The leader of the free world doesn’t believe in the free world

The leader of the free world doesn’t believe in the free world and doesn’t want to lead it. Such is clear from US President Donald Trump’s ugly Oval Office exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his withholding of US military aid, security guarantees and vital intelligence from a democracy fighting for its survival, even as he eases pressure on its authoritarian invader.
 

This is not the savvy use of leverage to end a forever war. Rather, it is the capitulation of a president determined to do a deal with a dictator, regardless of the cost.

Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States into World War II – and into the world – by persuading Americans they had a stake in preventing aggression in Europe and Asia. Every US president since FDR has defined the US national interest broadly. They understood that global leadership enables Washington to embed its own values and interests in the international system.
 

Donald Trump disagrees with them all.
 

FDR defeated America First; Trump has revived it.
 

John F. Kennedy promised that America would “pay any price” and “bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty”. Trump reckons it is for others to pay the price and bear the burden. Liberty is for losers.

Ronald Reagan believed “no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries … do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have.”
 

Trump takes a different view. “We have a lot of killers,” he once said when it was put to him that Vladimir Putin is a killer. “You think our country is so innocent?”
 

Most of the foreign policy themes of Trump’s second term are familiar from his first. He remains sceptical of alliances, though, of course, Moscow or Beijing would dearly love to have alliance networks as powerful and cost-effective as those of the US. Trump still prefers the company of autocrats and strongmen to democratic leaders. His hostility to free trade has intensified. Tariff is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, he says: both a means to force concessions from other states and a revenue-raising end in itself.
 

But Trump 2.0 also contains an innovation. Trump has always believed, despite the evidence, that America is on the wrong end of the global deal: ripped off and disrespected. Last time, his solution was to reduce America’s stake: to retrench, to withdraw from international institutions and geographies. This time, Trump’s idea is to increase America’s payout: to expand, to grab more protection money and more land.

Trump’s stated desire to acquire new territories for the US, including Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada and Gaza – in some cases, perhaps, through the use of force – is genuinely shocking. It blurs the clear, bright line breached by Russia in its brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. It may well encourage China to chance its arm on Taiwan. If this were to occur, it is unlikely that Trump would deploy America’s forces in Taiwan’s defence. He seems more disposed to seek an accommodation with Beijing than a confrontation.

The irony is that Trump’s plans to make America great again will subvert the pillars of American greatness. The US alliance network is a key comparative advantage vis-a-vis its adversaries. America’s companies and entrepreneurs dominate the international economy. Trump’s graceless conduct will alienate the world.

The genius of FDR and his successors lay in the fact that they were able to achieve what historian John Lewis Gaddis described as “hegemony by consent”. America’s friends could see a place for themselves in Washington’s world view, so they went along with Washington’s ways.

But if you push your friends to the brink in every negotiation – if you demand the very minerals from the land they are defending with their lives, and then insist they thank you for the privilege – well, then, sooner or later, that consent will evaporate.

“The free world needs a new leader,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas. But Europe is not up to this task. The hope of the free world – especially Australia and other US allies in Asia – must be that the fever in Washington will soon pass.