America Alone

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

The war in Iran may not be the last war that America wages during this presidency, but it will almost certainly be the last challenging war.

 

Whether that’s good or bad depends on how you look at it.

 

Having painted himself into a corner in the Persian Gulf, the president won’t risk another conflict in which he stands a meaningful chance of looking weak, I suspect. From here on out, we’re fighting tomato cans only. And that’s good news: A strongman who’s learned the limits of his strength will be less likely going forward to put American service members in harm’s way.

 

But it’s bad news if you believe U.S. military power is the only thing limiting the global reach of Chinese totalitarians.

 

There’s no liberal kinship binding Donald Trump to Taiwan—or Japan or South Korea, for that matter. If Xi Jinping dares the president to test his mettle against the People’s Liberation Army, my guess is the commander in chief will decide that letting China control its own “sphere of influence” is preferable to rolling the dice on a war that could shatter perceptions of American (i.e. his) might.

 

Never mind that ducking a fight with Beijing would itself go a long way toward doing that.

 

I could be wrong about all of that, as I’ve underestimated Trump’s appetite for war before. A strategic defeat in Iran might lead him to behave more aggressively toward China, not less, by leaving him feeling that he has something to prove.

 

But probably not. A bully who’s met unexpected resistance in the schoolyard will instinctively want to push smaller kids around to reestablish his dominance, not pick another fight with someone his own size. Just because I couldn’t wedgie Iran into crying uncle doesn’t mean I can’t do it to you.

 

If I’m right, America will spend the next 33 months preying on nations that can’t fight back while straining to avoid conflict with powers like China and Russia as they go about preying on our own allies.

 

How many dependable partners will a country like that still have when Trump leaves office in 2029?

 

No allies.

 

Israel?

 

Doubtful. The Israelis may want their alliance with America to continue in its current form, but Americans do not. One of the most sobering polls I’ve seen this year was this Pew Research survey published on Tuesday gauging U.S. opinion about the Jewish state. Majorities in both parties between the ages of 18 and 49 now view Israel unfavorably. (Yes, Republicans too.) Democrats 50 and older also hold an overwhelmingly unfavorable opinion.

 

Only among Republicans 50 and older—Donald Trump’s demographic—is negative sentiment toward Israel still a minority view. If the next president is J.D. Vance, it’s a cinch that Washington’s longstanding alliance with Tel Aviv will be radically more ambivalent than it’s been for most of my life. If the next president is a Democrat, the alliance might exist mostly in name only. There’ll still be intelligence-sharing, I assume (or hope), but Benjamin Netanyahu’s de facto political union with Trump has finished off whatever meager affection the American left still had for his country.

 

The Gulf states?

 

A good outcome to the Iran war might have cemented that alliance, but the window for a good outcome has closed. America’s Arab partners have been battered by Iranian missile and drone strikes, with Uncle Sam unable to fully protect them, while the bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz continues to strangle their core industry. “The U.S. and Israel went into the war and didn’t take Gulf interests into account, so we ended up as collateral damage,” one Kuwaiti academic complained to the Wall Street Journal. “The fear is that being collateral damage in the war extends into peace, and this is something we wouldn’t accept and need to work against.”

 

If the conflict ends with Iran’s terror-supporting regime still in place, as is all but certain, Gulf nations will need to weigh their relationship with the U.S. against the risk of further antagonizing that regime. Forced to live cheek by jowl with Shiite fanatics who’ve proved their ability to take the region’s energy sector hostage, Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE might conclude that triangulating between Iran and America is the safer long-term play. Having a friend in Washington is nice, but not as nice as not having to worry about Iran blowing up your oil fields.

 

Needless to say, the Gulf states will also pay a steep political price with the next Democratic administration for their corrupt courtship of Trump. Although maybe they’d prefer that anyway: At least a Democratic president would know better than to insult the most powerful Arab leader in the world by accusing him publicly of “kissing my ass.”

 

Japan?

 

Tokyo is probably America’s best bet for an ally who’ll still be there after the smoke from the Trump conflagration clears, but I wouldn’t bet heavily on that either. For starters, the Iran war is hitting the Japanese economy much harder than ours, as Japan gets no less than 93 percent of its crude oil via the Strait of Hormuz. Having that tap suddenly turned off has wreaked all of the havoc you might expect—a market dip, declining consumer confidence, and a rising risk of inflation. If our war saddles them with a recession, Japanese voters might understandably hold a grudge.

 

Skillful diplomacy could avert that, perhaps, but Americans opted out of skillful diplomacy when they chose a kakistocracy to govern them in 2024. Trump has responded to Japan’s economic pain by throwing a jab about Pearl Harbor during a visit by the Japanese prime minister to the White House last month and then browbeating the government for not helping him clean up the mess he made in Iran.

 

If he does anything in the Far East over the next 33 months to signal that his commitment to containing China isn’t ironclad (and there have already been rumblings to that effect), Japan will find itself in a position similar to the Gulf states. They can resolve to fight the regional menace that threatens them or they can move to appease it in hopes that it’ll leave them alone. But either way, they won’t be able to count on America to do anything meaningful about it.

 

Which brings us to Europe.

 

Enemies, a love story.

 

Our alliances with Israel, Japan, and the Gulf states will still exist nominally in 2029 even if there’s little substance to them. I’m not sure our European alliances will.

 

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” That was the president’s message yesterday after meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Hours earlier, his press secretary conceded that he was considering leaving the alliance, something he has no legal power to do but which no longer matters in autocratic America.

 

“It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Trump himself told reporters on Monday when asked why he was so angry at Europe for not joining his war. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’” It is very stupid politically to pair those two grievances, as one of them explains the other: If you want to know why Europeans haven’t behaved like allies lately, consider what sort of allyship the president showed them when he spent the first month of this year trying to extort them into coughing up territory.

 

That’s what NATO is up against. Trump expects Europe to comply with his individual demands, not necessarily because those demands are reasonable but because that’s what vassals do. Whether it’s helping in the Strait of Hormuz or forking over Greenland, European leaders are supposed to subordinate their national interests—and the will of their voters—to ours when the president asks them to do so. Because he’s not asking.

 

I don’t know how an alliance as poisoned as that survives even nominally for another 33 months. Without a doubt, Trump will continue to alienate NATO members and Europe by alternately insulting them, shaking them down, and making toxic demands of them. I expect him to take another run at muscling them over Greenland too (he might be preparing to do so already), possibly using the current war as a pretext. “Europe wouldn’t let us use their bases to attack Iran so we can’t trust that Denmark will always let us use Greenland,” the president could say.

 

Simply dwell on this fact: Since January 2025, multiple NATO members have been forced to plan their response to a potential U.S. military attack. Say what you want about Vladimir Putin, at least he doesn’t make Europeans glad-hand him when they’re not busy wargaming against his army.

 

A simpler way to put all of that is that the Trump-led U.S. government isn’t hostile to Israel, Japan, or the Gulf states, but it is, plainly, ideologically hostile to Europe—to the point that its hostility is now official national security policy. In fact, while Trump was meeting with Rutte yesterday, J.D. Vance was wrapping up a two-day trip to Budapest, where he attacked the “bureaucrats in Brussels” on behalf of a corrupt Putin toady whose government has become a sort of Russian catspaw within the European Union.

 

Without hyperbole, the White House is momentarily aligned with the Kremlin in trying to rescue an unpopular Hungarian strongman because his politics are their mutual best chance of ending liberalism in the West. You tell me how something like that gets papered over and we end up in January 2029 without the U.S. and Europe in a sort of Cold War.

 

Even Ukraine, America’s greatest remaining point of leverage over Europe, might not bind the rest of NATO to us for much longer. Necessity has led to ingenuity in Kyiv: From drones to missiles to air defense, the Ukrainians have developed formidable native capabilities. The less they’re forced to rely on weapons purchased from America, the less leverage Trump will have to extort Ukraine’s allies into doing his bidding by threatening to cut those weapons off.

 

Although, ironically, the president’s desire for leverage might be the last, best hope of preserving the alliance.

 

Prestige.

 

I don’t think it would bother Trump as an ideological matter if America ended up without meaningful allies in 2029. (I doubt very much that he cares what happens to the country one way or another once it no longer answers to him.) He might actually prefer it.

 

Like his boyfriend Kim Jong Un, Trump is an autark at heart. Our mercantilist leader would be perfectly content, I think, if America subsisted entirely on homegrown food and domestic goods and exported whatever’s left over. Self-reliance is the essence of Trump juche, and self-reliant nations don’t need allies.

 

Nor, I suspect, does the president discern any reason why a nation with the greatest military in history should desire partners. That’s the mafioso in him: If you can impose your will on others (except Iran, I guess), there’s no need to court them. Eventually they’ll come begging for something they need, creating an opportunity to extort them, or you’ll take what you want from them when your own need arises.

 

“America alone” is an acceptable outcome to him in principle. But he’d miss all of the bowing and scraping allied leaders have learned to do to try to satisfy his bottomless need for flattery.

 

That’s the real risk to him in alienating partners. The president doesn’t care for NATO in the abstract, but I’m sure he finds it deeply pleasurable when a figure like Mark Rutte feels obliged to call him “daddy.” If he keeps threatening Europe, at some point that will stop. The leverage he enjoys over global elites dissipates every time he forces them anew to question whether they’re still getting more out of maintaining close ties to the United States than they’re losing.

 

“Nobody can understand what America actually is today. It seems governed by some kind of mad emperor who keeps saying whatever comes to his mind, something we haven’t witnessed since Caligula or Nero,” an Italian senator told the Wall Street Journal this week. “The one thing the Europeans have understood is that we are dealing with a bully. You can give him everything he wants, you can pretend you don’t hear his insults, but he will keep trying to bully us, and so at a certain point we must stop him.”

 

Even the Euroweenies can be pushed only so far. Eventually the president will threaten for the umpteenth time to quit NATO and they’ll reply with an exasperated “go ahead.” (Iran’s behavior this week should have taught Trump a lesson about scare tactics losing their potency.) Then he’ll be alone in the Oval Office, a global pariah with 36 percent job approval, forced to dial up Delcy Rodríguez to chat with a world leader who still respects him.

 

Or pretends to respect him, I should say.

 

That would be grim for him, which may explain why the “punishment” the White House is reportedly preparing for NATO over the Iran war doesn’t seem so punitive. From the Wall Street Journal:

 

The proposal would involve moving U.S. troops out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries deemed unhelpful to the Iran war effort and stationing them in countries that were more supportive.

 

…

 

Countries that could benefit because they are viewed as supportive include Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Greece, the officials said. The Eastern European countries have some of the highest defense-spending rates in the alliance and were some of the first to signal they would support an international coalition to monitor the Strait of Hormuz. After war broke out, Romania quickly approved U.S. requests to allow its bases to be used by the U.S. Air Force.

 

Moving U.S. troops from western Europe to eastern Europe isn’t punishment for NATO, it’s simply good strategic sense. If Russia comes for the alliance, it’s not going to do so via the Atlantic, with an amphibious landing in Galicia. Pulling troops from Spain or Germany might be a minor economic blow to those countries but it won’t weaken NATO’s defense if those troops end up in the Baltics. On the contrary.

 

The thought of America alone—of an America with little remaining international prestige—may ultimately be too unpalatable for a leader who really, really revels in that prestige. If our alliances with NATO and its members somehow endure until 2029, that’ll probably be why.

 

But I’d still bet on America ending up more or less alone. With the possible exception of Russia, I can’t imagine any government on Earth living through this period of chaotic, brain-damaged gangster insanity and ever again wanting to invest heavily in a relationship with the United States. I’ve made this point many times but it can’t be overstated: A people capable of electing Donald Trump twice, especially after January 6, is a people that can never again be trusted to lead the world even after he’s gone.

 

So they won’t be. Our alliances post-Trump, insofar as they exist, will be of a qualitatively different and less deferential nature than they were for most of our lifetimes. “Still somewhat better than being dominated by Chinese communists” is the most one can say for the Pax Americana anymore. And already, after just 15 months, things are so bleak that some are unwilling to say it.