The end of alliances: Trump treats friends much the same as rivals
This is not just about trade. The enormity of what is happening with the return to power of an “America First” president should not be overlooked.
The UK “is way out of line”. The “European Union is really out of line… it’s an atrocity what they’ve done”.
Donald Trump’s comments about trade and his threats of large tariffs are not what you would expect of the leader of an allied nation. They sound more like an emperor demanding tribute and fealty from subject nations.
That, though, is where we are. It may be - as the battered markets outside the US seem to expect - that, on the economy, his bite turns out to be less than his bark and that some compromise short of a global trade war is reached. His view of the world is not going to change and that matters to everyone.
President Trump is treating friends such as Mexico and Canada in the same way that he is treating his geostrategic rival, China. Like France and the UK, Canada is a fellow member of both NATO and the G7. The US’s North American neighbours have responded to tariff intimidation politically by making modest concessions on border security, leading to a delay in tariffs on both sides. China has imposed major tariffs on American imports, pending talks between Xi and Trump.
Perhaps the UK leaders can avoid the worst of it with a deft mixture of flattery and keeping their heads down. But this is not just about trade. The enormity of what is happening with the return to power of an “America First” president should not be overlooked.
This democratically elected president, whose predecessors revelled in being called the “Leader of the Free World”, has set to smashing up the global rules-based order, while also demolishing the checks and balances on his rule at home.
Economic hostility extends beyond tariffs, to dismantling USAID, and the immediate suspension of all foreign aid. Trump is ripping apart the NATO alliance, the cornerstone of Britain’s defence. There will be dire humanitarian consequences from cancelled programmes. China and Russia, with the avowed intention of breaking western hegemony, will step forward with their alliance of convenience around the BRICS.
Rather than being used to search for common ground, the United Nations and its institutions are increasingly being deployed by the BRICS to vilify the US and its perceived allies.
Inside the Western alliance, one NATO member, the US, is demanding that another, Canada, give up its independence and place itself under US control or suffer economic and political attack.
That same NATO “ally” now has avowedly “expansionary” ambitions. It is demanding that another NATO member state, Denmark, should surrender territory, Greenland, to it. Meanwhile Trump has invited Russia “to do whatever they want” to any NATO member state which does not match his demands for defence spending – currently put at 5% of GDP, considerably more than the current defence budget of the US itself.
We are living through not the “End of History”, the final triumph of liberal democracy, but quite possibly, through the end of alliances which have sheltered the developed world since 1945.
Donald Trump is the prime mover of the current chaos but he did not start it. The US squandered the “unipolar moment” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it appeared that it alone could set the terms for a democratic and prosperous 21st century. The US pulled back from multilateral institutions, dragged its economic allies into recession through reckless capitalism and went to war in the Middle East with no clear objective.
Other countries and alliances also turned inward. Without the clout of the US as an ally, they had little alternative but to compete and try to look after themselves. This necessarily resulted in the questioning of the value of the alliances they found themselves inside.
The Western Allies said they were “all Americans now” after the 9/11 in 2001 and NATO allies went “shoulder to shoulder” to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan, although they failed in their prime objective of punishing Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In the aftermath, military alliances fractured as the US pressed on with military action against some of the “Axis of Evil”, although they had not been responsible for the attacks on America.
The UK insisted on invading Iraq alongside the United States but France, with the backing of many European Union member states, fought the action all the way to the United Nations security council. The UK has never recognised the bitterness left behind by the vicious attacks made against European allies by British political leaders, goaded by UK’s largely foreign owned media. The rupture with EU began then. So did the political estrangement between Europe and the US. It was slowed a little by President Obama, even as he pointed out that the US was pivoting away to the Pacific.
All of which weakened the cohesion to the NATO alliance. Meanwhile in 2002, the EU expanded by taking in many of the nations which had belonged to the Soviet bloc. As an EU member, the UK had long championed new entrants – explicitly to “widen not deepen” the Union. Ostensibly a major advance for regional security and economic co-operation, new members such as Poland formerly and Hungary and Romania now, were soon diluting the EU’s sense of purpose.
In 2008, the limits of the European alliance’s ambitions were demonstrated. When NATO offered Georgia and Ukraine a non-binding mañana deal on ever becoming a full member. President Putin read the signals and subsequently took up the invitation by sending troops into both countries.
The referendum vote to leave the European Union was the UK’s contribution to the unravelling of alliances. Brexit took place against the advice of all major political parties – Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP. It manifested both the British public’s loss of faith in multinational institutions and their unwillingness to try to make them work. Inevitably, Brexit plunged relations between the UK and its nearest neighbours and major trading partners into the deep freeze. A thaw is only just beginning.
History does not repeat itself exactly but there are always echoes. The world has been in a similar condition before with an isolationist America and with unconfident, untrustful western democratic allies weary and squabbling over a diminishing pool of wealth. The distinguished American historian Timothy D Snyder suggests that the world has moved from the “post-war era” into a “pre-war period”.
Trump is accelerating this dangerous deterioration in stability, for his own selfish and, possibly, ultimately misguided reasons. We have all played our part. We will surely all suffer the consequences.