America’s Friends Will Never Trust the US Again
Trump keeps treating the nation’s allies with such contempt that the consequences will be lasting and ugly.
“We respectfully suggest … ,” the letter says. It was sent by a group representing more than 300 veterans of American diplomacy, intelligence and national security and addressed to the leaders of the intelligence committees in the Senate and House. For a fleeting moment, I thought — hoped? — that I was reading a Swiftian satire in the tradition of A Modest Proposal. Then it hit me with full force that the entreaty was dead serious and reflected what I and other observers of US foreign policy under President Donald Trump have been worrying about for months.
The letter asks Congress to demand a classified intelligence assessment that answers questions such as the following: Whether America’s allies believe the US remains a stable democracy; whether they regard the US as a reliable partner; whether they’re hedging their security by seeking alternative alliances without the US; and even whether they’re developing contingency plans for wars “in which they might, for the first time in generations, have to fight against US forces if America were to align with Russia against NATO or Ukraine, for example.” Let that sink in.
Such an intelligence assessment, of course, stands a snowball’s chance in hell. The relevant committees, like Congress as a whole, are controlled by Republicans, who are in thrall to Trump. So is the so-called intelligence community that would execute the analysis, which is in the throes of an effort by the Trump administration to purge its ranks of anybody deemed disloyal, even at the expense of losing vital expertise.
But the concerns are out there and becoming more urgent with every news cycle. Consider those military drones that Russia just sent into Poland, where NATO jets shot them down. It appears that Russian President Vladimir Putin was testing NATO’s air defenses, crisis procedures and resolve, feeling increasingly confident — especially after that cuddly Alaska summit — that Trump is as wobbly on NATO’s mutual-defense commitment as he is indulgent toward his strongman BFF in the Kremlin.
Or consider the Israeli bombing of Qatar, with the aim of killing Hamas leaders. Both Israel and Qatar are, in the jargon, Major Non-NATO Allies of the US. Qatar even hosts America’s largest military base in the region and recently hosted Trump with lavish promises of deals and the personal gift of a luxury jet. All that was clearly irrelevant as Israel’s prime minister once again ignored Trump, who either can’t or won’t protect the sovereignty of his Qatari allies and was reduced to grumbling that the strikes made him “very unhappy.”
If the Polish episode highlights Trump’s inconstancy within NATO and the Qatari event shows his weakness toward Benjamin Netanyahu, America’s actions in Greenland point to downright malice. That semi-autonomous territory belongs to Denmark, one of America’s oldest and tightest allies.1 And yet Trump keeps threatening to seize Greenland “one way or the other.” Last month, the Danish foreign minister summoned the top US diplomat in Copenhagen, for the second time this year, to protest covert operations that had come to light. Some Americans had infiltrated Greenland to make lists of people who might turn against Denmark and support a US takeover. This is not friendly.
The list of friends and allies scorned, humiliated and disdained continues: Trump wants to annex Canada, which shares with the US the world’s longest undefended border and now views Washington as one of its top threats. His intelligence director has blocked information about Russia from going to the Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing arrangement with Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada that is one of America’s most intimate and useful alliances (and has apparently saved many American lives by foiling terrorist plots).
Trump casts doubt on AUKUS, a budding alliance among the US, UK and Australia, and on the Quad, a partnership among the US, Japan, Australia and India that was meant to blossom into an alliance one day. From Taiwan and the Philippines to Estonia and Germany, no American ally can be sure that Washington, in a pinch, would have its back.
Trump’s willful destruction of America’s alliance capital is so self-defeating that it “discombobulates us,” says Graham Allison at Harvard University, a doyen among international-relations scholars. It was by deepening and widening its alliances after World War II that the US was able to deter another world war for eight decades and to limit the number of nuclear powers to just nine so far, a degree of geopolitical stability that Allison deems “unnatural” by historical standards. Trump doesn’t get this and instead interacts with allies as if he were a Dickensian landlord squeezing his tenants or a mob boss shaking down a mark.
For the sake of argument, ignore factors such as honor, credibility, ideals and values for a moment and think only in terms of realpolitik and the looming contest with communist China. Even and especially then, Trump’s de facto policy of contempt for allies seems bonkers. Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, who were top foreign-affairs experts in the administration of Joe Biden, point out that China already surpasses the US in many of the metrics that matter in war, from ships and factories to patents and people. But if the US cooperated more with its allies, their combined economic and military power — what Campbell and Doshi call “allied scale” — would dwarf China’s.
The way things are going, that allied scale will remain a pipe dream. The US’ allies are instead reacting as predicted by the “balance-of-threats” theory in international relations. They’re forming other trading and security networks, excluding the US to hedge against hostility by Trump or a future president. The Europeans in their notoriously disunited Union are pulling closer together. The UK, France and Germany are signing backup defense treaties in case NATO should falter. All of them are talking about how to adapt their nuclear stances to fit a world in which the US “umbrella” may not be there when it rains.
Some Americans are aware that the current direction points toward disaster. I went to see Gregory Meeks this week. He’s the ranking member and former chairman on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Trump “is isolating America,” he told me. “He’s not leading. If you’re leading, you got to have other people following you, and he’s pushing people away. He treats our allies as if they’re adversaries.”
I asked Meeks what, among all the problems in his inbox, worries him most. He pondered that for a long minute, during which my gaze drifted to the window behind his desk, which perfectly framed the Capitol in all its splendor. “What keeps me up most,” he finally answered, is “whether or not our friends and allies will ever trust the United States again.” The way I heard it, the question was rhetorical. I fear the answer is simple and sad: They won’t.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.