America First, as practiced by President Donald Trump in his second term, will instead — and probably sooner rather than later — amount to America Isolated or even America Hated. How such an outcome will Make America Great Again is beyond me, and should give Trumpies pause for reflection before it’s too late.
With respect to foreign policy, Trump campaigned on the promise that he would, through sheer “strength,” be a peacemaker, settling wars such as Russia’s against Ukraine within 24 hours and preventing new ones from breaking out. But since his re-election, and especially since his inauguration, Trump has adopted a new tone. It’s one he’s been accustomed to using in domestic affairs: that of bully.
Trump has already threatened: Denmark, because he wants Greenland; Panama, because he wants its isthmian canal; Canada, because he wants to incorporate it as the 51st state; Colombia, because it briefly balked at receiving a few planeloads of its migrants; and South Africa, because he’s become convinced that its government is racist, meaning anti-White.
He’s also indirectly threatened two other American partners, Egypt and Jordan, because he wants to “take ownership” of the Gaza Strip, which would require coercively resettling its 2 million people in other countries in the region. And he’s brandished trade tariffs at America’s trading partners, including Canada, Mexico and the European Union. (Curiously, he has not, so far, talked nearly as tough to America’s adversaries, notably Russia and China.)
How are those countries — and others, because the whole world is watching — likely to respond? In the 1980s, Stephen Walt, a scholar in the realist school of international relations, developed a theory to answer that question.
Walt updated the traditional realist notion that countries or empires generally strive for a “balance of power” by forming alliances against whichever among them is mightiest. That can’t be right, Walt argued, because a lot of nations should then have ganged up against the U.S. after World War II, when America turned into the stronger of two superpowers.
After the Cold War, when the world briefly became unipolar and the U.S. was unchallenged, even more nations should have coalesced against it. But the opposite happened. The U.S. kept attracting more friends over time, today numbering about 70 allies and many more trading partners.
The reason: America stood for a benevolent rather than a hostile hegemony. It voluntarily restrained and deployed its might to safeguard an open trading system and the norms of international law, in what became known as the Pax Americana or the “rules-based” international order. Other countries, especially small ones, felt safer under American leadership and wanted to belong to these U.S.-led networks. Nations only form new alliances against a country such as the U.S. when that power becomes both might and menacing. The best label to explain international relations is not balance-of-power but balance-of-threat.
Nations only form new alliances against a country such as the U.S., Walt hypothesized, when that power becomes both mighty and menacing (as Wilhelmine Germany did during the late 19th century, say). The best label to explain international relations, he suggested, is not balance-of-power but balance-of-threat.
America in this new Trump era does appear to have turned from benevolent to threatening power. Trump disdains the Pax Americana (he considers it a rip-off) and seems fine with imperialism as long as he gets to be a player, even if that means letting the world revert to anarchy.
And as Walt’s theory predicts, countries do seem to be accelerating their efforts to find alternative arrangements in trade and security that exclude the U.S. The European Union is talking to countries in Latin America and Asia; more nations are joining BRICS, a club that sees itself as an alternative to the U.S.-led Group of Seven; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is linking up with the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Middle East; and so forth.
The change is especially mind-boggling if you know where to look. Last weekend, the incumbent chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, debated his challenger, Friedrich Merz, ahead of this month’s federal election. Since World War II, West Germany and then the reunited nation viewed the U.S. as a sort of “father figure” — as conqueror-turned-savior and also mentor in democracy. Merz even used to chair the Atlantik-Brücke (“Atlantic Bridge”), an organization to promote German-American friendship.
And yet these two, while tearing into each other on just about every other topic, seemed matter-of-fact in agreeing that America has gone from friend to threat. Merz even related the private concerns that Denmark’s prime minister has shared with him. Both agreed that in trade and everything else, Europe, including Britain (which left the EU), must stick together, not with but against the US.
Trump as a person and MAGA as a movement are making a catastrophic mistake in conflating whimsical and immature displays of strength — the strength to hurt weaker friends — with the more lasting glory that comes from using power to make the world safer and better, by drawing friends closer and keeping foes at bay. America under Trump has become a threat. Let nobody be surprised when the world once again looks for balance, and America ends up alone.
