From the very start, the foreign policy of the second Trump Administration has been described as unreliable. The highly personalised nature of the government (decision-making resembles medieval absolutism) and the dressing down of Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelensky in February are among the many reasons America’s partners and allies felt they were tied to a country they could no longer fully understand or trust.
Will Washington treat its alliance commitments the same way as its trade deals?
To date, Washington has not tested the reliability of its security guarantee with allies and partners. The flip-flopping on Ukraine is the closest it has come. Yet, in the end, Washington remains supportive of Kyiv and even though President Trump seems rather too desperate to rack up another photo opportunity “peace deal”, American reliability has held up. So far.
Outside the security realm, however, things have been rather different. In April, Washington shredded dozens of trade agreements, ditching decades-old commitments with close partners and enemies alike. Australia and Israel have free trade agreements with Washington that are no longer worth the paper on which they were written. Mexico and Canada agreed to a revision of their free-trade zone in Trump’s first term, and that too has been treated with disdain. Washington had spent close to two decades building up relations with India only to incinerate those efforts by leaving India to face some of the heaviest tariffs the US has imposed on any nation. Economically speaking, it is hard to imagine a less reliable partner than Trump’s America.
The recent publication of the administration’s National Security Strategy is the latest example of its decidedly enigmatic approach to international policy. The Strategy is oddly contradictory on America’s global role – simultaneously rejecting global dominance as a fool’s errand while asserting that dominance is precisely what it is trying to achieve. It seems fixated on the internal politics of allies and utterly unconcerned about the vicious authoritarianism of countries like China, Russia and North Korea.
But the most striking feature is that the document in many ways does not matter at all. Washington will do whatever Trump wants regardless of whether or not it aligns with the strategy.
National Security Strategies have been published by every administration since Reagan. They are closely read by friends and foes alike as they are serious statements about both the ends of US policy and the means through which they are pursued. While rarely perfect, they were taken seriously as sober efforts to signal what each administration was trying to achieve. This document may as well not have been written, such is the gap between the statements of intent and the reality of government action.
The combination of Trumpian mercurialism and the long term cracks in the foundations of American internationalism means American allies are likely to begin to develop a US-plus-one strategy.
For countries bound to the US, the turbulence and uncertainty is profoundly unsettling. Will Washington treat its alliance commitments the same way as its trade deals? Even if a country can manage to survive the dignity-sapping ordeal of a meeting with the president, what if Trump’s mood shifts? More importantly, the long term political forces that brought the president to office – extreme partisanship, scepticism about an internationalist foreign policy, and a corrosive cynicism about politics – are not going away when Trump departs. Can allies assume the America that made the North Atlantic and East Asian alliance systems will be there indefinitely?
This is a dilemma of immense significance. Countries like Australia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines have organised their defence strategies on the assumption that American power will be ever present. They have structured their militaries on that basis and organised other political and budgetary priorities on the belief that American military power will provide the bulk of regional stability. What do you do if that faith turns out to have been misplaced?
The Biden administration somewhat surprisingly opted to maintain and then significantly ramp up tariffs and broader economic pressure on China. Decoupling the US from China became a core aim of US policy and as a result, many companies began to develop China-plus-one strategies. That is, they sought to hedge the risk of delinking by establishing one business plan for the China market – whose scale meant it could not be ignored – and another for the rest of the world. "Plus-one" was about diversifying away from dependence on China.
The combination of Trumpian mercurialism and the long term cracks in the foundations of American internationalism means American allies are likely to begin to develop a US-plus-one strategy. Like businesses that cannot turn away from China entirely, America’s allies are bound to Washington in the short to medium term. But they increasingly recognise the need to diversify away from an America that is unreliable and may well turn away entirely from the global constabulary role it took on after the Cold War.
In the short term, countries like Japan, Australia, Korea and Taiwan have no option but to remain engaged with the US. This is because their own defence strategies, force structures and doctrines are predicated on the US being Asia’s primary power and assumptions about US long-term strategy. They cannot turn their backs on the US even if it is unreliable. To provide the same level of security themselves is a generational task.
The allies had a friend on whom they could once depend. They now have to look after themselves and work out how, individually and, hopefully, collectively, they can diversify their dependence. The magnitude of this task cannot be overstated.
