The alliance Trump built trying to break it

At this year’s NATO summit, Donald Trump appears to have achieved a long-awaited victory.

For a full decade, he has pushed and threatened allies to increase their defence spending. At one point, he even put the commitments of Article 5 in jeopardy if other NATO countries did not submit to his will.

Since his return to office, defence spending across NATO is up (Opens in new window). The organisation itself is opening to new deals and new manufacturers, putting a far greater emphasis on production than the alliance ever had. Countries are making historic investments as the promises of a post-Second World War pax americana wear off.

What looks like a victory for Trump may also be the beginning of a world in which America’s allies learn to need it less.

Much of that money is heading toward American defence contractors. Under the guise of a renewed isolationism, Trump created a market signal that would send billions back to the domestic economy at a time when it needs a boost.

The problem lies in the term of the deal he is creating. The money being spent by NATO and other allies is not simply more spending within the old order but on planning for a new arrangement in which American support is conditional.

In the short term, countries will spend billions acquiring American-made weapons systems, which involves trainers and technical support that will carry for decades. In the long term, they are already looking to build capacity toward a more self-sufficient era.

Last year, the EU mandated (Opens in new window) that half of all defence spending by 2030 stay within Europe, rising to 60% (Opens in new window) by 2035. Many of those same European countries are looking to Ukraine to import battle-born systems from outside the US industrial complex as well.

The pattern isn’t new. When the Biden administration weaponised the dollar (Opens in new window) to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine rather than supporting Ukraine militarily, it triggered the same reflex. Allies didn’t abandon the dollar, but they began quietly diversifying their reserves. They treated American financial power as something that could be turned on them as easily as on an adversary.

Europe has institutions that can absorb this move. NATO, the EU, and the sprawling eurocracy allow for these threats to be spread across a whole continent. Defence procurement is far easier at scale, and a realignment is happening around the terms set forward by Mark Carney’s speech (Opens in new window) at Davos earlier in the year that called for a reimagining of the political ties of the West to no longer rely on the sole hegemony of the United States.

When faced with this question of how to wean themselves off from an increasingly transactional and political American command, Europe has options made possible by collective power.

The Asia-Pacific does not have such a network. It faces the same strategic problem – arguably a more potent one given the static charge currently being stored in the South China Sea, ready to snap at the next available moment. And yet it lacks the collective architecture to readily find alternatives to unstable American capacity.

As every country in the region rebalances itself along the US-China axis, no country can simply wait for Washington’s mood to change and a new President to reset these relationships. Trump has proved a domestic political appetite for treating allies and alliances as transactional pawns rather than the old deal of using them as pillars that supported American leadership in the world.

Trump has now spent a decade telling American allies that they should depend less on the United States. He has used every tool at his disposal, and many that were never his to begin with, to make that case.

Allies are beginning to put plans in motion. They cannot entirely abandon the United States, and nor should they entirely. But the question has now emerged whether they can build enough regional strength, industrial capacity, and political coordination that an alliance with the United States becomes a choice made from resilience rather than a dependence on which the United States has relied for many decades.

That resilience is worth wanting on its own terms. A democratic order propped up by a single guarantor is an order only one election away from collapse. Spreading the load of defence, production, and political commitment across a wider set of capable states makes the entire system harder to break so that failure can be isolated and resolved.

The tragedy is the method. Trump is not wrong that the old arrangement needed correcting, and he may even be right that dependence over decades gave way to complacency. But the terms of the deal he is forcing on the world leaves countries questioning the costs of alliance rather than being persuaded of the benefits of sharing burdens.

The consequences of that question may well be the shape of the current Western order itself.