Reading this article, I understand that the author's definition of threat is quite extreme. A threat is not something that "has the potential to annihilate" but is rather "a thing that has the potential to inflict damages".
Dismissing any threats that has not a fully destructive potential as "not important" is sloppy, dangerous thinking.
There is two extremes to this spectrum, you will notice that both have a characteristic in common, they fail to differentiate and nuance threats.
From this fallacy, we can classify the two end of the spectrum as:
- The "paranoid", who genuinely end-up thinking that "the end justify the means" and propagate their hysteria to the rest of the group, effectively becoming the biggest threat to what they were trying protect.
- The "naive", who dismiss anything that has no fully destructive power as "trivial", effectively allowing threats to turn into actual damages, grow to become "fully destructive" (at which point it is too late) or cause a chain of events leading to destruction of what they were effectively trying to protect as well.
Let's not be fooled for a second by the "alliances" and "historical relationships" between the US and its allies.
Nation-States are engaged in a game for survival which is directly linked to growth and domination. A game-theoretic analogy would be the "non-cooperative" game, defined as "a game where players play independently and where any cooperation must be self-reinforcing".
There is exceptions to that rule but they are such of limited scope and impact that we can safely consider them negligible.
Since "Nation-States" lack a system of belief, they are free from the constraints that Humans self-impose onto themselves. A Nation-State will do anything to further its own interest, they are in essence, cold-blooded machines.
The author of this article is forgetting about the 195 other countries in the world who are also playing this game.
Obviously not all of them have credible chances to become big players but you can bet on the fact that all of them will fight tooth and nail for their part of the pie, no matter what it takes.