Trump vs. America’s Allies

It might seem obvious enough, one year into Donald Trump’s second term, that he will leave behind an enormously destructive—and plenty durable—domestic legacy. He is the president who urged on a violent insurrection, transformed a major political party into his personal cult, and yanked America in a far more nativist direction. The old free-trading Republicans are now full converts to Trump’s manic tariff regime. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary are stacked with Trump appointees, validating his right-wing policy.

Yet it is hard to know, in the next decades, what America will look like and how much a former president can bend a party to his will—especially if that president is no longer alive. With Trump gone from the scene, Republicans could lose their appetite for tariffs or deranged Minneapolis-style immigration enforcement which carries so little upside. Given how unpopular DOGE was, a future Republican president might attempt more traditional austerity rather than the wanton layoffs prized by Elon Musk. The jury on Trump’s ultimate legacy is still out. We’ll know, in the next decade, how much of this can stand without one man. That’s the strength and weakness of cult leadership.

Journey out of the country, however, and it’s clear enough that Trump is doing lasting damage to the United States that won’t be immediately fixed by a successor Democratic administration. The foreign nations that, for so many decades, either believed in the promise of America or were content to operate in our shadow are now restive and seeking to permanently alter how they relate to the U.S. This, in turn, might drive them closer to China, a technofascist nation that is, for them, a more predictable world power. Historians might chart the moment when this rupture occurred to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos earlier this month. It was a shot heard round the world, and one Americans should take seriously.

Trump’s attempts to seize Greenland, as ludicrous as they were, seemed to trigger the final break.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

“This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”

“This bargain,” he added, “no longer works.”

More damning, perhaps, for Trump’s America was Carney’s call for “middle powers” like Canada and the European nations to “act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

“Great powers” like the United States, he said, “can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.”

“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

The old order is not coming back. In Europe, Carney’s speech was received extremely well, with most national leaders treating it as a necessary corrective, a way to say out loud what they all had been, for the last year, contemplating. “Europe is back,” proclaimed The New Statesman, one of the leading British magazines. The Greenland threat, from Denmark to France to the U.K., triggered a round of collective revulsion unlike any ever witnessed in the Trump age. Far-right European leaders who had drawn close to Trump began to beat a retreat, as they made clear they valued their own national sovereignty over America First. Until now, European and Canadian politicians were content to flatter and mollify Trump, bartering with him like they would a schoolyard bully who could, at any moment, bash their teeth in. No matter what Trump said or did, the presidents and prime ministers would still strain for photo-ops and contemplate how they might, through elaborate and quasi-absurd diplomacy, win over the mercurial American strongman.

Carney has made it clear that era is over. Trump did succeed in forcing the European countries to pay more for their own defense. He has, as intended, nudged America away from NATO. If Trump had a strategy for a workable “America First” paradigm that treated allies with respect while massively reinvesting in the homefront—imposing reasonable and select tariffs, investing billions in new domestic manufacturing—there could be a world where MAGA enjoyed the best of all worlds, maintaining useful ties abroad while powering an American industrial renaissance. We know that isn’t happening. Trump is too venal, too maladjusted, and far too shortsighted to pursue such a path. He will lose Europe without getting much in return.

Carney, of course, isn’t wrong. The postwar international order was always somewhat illusionary, with the United States lording over much of the West. What Trump hasn’t grasped is that the old status quo served American interests just fine. And that, in a new world where Europe and Canada seek out further cooperation with China, America will have little to gain. Already, the Chinese electric carmaker BYD is outcompeting Tesla abroad, and may well dominate the European market in the next decade. Xi might menace Taiwan but is wise enough to understand it would never make sense for China to threaten territory like Greenland that belongs to a European power.

If the next president is a Democrat, could relations between the U.S. and its postwar allies be reset? Perhaps—but only a degree. The memories of Canadians and Europeans are long. Even if Trumpism is vanquished from America, foreigners will fear the return of another movement like it and plan accordingly for that reality. We are no longer reliable. Trump has blazed a new trail, one we will be stuck on in the years after he’s faded into political oblivion.