A treaty — or a basing agreement, or any compact between nations — is sustained not by its ink but by the accumulated confidence of the parties that each will consult the other before altering the conditions on which the compact rests.

England has been the host of American military assets under arrangements that, I must infer from the CNBC reporting, were not renegotiated publicly before this redeployment. Whether the underlying agreements required consultation I cannot say with certainty, as the specific terms of modern basing compacts are not before me. But the shape of the question is familiar: when one party to an agreement acts unilaterally on shared infrastructure, the other party is entitled to ask whether the partnership still holds on equal terms. That question, left unanswered, corrodes.

There is also the matter of Iran. Strikes on a sovereign nation carry obligations under the law of nations — obligations that do not dissolve because the cause is just, or because the threat was real. The world has constructed, since my own era, a web of multilateral conventions governing the use of force, the treatment of neutral parties, and the rights of navigation and airspace. I speak with appropriate humility about the technical specifics of those modern instruments. But their animating purpose — that nations should not act as if no law existed above their own convenience — is as old as the republic I helped to frame.

What should be done? First, the administration ought to provide allied governments not merely an explanation but a genuine accounting of what basing arrangements now govern these assets and what obligations attend them. Second, if the threat that prompted the redeployment was genuine and imminent, let that case be made to Congress and to the public in terms precise enough to be evaluated, not merely asserted. A diplomat's task — and I would argue an executive's task as well — is to leave a quarrel less inflamed than he found it. Vague invocations of threat, offered after the action, accomplish the opposite: they invite suspicion without satisfying it. The public faith of a great nation is not well served by explanations that arrive late and travel light.