Donald Trump’s bruising return to the White House has sent many longtime foreign allies scrambling to get their distance, and according to a new piece from The Atlantic, that distance will last long after Trump is gone.
Trump’s second term as president has been marked by notable and widespread disrespect toward nations once seen as close U.S. allies. Between his attempts to level massive tariffs against nearly every nation in the world and his frequent breaches of diplomatic norms, Trump has created a hostile global environment in which allies no longer feel safe trusting in the stability of the U.S.
In a new piece for The Atlantic on Tuesday, staff writer Vivian Salama argued that this new dynamic, in which the nations of the world are working to establish a safe distance from the U.S., is bound to become the new normal for years to come, even after Trump leaves office and is potentially replaced by a more traditional, dependable administration.
As an American I have no doubt that our relationship with our allies will improve once we restore some sanity to the White House, but we’ve forced our allies to diversify their trade to brunt the impact of our tariffs and now that they’ve done so I don’t see any sane reason why they would undo that.
Well then you haven’t been paying attention.
We have committed some of the worst war crimes of the modern era
We threatened to INVADE MULTIPLE ALLIES
We have constantly lied and broken multiple signed agreements
Our allies have permanently changed large scale trade operations to China for stability
The dollar has decreased in value
Allies have removed bonds and gold reserves from our country.
Allowed a bloated and swollen pedophilic rapist to go on tv and threaten to nuke a civilization at the UN
Ostracized ourselves by launching state run media and threatening to dismantle the ICC (which is investigating us for warcrimes)
Allowed the president’s family to invade and steal islands from sovereign nations (we all know what they want islands for)
And more!
No. There is no going back. The country was couped and is dead. Take a look at who is running every agency within government and you go ahead and tell yourself in the mirror that when trump doesn’t accept the election results, he won’t, that Kash Patel and Tom Homan will send DHS and the FBI to arrest trump. Maybe the Military run by kegsbreath and the businessman secretaries will come get him? Maybe the US Marshals will come get him- oh wait, they gave Trump a marshal badge and said he is the “highest law enforcement officer in the land”
A country of delusional peasants.
America used to be dependable to its allies. Treacherous, but in predictable ways. Now the seal is broken, and it’s been proved that any norm can be ignored. So that’s never going to return to how it was. Its now firmly in the category of erratic unstable partners and that will not change with any successor.
Was it? I mean America went through a relatively short period of a several decades of stability during its golden age for sure, but the time scale we’re talking about is so short it means little to nothing. The European mindset of some kind of “before and after” due to trump is a level of historical blindness that defies belief.
America has been in open war with most of its modern allies throughout its short 250 year existence, several of which were in this past century. For gods sake America dropped two nukes on civilian population centers in one of its closest modern day allies.
And on the flip side of that, you have to step back and consider the fact that there are people alive today who remember their homes being carpet bombed by German planes during that period where Germany elected a fascist dictator, the likes of which all others to this day are compared against, and proceeded to slaughter half of Europe while simultaneously committing the largest genocide ever recorded in human history. And yet Germany’s reputation among European nations appears to have completely recovered in a shorter time span than America’s “dependable ally” era lasted.
In fairness to Germany we had the Nuremberg trials where the top Nazis were held accountable for their crimes and hanged. You could argue that the current American administrations crimes are not on a par with Nazi Germany’s, which I would agree with but accountability is not in the Americans vocabulary. Trump and his team have suffered no consequences from the Jan 6th insurrection, I don’t think anyone will face any consequences for supporting Israel’s genocide both at the UN and in supplying the weapons to keep it going. I can’t see anyone being punished for the war crimes committed in Iran, worst of all bombing a little girls school killing 120 children.
America’s biggest loss under trump has been in the soft power they have spent the last 100 years building. The mask has fully slipped with no plausible deniability about what America is and where they are headed. We in Europe will still cynically do business with you, the USA remains the global military and financial hegemon but the public support is gone for a generation at least.
The Nuremberg trials were not conducted by Germany and aren’t an example of the nation holding their own leaders accountable, so in fairness it doesn’t really compare to America failing to hold its own leaders accountable for Jan 6th. And in fact despite the Nuremberg trials being conducted by the Allied powers, those same allied powers (USA included) absolutely committed subversions of justice for the Nazis by recruiting many into government research programs.
So Germany failed to hold the Nazis to account, and unfortunately the rest of the world did to some degree too.
I think this whole thread is full of rose-tinted glasses and vague ideas of international justice and American Moral Exceptionalism that didn’t really exist
Germany as a nation teaches its children about all their dark history and acknowledges the atrocities committed. Their leaders were held to account at Nuremberg while the country was under allied occupation, I accept your point that it was not Germany themselves holding them to account but the country as a whole accepts responsibility for their crimes in a way the USA couldn’t even imagine.
The USA on the other hand has never accepted formal responsibility for the genocide of the native American population.
The subversions of justice you mentioned by the allied powers, I fail to see the point you are making mentioning this.
Your view that it will be business as usual after the current American regime is what I think is rose tinted. The USA used to get away with the atrocities they committed using a combination of plausible deniability and soft power. This is no longer an option post the current trump regime, this is the point. This loss of soft power with their former allies will only hasten the USA’s downfall and it is hard to see them maintaining their current dominant position going forward. The USA’s current prosperity is borrowed not earned and is in part financed by their allies. The current bond market is an indicator of what is to come.
Germany as a nation teaches its children about their dark history now many years after the fact (it appears to not be working). The U.S. isn’t in the “after the fact” period yet so it’s hard to predict what they could imagine at this point.
The subversions of justice you mentioned by the allied powers, I fail to see the point you are making mentioning this.
The allied European nations didn’t fully hold the Nazis to account for their crimes against humanity, so there’s no historical precedent to suggest that they will fully hold America to account with what’s going on now.
Your view that it will be business as usual after the current American regime is what I think is rose tinted
My point is if Germany can be back to business as usual mere decades after the events of WW2, there’s no reason to think the U.S. won’t be back to business as usual in the same timeframe if not even less.
Why do you think Germany teaching kids about the horrors they committed during ww2 hasn’t been working? I haven’t noticed a 4th Reich rising!
We do not need to get into the difficulties in holding other nations to account for crimes permitted in a different nation and the lack of laws at the time to prosecute most of the 2nd and 3rd tier Nazis or the underlying antisemitism that was not limited to Nazi Germany in Europe at the time as that is a different conversation.
I agree with you when you speak of people’s short memories when it comes to making money in a cynical business sense over the long term. The USA’s danger at the moment is all in the short term, the trust they have lost will take decades of good foreign policy and reliability which I can’t see happening with the current divide in American politics. Any olive branches offered by the democrats will likely be undone by the republicans and it is this unreliability that will be the death of the American economy. The USA has been the most reliable and trusted trading partner for the last century. The uncertainty is what has the rest of the world decoupling from the USA right when they are starting to feel the burden of their national debt that used to be bought up by the rest of the world.
The bond market is now showing cracks, the USA’s financial dominance over the last 35 years has been built primarily on the tech boom they have experienced. They went all in on AI and are now doubling down like a gambler as China offers free open source alternatives making an AI dominance look unlikely. China is now the most interesting tech innovator in robotics and manufacturing. I can’t see how things go back to normal for the states after this, only a long period of decline and loss of relevance on the world stage. I do not take joy from this, my own country’s current financial boom is overly reliant on these American companies.
Yeah eventually maybe, but the problem is we’ve shown TWICE now that we’ll elect someone erratic and petulant. Nobody should trust the US because even with a sane leader, you can’t be guaranteed you’ll be greeted with sanity 4 years later. Every deal struck may or may-not be shredded with the next admin.
Uh we’ve done it a lot more than twice.
