Yes, the US has changed—because the world has changed
From Canberra and London to Ottawa, Brussels and beyond, politicians, professors and pundits are raging against the United States.
Some warn it has just about transformed itself into a rogue state that may soon be as great a threat to the allies as are China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The upshot of their storyline is that the administration of President Donald Trump has in just six months betrayed allies, embraced dictators and set the stage for World War III. Or, as more crassly put by some, a madman with a Sharpie and a poor grasp of high school economics has single-handedly plunged the world into chaos.
This is both exaggeration and a dangerously misguided mindset.
If the world were a simple place and hostile states were not on the rise, the Blame Trump theory of international politics might be harmless. But in a world that is all too reminiscent of the late 1930s, navigating the challenges requires facing some hard truths. The first among them is that the US did not cause the global order to collapse at the stroke of a Sharpie, that it did not unleash economic war on its allies on par with Beijing’s cauldron of predatory practices, and that it did not shapeshift into a rogue state from which we had all best run away at top speed.
Yes, the US has changed—because the world has changed.
In just three decades, complex structural forces and the behaviour of malign states have undermined the post-war order. They have eroded the liberal democracies’ collective economic might and power of military deterrence and thereby set the stage for major-power war. Making matters worse, the greatest adversary of the liberal democracies has gained control of technologies and critical infrastructures essential to our societies, daily lives, and national security. That’s China, which makes, for example, the solar panels on our roofs, the batteries in our electric cars and, for many of us, the equipment and software that supports, and perhaps monitors, our telecommunications.
It is against this sobering backdrop that the US is resetting relations with allies and adversaries. And, of course, we don’t like everything the US is doing, particularly its failure to separate friend from foe in some of its actions. We must stand up to the White House when it falls short—but speaking truth to power is incomplete when we criticise only Washington.
In the Indo-Pacific, which countries spoke out against Beijing’s April claim of sovereignty over Sandy Cay in the South China Sea? (Two—the US and the Philippines.) And in the Euro-Atlantic, how many NATO allies, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, were honouring their defence spending commitments to support the US against breaches of the international rules about which they now reminisce? (Hardly any.) It is now a different story, in part because of Russia’s actions, but also because Trump has forced NATO allies to have uncomfortable conversations on defence spending.
The outcomes of the NATO summit in June—with NATO allies committing to increased defence spending and Trump reiterating US commitment to Article 5—show that difficult conversations can lead to better security outcomes and reinforce collective commitment to protecting national security and international rules. To be clear, NATO’s increased defence spending was not a gift to the US, but vital to the national security of each individual NATO member.
For too long the rest of us took for granted that the US would just accept the global security burden while we accepted economic benefit from Moscow and Beijing. The US must share the blame, too—for doing too little to form a powerful collective of those valuing individual freedoms.
Now understanding the world as it is, the US is moving at speed to rebuild its national power, safeguard itself against hostile states and arrest the growing risk of a major hot war. The first Trump administration began the process, and the Biden administration pushed it forward with vigor. Now Trump and his officials have turned the dial much further.
Facing a worsened and still worsening geopolitical outlook, the primary tasks of liberal democracies are reinforcing the US’s power of deterrence and giving Washington compelling reasons to continue serving as the anchor of the alliance against authoritarianism.
While raging at the US, its allies should stop to consider a painful truth: having let their militaries fall into relative decline and wilfully ensnared themselves in Beijing’s economic and technological webs, they have made themselves vulnerable to their enemies. To the extent that it has made the same mistake, the US is striving to correct the error.
We could indeed use a little emulation by US allies of some Trump administration policies towards China.
This, and further efforts to build military strength, would show the seriousness needed to gain renewed US commitment to serve as the anchor ally. Without it, US allies are at high risk of losing without fighting, capitulating to ever-worsening aggression from Russia and China because they cannot fight back.
Certainly the allies should call out America’s unfair, arguably brutish, approach to resetting its relations with them. And they must work together in fields where they formerly left it to the US to lead.
Yet this must not mean seeking to do without the US. An Australian, Canadian or British claim to freedom from dependence on the US might have popular appeal. But it would make us all less safe in a world in which Beijing is leading an authoritarian axis hell bent on replacing the democratic rules-based order with an authoritarian one.
When we largely focus our annoyance on Washington, not Beijing, we do Beijing’s work for it. We play down Beijing’s decades-long campaign of hostility against us, we invite worse aggression from it, and we make ourselves even less attractive allies to the US. Then Beijing moves one step closer to winning.
This article is an updated expansion of one written by Raquel Garbers and published in the Toronto Star.
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