Trump abdicates U.S. role as leader of the free world
Now that U.S. commitments are untrustworthy, there will be a geopolitical realignment among other democratic countries.
In just a month, Donald Trump has obliterated the position and role of the United States as the leader of the free world, which it has occupied since the end of World War II.
There is an avalanche of maneuvers that have contributed to this irreversible obliteration, but two stand out for their salience and illustration.
The first was the imposition of tariffs, since paused, on Canada and Mexico. Trade terms with the two neighbors are governed by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The agreement was negotiated by the first Trump administration and ratified by the U.S. Congress.
The tariffs Trump officially imposed and then paused violate USMCA. Trump might have legal authority to adopt them under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But the rationale for triggering them under that act is clearly a pretense, particularly with respect to Canada. Illegal immigration and drug smuggling were already major issues when the USMCA was negotiated and approved by all three countries.
If Trump doesn’t feel bound by, or willing to honor, a commitment he himself made, what reason does any country in the world have to believe that he will feel bound by, or willing to honor, the multitude of commitments the United States government has made over the last 80 years regarding economic and security relations with other democracies?
The second is the selling down the river of Ukraine and the attempted extortion of its mineral resources on the way out.
Ukraine is an aspiring democracy that wants to be fully integrated with democratic Europe. Russia invaded with the intent to capture it entirely and install a puppet government. The brave and resourceful Ukrainians repelled that attempt. Now, the Russian short-term objective is to annex its eastern provinces, neuter its sovereignty, and render it a vassal state.
Instead of siding with the democracy aspiring to become fully integrated into the free world, Trump is siding with authoritarian Russia to the point of parroting its lies about how the war started. There can be a debate about the extent to which the United States should be supporting Ukraine in its resistance to absorption by Russia. But conspiring with Russia to attempt to force a peace agreement on Ukraine that suffocates its ambition to fully integrate into the free world is as stark of an abdication of leadership of that world as can be imagined.
The consequences of this abdication aren’t all bad. The United States has assumed global responsibilities disproportionate to our true security interests. A rebalancing of responsibilities within the free world is long overdue.
Years ago, some scholars at Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, used the term “strategic independence” to describe the diplomatic and defense policies they thought optimal for the United States. I’m going to borrow the term but, while there is considerable overlap between my optimal and Cato’s, what follows is entirely mine.
Strategic independence isn’t isolationism. It includes free trade, particularly with other democratic capitalist countries. And a generous immigration policy, particularly for the highly skilled.
However, it is much more circumspect about providing security guarantees to other countries or policing regional conflicts. Europe vastly exceeds Russia in resources and population. The Indo-Pacific major democracies – India, Japan, South Korea, Australia – have the resources to effectively check China’s hegemonic ambitions. Israel and the Sunni autocrats in the Middle East have the capabilities of similarly checking Iran’s.
In my strategic independence, there is room to assist democracies under pressure or attempting to emerge. Providing Ukraine with military hardware and financial assistance is a cost fully justified by a circumspect evaluation of our security interests at stake.
That’s particularly true given that the transition to a more proportionate sharing of responsibilities would, ideally, be a considered and cooperative one. NATO exists and we have a treaty obligation to actually deploy our military to protect a signatory that comes under attack. Russia has territorial ambitions similar to what it is attempting to achieve in Ukraine in NATO countries, which Ukraine is not. Thwarting Russia in Ukraine makes triggering a considerably greater NATO obligation elsewhere less likely.
What Trump is doing isn’t transitioning to a policy of strategic independence. Nor is it really America First. Under neither rubric does it make sense for the United States to assume responsibility for negotiating peace in the Ukrainian conflict, rather than leaving that to Russia, Ukraine, and European democracies alarmed by Russia’s aggression.
As a leader, Trump is an impulsive narcissist. There is no strategic overlay to his day-to-day eruptions.
However, by default, he seems to be attempting to revive the Great Power politics of the 19th Century, in which major powers made decisions in their own imperial self-interest without much, if any, consideration for the views or consequences for lesser powers.
Hence, Trump threatens military action against Panama over the canal and Denmark over Greenland. He threatens economic coercion to make Canada the 51st state. He threatens tariffs against everyone, friend or foe, although, for Trump, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between the two.
And misnamed peace negotiations become more about gaining access to mineral resources in Ukraine and Russia than about the security and ability of a sovereign, democratic Ukraine to chart its own course, or about thwarting further Russian territorial ambitions. European democracies, while expected to produce troops to semi-guarantee any peace deal, aren’t invited to join the Great Power table. They, and Ukraine, are expected to docilely do whatever the United States and Russia decide they should do.
Right now, other democratic countries are tiptoeing around the Trump eruptions. But this isn’t the 19th Century. And the United States doesn’t have the power or position commensurate with Trump’s megalomania.
The people of the United States elected Trump president twice, and this time after he attempted a coup to stay in office after losing the 2020 election. The American people were never as committed to the position and role of the United States as leader of the free world as the foreign policy elites in both parties. Trump has clearly abdicated that position. Other democratic countries are going to conclude that the abdication isn’t temporary. A geopolitical realignment will take place.
What form that will take is hard to envision. The mechanisms for other democratic countries to compensate for the now untrustworthy commitments they thought they had from the United States aren’t in place, in either Europe or the Indo-Pacific. Creating them, if attempted, will be complex and difficult. That’s why it would have been vastly preferable for the transition to be considered and coordinated, rather than a reaction to the Trump eruptions.
My guess is that the realignment will be a combination of greater accommodation of the regional authoritarian powers, Russia and China, and developing some greater defense capabilities of their own.
The role of the United States in the world will shrink. Not because we chose to shrink it and made arrangements for others to step up. But because the United States became an untrustworthy, arbitrary, and disruptive force.
Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.