Rethinking the Transatlantic Bargain

It has been a long time coming: past assumptions about the relationship of allies with the United States no longer prevail. American voices of disruption to the multilateral world order emerged in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, only to be usurped by Bill Clinton’s unipolar moment and George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Trenchant observers saw the disruption of the second Trump administration coming. Yet, allies dispensed with preparing adequately, because they believed Trump I to be an outlier. Let us not repeat mistakes of the past: President Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of a world that has been undergoing major structural shifts. Since the pandemic, the pace of change has been accelerating. That explains why Trump II is unlike Trump I, and why the United States of America will never return to the status quo ante; allies had better get used to the “new normal”.

The United States has not been isolationist in its foreign policy since the late nineteenth century, but it has always been unilateralist. Allies find the Trump administration’s approach so jarring because they had grown used to “multilateral unilateralism” – US presidents trading in classical realism: projecting US power while legitimating decisions.

The allies’ preponderant relationship with the United States is coming under severe strain. Trump wants power and pursues American power from the perspective of structural realism. He leverages America’s disproportionately powerful instruments of statecraft without a guise of legitimation. Time to re-read John Mearsheimer: states have a deep concern for the balance of power and compete to gain power at the expense of others (or at least to make sure they do not lose power). Domestic and international structural conditions differ from Trump’s first term: After the pandemic, and with China now asserting itself as a peer rival, there is a real sense of urgency in Washington, bordering on alarm.

Allies had become (too) comfortable with the US as the guarantor of an international rules-based order that favoured their interests. Now, they are confronted with a United States that competes for power in a way that makes the world more dangerous, including, and possibly foremost, for allies. While adversaries came prepared, yet again, allies have been caught unaware. The administration in Washington is committed to prevail in every conflict. As Robert Kagan wrote in 2003, the rift between Paradise and Power: Europe and America in the New World Order opened in the aftermath of Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York on September 11, 2001. Any sense of a level playing field between America on the one hand, and allies, on the other, has been eviscerated.

The carnage in transatlantic relations to which we are witness was thus to be expected. In his prescient 2023 (!) book Canada Alone: Navigating the Post-American World, Kim Richard Nossal urges preparations to confront an illiberal and inward-looking America that is happy to jettison its role as leader of the West. Nossal predicts that allied insurance premiums for security and defence would rise exponentially and that a bipartisan protectionist consensus would jeopardise access to the US market. In a 2024 (!) podcast, Nossal posits Trump’s belief that allies are “just pretending to be friends and allies while eagerly ripping off long-suffering Americans through unfair trading practices and refusing to spend enough on defence.”

Among the schools of US foreign policy, Trump differs from his predecessors over the past 200 years insofar as he takes after the country’s 7^th president, Andrew Jackson. In Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, Walter Russell Mead summarises Jacksonianism as the belief “that the specific cultural, social, and political heritage of the United States is a precious treasure to be conserved, defended, and passed on to future generations; they celebrate what they see as the unique, and uniquely valuable, elements of American life and believe that the object of foreign policy should be to defend those values at home rather than to extend them abroad.” 

Prudent observers of the content and conduct of American foreign policy that characterises the Trump administration’s second term would do well to keep in mind five basic principles:

1. History matters: American foreign policy is influenced by events and policies going back to Colonial times.
2. Ideas matter: Many intellectual traditions have sought to describe how the United States relates to the rest of the world. At any given period, one or more of these ideas have guided policy.
3. Institutions matter: The content and conduct of U.S. foreign policy is a product of the promise of disharmony of the American Republican system of government with its division of powers, checks and balances.
4. Complexity: The United States formulates and conducts a globally engaged foreign policy in a multifaceted and uncertain international environment and an equally complex domestic setting.
5. Critical Empathy: Whatever the rational assessments or moral judgments about the conduct of American foreign policy, it is important to empathise with the difficulties and dilemmas the United States faces in securing its own interests and those of the many other states who seek to ally with it. Being powerful is not easy.

Allies should not keep calm and carry on: on foreign and defence policy, they are confronted with (much) higher transaction costs, lower returns on investment, and a more volatile and unpredictable partner in the US whose expectations of its allies will continue to grow. Allies can no longer take the United States for granted; they will need to be much more deliberate and intentional.