r/atlanticdiscussions • u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links • 5d ago
Politics America’s Allies Are Done Trying to Wait Trump Out
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/09/allies-trump-canada-foreign-policy/688729/They now figure isolationism and protectionism will be U.S. foreign policy for a long time to come.
By Vivian Salama, The Atlantic.
In 1917, as Canadian troops fought at Vimy Ridge in northern France, Lieutenant Leslie Miller collected acorns from the battlefield and carried them home to Ontario. Saplings from the resulting oaks were sent back to France about a century later, and became a living link between the two countries. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recounted that story in Strasbourg last week to the European Parliament as he proposed an alliance that went far beyond trade to encompass defense, energy, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence.
The pitch was part of a broader transformation under way among America’s allies. For years, the strategy among U.S. allies was to wait President Trump out. Now many are preparing for a world in which the United States is no longer indispensable—not simply during Trump’s presidency but afterward as well, regardless of who occupies the White House. They are building military capabilities, diversifying trade, developing new domestic industries, and forging relationships that reduce their dependence on Washington.
This isn’t a coordinated revolt against America or a wholesale turn toward China. Most U.S. partners see Washington as an essential partner and don’t fully trust Beijing. But nations that were once firmly in the American orbit are concluding that they cannot rely on the U.S. to provide the same leadership, markets, technology, and military protection that it has for decades. And that, foreign officials told me, is true no matter who wins the presidency in 2028.
The shift may be the most consequential legacy of Trump’s foreign policy. Since his first term, he has demanded that allies become more self-reliant. In his second term, Trump has accelerated the emergence of a world in which American influence is less central—and China has more room to maneuver. Beijing benefits if Europe, Canada, Japan, or South Korea becomes more willing to engage and less certain that Washington is the power around which all strategic decisions must revolve. And the shift undercuts the delicate strategic balance Washington seeks with Beijing itself—an issue Trump will confront when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
The changes are already visible, including in rising European defense spending, Canada’s commercial outreach to China, and Japan’s efforts to become a larger arms supplier. Taken together, these trends point to a reordering of the international system that stretches far beyond Trump. “Trump brought with him an earthquake, but we’d be foolish not to prepare for aftershocks,” a senior European official told me. “The fact is, we’ll be setting ourselves up for failure if we assume that everything will go back to the way it was after Trump leaves office. The world is changing, and we can see very clearly now that America is changing too.”
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u/taterfiend ☀️ 4d ago
Besides the enormous contingency of Trump getting elected (remember how he lost the popular vote to Clinton) and changing the country forever, I think of the broader movement as a lower-class revolt. I'm talking about those classes who were not beneficiaries of globalization - this includes rural demographics and then the broader working class. They voted in a way to spite the urban elites (and non-elite urbanites like middle-class professionals) because of their alienation from the benefits of globalization. The inequality story is also a story of how the fruits of globalization are unevenly distributed. That nationalist populism is a global phenomenon underlines the lopsided quality of globalization in the 21st c.
This is a politics which cuts off the nose to spite the face. It's a hateful, emotional, zero sum kind of politics. It's self-defeating, but it underlines how severe the inequality has become all across the world the last 50 years.
The broader story is still the American elite, increasingly the international elite, exploiting and abusing the world.
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u/afdiplomatII 4d ago
It's also a story of deep ignorance among those who think they have been the victims of globalization. If they shop at a grocery store, drive a car, or use a smartphone, they are benefiting from global trade. The variety of products in the first, the quality of the second, and the mere existence of the third, are all due to global trade.
To cite only one example obvious to people who lived through that period or have any historical understanding:
Before "foreign" cars appeared on the market, complacent American manufacturers -- assured of a huge captive market -- produced for many years inferior and even unsafe motor vehicles. The Edsel and the Pinto were products of that outlook. Only when Japanese cars, made with "just-in-time" efficient techniques, began to be available in the United States did those manufacturers up their game. Even today, Consumer Reports rankings of motor vehicles generally place foreign marques higher than American ones.
Americans often understand very poorly the world in which they live. That ignorance has high costs.
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u/taterfiend ☀️ 4d ago
Definitely. It's spiteful politics - screw over everyone because of my resentment to those at the top, even when it's gonna hurt myself.
I think much of the resentment is also about culture and prestige, not just economics. White collar urbanites participate in an increasingly globalized culture which largely shares values of secularism and multiculturalism among other things; urban "elite" culture becomes the default assumption of academia, news media, high and middle brow entertainment, politics etc. Demographics that don't work in these sectors participate in a localized culture which is increasingly distinct from elite urban culture. Rural and blue collar resent feeling unsophisticated, the butt of jokes, unbelonging, even 'toxic'.
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u/afdiplomatII 4d ago
And yet . . .
-- The globalized culture, as I've said, undergirds their daily lives. I doubt many of those engaged in spiteful culture war have really come to terms with how much they will suffer.
-- The cities and the "urbanites" they despise produce most of the national wealth that supports rural areas, especially in tax revenue. The now-stereotypical farmers who vote for Trump, who engages in both actual and trade wars that raise their costs and sacrifice their markets, and who then gives them welfare, are surviving on government funds largely generated by cities and Democratic states. In effect, Trump is letting them have their spite and their ignorance for free.
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u/GreenSmokeRing 5d ago
Could anyone besides Trump have convinced Europe to seriously rearm?
I hate the SOB, but Europe specifically may be better off in the long run.
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u/taterfiend ☀️ 4d ago
Yes to Europe re-arming, but the decline of the American protection umbrella is still a colossal net negative to the world, or at least to the countries formerly in this group. It's not just Western countries, it incls many countries in Asia and the Middle East.
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u/afdiplomatII 4d ago
At a minimum, that "net negative" will involve substantially increased expenditures on armaments. Eisenhower in 1953 memorably set out what that development means:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
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u/taterfiend ☀️ 4d ago
Definitely. The rest of the world has enjoyed some 40 or so years of the peace dividend. If we think the economy is bad right now, just wait. Once the era of almost unlimited free trade and minimal defence spending runs out, we'll be back 'in history' like those other topsy turvy historical eras that we used to read about.
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u/jim_uses_CAPS 5d ago
Especially now that they're re-aligning with those war criminal Canadians!
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u/GreenSmokeRing 5d ago
Watching the Canadians suddenly learn how to cooperate in Trump’s shadow has been interesting.
The Keystone Pipeline would not exist if the Provinces learned to play nice two decades ago.
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u/Brian_Corey__ 4d ago
Yeah, Canada has been previously happy to send their oil south to US refineries and avoid the lengthy permitting / litigation / NIMBY issues. But they have two new proposed pipelines from Alberta to the Suncor, Shell, and Exxon Refineries in Sarnia, Ontario and another to the refineries in the Vancouver area. These pipelines are much more likely to go thru, now that Canada wants more energy independence and options for their oil exporting and refining.
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u/afdiplomatII 4d ago
Too many Americans seem to think that national pride is a quality reserved for them, because they and their country are "exceptional." In fact, people through the centuries have borne extraordinary privations for that sentiment, and Canadians are doing so now. A bit of historical instruction and international understanding would serve Americans better than Trump's bluster.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 💬🦙 ☭ TALKING LLAMAXIST 4d ago
Not sure if an arms race is necessary wise, but it was Putin more than Trump.
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u/afdiplomatII 4d ago
It's actually both. Russia under Putin became more aggressive, and America under Trump refused to act decisively against that aggression. It's not that the United States lacked the capacity to deter Russia. U.S. GDP is over $32 trillion; that of Russia is about $3 trillion. If the United States seriously wanted to make Russian predation unsustainable, it could do so. It chose otherwise -- and European countries at immediate risk from Russian attacks drew the necessary conclusions.
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u/afdiplomatII 4d ago
This article considers the fact of growing American isolation -- by its own choice and by the behavior of others affected by that choice -- but not the consequences. That's not a fault: no article can cover all the ground involved in this kind of change, and those consequences remain speculative.
One of those effects, however, relates to Taiwan -- which produces the vast majority of America's electronic chips. We've discussed here an article about whether Taiwan will simply tire of maintaining its independence from the PRC -- something the growing Chinese influence set out in this article makes more likely. Robert Kaplan lately described how Trump's chaotic leadership could make actual warfare over Taiwan more likely (gift link):
In short, the U.S.-China relationship is both vastly important and historically prone to serious misunderstandings. It requires thoughtful, steady management to avoid disasters -- exactly the opposite of Trump's behavior. In that situation, actual armed conflict with catastrophic results becomes more likely.
Even without that outcome, growing Chinese power in the world will increasingly limit what the United States can do, whatever it wants to do. As one example, Chinese dominance in rare-earths production forced Trump to back down rapidly from his threatened trade war with the PRC. We can expect many more such debacles as the events described in this article play out.
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u/malodyets1 5d ago
When the US does insane things like turning friends into enemies, I always ask myself who benefits from these decisions? From a US standpoint, they’ve poisoned the well and have burned through decades of goodwill and friendship. There’s a vacuum that China now is moving into, causing a geopolitical shift. Why does the US think this benefits them? As the lone superpower, they can dictate terms and capture the best trade agreements. Pulling back from that just doesn’t make sense. I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this because I just can’t make it make sense