By Noah Rothman
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Maybe it was because Europe is populated by milquetoast
dandies who hitched a free ride on American backs for too long. Maybe America
was simply a spent force that didn’t “have enough power for global hegemony,”
in the words of the current under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge
Colby. Either way, at the outset of Donald Trump’s second administration, the
intellectuals who gravitated toward the MAGA movement’s big tent seemed to
agree that America could not give up on Europe fast enough.
The Trump administration in some ways shares the Obama
administration’s misconceptions about America, its interests, and the value of
its partnerships abroad. As a consequence, Trump has so far failed at that task
in much the same way that the 44th president did.
Under Obama, an administration that spent the better part
of eight years insisting on the urgent necessity of a “pivot to Asia” devoted
its final days to a public argument with itself over just how provocative it
would be to transit U.S. naval assets through the South China Sea. Clearly, the
pivot was less a policy priority than a talking point. And the point of that
talking point was less to put China on notice than it was to put Old Europe in
its place.
Despite their shared cultural attitudes, Obama and his
team seemed to detest their Western European counterparts. That was how a
doctrine of “leading from behind” — an effort to get Western Europe to take the
lead in its security interests in North Africa — came to be, and it explains
the Obama administration’s conspicuous hostility toward the British.
Obama did his best to withdraw America from European
affairs, starting with the U.S. troops and armored divisions on the continent —
the last of which were withdrawn just months prior to Vladimir Putin’s first
invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the harder and more heedlessly Obama sought to get
out of Europe, the more Europe dragged him and America back in. Trump’s
subordinates, possessed of similar prejudices, have encountered similar
frustrations.
For his part, Donald Trump’s approach to relations with
Europe has been far less doctrinaire than the true believers in the MAGA camp
would probably prefer. Even as the Pentagon drafts National Defense Strategy
documents that would, if implemented, compel America to retreat from the world
and “prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere,” as Politico
described it, Trump’s pursuit of a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv has
ensnared him in the diplomatic processes of which Europeans are so fond. The
administration does not speak in one voice on Europe, and its officials often
seem to be working at cross-purposes. The result of this confusion has been a
disjointed United States, at once contemptuous of its NATO allies on the
continent and preoccupied with resolving its security challenges.
The second Trump administration’s first hundred days were
spent berating the Ukrainian president for having the temerity to be invaded by
Russia, and castigating European capitals for failing to meet the measure of
the moment without American help. In March 2025, reporters obtained Signal
group-chat records featuring several administration principals heaping scorn on
“European freeloading” as the vice president, national security adviser, and
secretary of defense debated the virtue of reopening the international shipping
lanes that the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen had closed. The chat showed that
the contempt Trump’s underlings have shown for Europe isn’t just talk. And when
those figures can set policy affecting America’s closest allies, they
demonstrate their inclination to cut and run (as the Pentagon did in September
when it attempted to zero out a congressionally approved program aimed at
helping NATO allies on the frontier to deter Russian aggression).
But by early summer, the president seemed to have changed
his tune on Europe. Trump started talking about Putin more as an American
adversary than as a misunderstood potential ally. Suddenly, a president who
routinely entertained the prospect of withdrawing from the Atlantic Alliance
effusively praised both NATO and its mutual defense provisions. “It’s not a
rip-off,” Trump said of an alliance that he had only weeks earlier claimed was
“ripping us off.” “I left here saying that these people really love their
countries,” Trump said at the close of a productive June NATO summit, “and
we’re here to help them protect their country.”
That summit was a success because the Europeans felt
compelled to mollify the president. Trump secured, for example, commitments
from America’s European partners to set defense-spending targets at an
ambitious level — the equivalent of 5 percent of gross domestic product —
giving him the headline he wanted. But while such commitments would be
desirable, the Europeans (save the existentially imperiled former Soviet
colonies on the alliance’s frontier) will not meet that goal anytime soon. Nor
will the United States. Indeed, “I don’t think we should,” Trump said of his
own military-spending targets, “but I think they should.”
Europe had caved, but it caved with passion and purpose.
“You are flying into another big success in The Hague,” said NATO
Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who had earlier cast the American president as a
“daddy” tasked with setting his unruly kids straight. “Europe is going to pay
in a big way, as they should,” he continued, “and it will be your win.”
The sacrifice of dignity to Donald Trump’s need for
flattery is a small price to pay to preserve America’s role as a “European
power”: that hard-won status, as Condoleezza Rice recalled, was ceded to the
United States by a Soviet delegation in the final days of the Cold War. But
that doesn’t mean that the Europeans do not bitterly resent the spectacle and
their roles in it. “This is not the America of old, whereby there was a coming
together of countries of shared values and shared interests,” observed the British
political scientist David Dunn. “What it looks like is fealty to the king.” And
Americans aren’t alone in privileging prestige, that tempting intangible of
statecraft.
America’s approach to managing relations with its East
Asian allies and partners suffers from a similar incoherence. China, adopting a
wait-and-see posture as it observes the eroding trust between the United States
and its European allies, has denied Trump the bilateral summit with Xi Jinping
that he’s long sought. In fact, China’s instruments of state propaganda, like
the Global Times, have attempted to exacerbate those tensions and to
foment schisms in the East. For that, Trump needs no help from Beijing.
Far from out-hawking Joe Biden on China, who had publicly
pledged the United States to Taiwan’s defense, Trump has restored a doctrine of
“strategic ambiguity.” On the campaign trail, Trump lamented how Taipei “stole
our chip business” and compared the United States to an “insurance company”
when he mused that “Taiwan should pay us for defense.” Understanding both its
tenuous position and the incentives to which Trump responds, the Taiwanese
chipmaker TSMC announced a $100 billion investment in a semiconductor campus in
Arizona. Trump celebrated Taiwan’s beneficence, but the gesture was soon
forgotten: he slapped tariffs on Taiwanese goods anyway. The Taiwanese had
misjudged the president, wagering and losing political capital in the process.
It was a strategic failure that humiliated Taipei.
But in its mortification, Taiwan can take some solace in
not being alone. The president and his subordinates have ignited diplomatic
fires all over the region.
In June, the Pentagon launched a review to make sure a
Biden-era deal to provide Australia with nuclear submarines “aligned with the
president’s America First agenda,” a review that coincided with Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth’s public admonition of his Australian counterpart for
spending less than 3.5 percent of GDP on defense. “I think that Australia
should decide what we spend on Australia’s defense,” Prime Minister Anthony
Albanese replied. “Simple as that.” In the Sydney Morning Herald, Emma
Shortis, doubtless speaking for a constituency with growing political clout,
welcomed these slights as grounds for Australia to decouple from “an
increasingly volatile and aggressive America.”
Japan and the Republic of Korea, two nations with a
fraught history whose working diplomatic relations are built on fragile
foundations, have been similarly vexed by the mercurial president. Tokyo
expressed rare (thus intense) dissatisfaction with the president when the Trump
administration leveraged tariffs to compel the Japanese to cede 90 percent of
the profits from a $550 billion fund for direct investments in the U.S. —
calling this move, with typical Japanese understatement, an “extremely regrettable”
error the Americans have since corrected.
Likewise, the Center for Strategic and International
Studies analyst Victor Cha has long maintained that U.S.–South Korean relations
in the second Trump era are in a state of “quiet crisis.” Trump’s tariffs hurt
the South Korean export market particularly hard, breathing new life into a
political disposition in Seoul that favors the withdrawal of U.S. troops from
the Korean peninsula in concert with a national race toward nuclear-weapons
capability. A poll earlier this year found that three-quarters of South Koreans
favor the development of a domestic nuclear deterrent — a less than ideal
outcome from Washington’s perspective, which has made nuclear nonproliferation
a pillar of its defense doctrine.
Even India, which could serve as a useful bulwark against
Chinese expansionism in Asia, found itself in a row with Washington. After
Trump helped negotiate a cease-fire between India and Pakistan following an
exchange of missiles and drones over disputed Kashmir, Trump slapped a 25
percent import duty on all Indian goods. Trump adviser Peter Navarro said the
maneuver was a “pure national security issue associated with India’s abject
refusal to stop buying Russian oil.” But the imposition of highly anticipated
“secondary sanctions” on Russian oil has, as of this writing, still not touched
the other foremost consumers of Russian energy exports, China and Turkey.
Regardless, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is spurned, and he has
communicated his displeasure with the White House by making a theatrical show
of gravitating toward China’s orbit, culminating in a display of bonhomie
between Modi, Putin, and Xi at a meeting in Shanghai. Trump himself lamented
that “we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China.”
None of these initiatives appear aligned with Trump’s
stated goal of surrounding China with a confrontational array of U.S. allies.
Indeed, confronting China doesn’t seem to be what the U.S. is doing at all.
The Trump administration is brazenly refusing to comply
with the law compelling Beijing to divest its holdings in TikTok, the
Chinese-owned social media app. It loosened national-security-related export
controls that prevented U.S.-based firms from selling sensitive electronics to
Beijing — that is, so long as Uncle Sam gets a 15 percent cut of the action.
Trump is allowing 600,000 Chinese nationals to enroll in U.S. colleges despite
documented efforts by Beijing’s clandestine services to recruit U.S.-based
students — and boasted that, for this favor, he does not expect “anything in
return.”
Just about the only region in which the president’s
approach to foreign affairs has been both consistent and effective is in the
Middle East. The president has stood unwavering in his commitment to Israel’s
defense in its war against the West’s enemies. And despite the occasional
boilerplate statement of protest here and there, that posture has not
frustrated U.S. relations with Israel’s neighboring Arab states.
That is remarkable. It’s probably not coincidental that
this is also a region where transactional politics are standard fare and money
talks. Indeed, Trump himself gushed over the “gleaming marvels of Riyadh and
Abu Dhabi” in a May speech from the Saudi capital city. Despite some theatrics
from Arab capitals over Trump’s steadfast support for Israel as it wraps up the
wars that followed the October 7 massacre, Trump has been good for business.
The president has extracted his share of offerings from
this region, too: weapons deals, new technology partnerships, investments in
American manufacturing, and the largest civilian aircraft order in Boeing’s
history, to name a few. But America’s Middle Eastern partners are getting what
they’ve paid for in the form of a United States that is actively disrupting and
demolishing the Iranian regime’s capacity to export terrorism as well as
keeping at bay non-state Islamist actors in places like Yemen, Syria, and
Somalia. An administration openly disdainful of diplomacy based on shared
values has enjoyed its most unalloyed successes in a region where (save for
Israel) there are few values to share.
While the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East is in
flux, Washington and Jerusalem have good reason to believe that the
normalization process between Sunni states and Israel will resume when
hostilities in the post-10/7 wars conclude. The future of American diplomacy
with the rest of the world is far less certain.
The United States is unique in many ways. One of them is
that it is a hyperpower that is deeply discomfited by its own prohibitive
ability to project force. It spent the decades after World War II and, later,
the Cold War creating a buttress of intertwined alliances of which it was
primus inter pares — a remarkable security architecture the American political
class now resents. Other countries have politics, too, and the politics that
will rise to the fore inside the nations that perceive themselves to have been
disrespected by Trump will be nationalistic and, likely, antagonistic toward
Washington. For good or ill, the forces he is unleashing will outlast his
presidency.
And there are benefits to Trump’s antagonism,
including his efforts to promote a consensus around broader defense-spending
commitments. But those commitments may come at the cost of reduced influence
over America’s allies and partners abroad. A generation of conservatives did
not argue for a more active effort by our friends to secure their own defense
just to advertise their own muscularity. Their argument was that Europe and
Asia should take on more responsibility only so they could be a better
steward of our shared priorities, as defined and directed by Washington.
Americans who might welcome more independence from our
partners might consult the logic of their own efforts to put the screws to
go-along, get-along types in Europe and the Far East. As JD Vance put it, “It’s
not good for Europe to be the permanent security vassal of the United States.”
But Vance is not the vice president of Europe, and it is hard to see what U.S.
interests are advanced if America’s allies are less confident in Washington and
more inclined to accommodate the bullies in their own regions. It is
unfortunate that we may soon have to find out.
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