In January, he even threatened to seize Greenland by force from Denmark, a threat so shocking—even if it shouldn’t have been—that many European leaders agreed with the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, who used his speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to proclaim the end of the “pleasant fiction” that there was still such a thing as a U.S.-led liberal international order. As for Europe’s top security priority, helping Ukraine beat back Russia’s invasion, Trump has already ended all direct U.S. military assistance to Kyiv; repeatedly blamed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, rather than Putin, for the failure of U.S.-led peace talks; and, just this week, according to Zelensky, told Ukraine that it should agree to give away territory in the Donbas to Russia, in exchange for vague U.S. security guarantees. On Thursday, even as Trump was railing about NATO, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was considering diverting urgently needed weapons for Ukraine—which have been paid for by Europeans—to the Middle East.
At the same time, Russia, despite supplying Iran with both drones and targeting intelligence in its war against the U.S., has emerged as a major economic beneficiary of the conflict, with the Trump Administration announcing that it would temporarily lift sanctions on some Russian oil to help ease the supply crisis that its attack on Iran has created. (If the war ends by April, a study by the Kyiv School of Economics found, that decision would mean an eighty-four-billion-dollar windfall in export earnings for Moscow.) So Trump’s war, in effect, is now also funding Putin’s war. How’s that as a message to our allies?
During Trump’s first term, the establishment types, who coexisted uneasily in a White House with Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and other characters from the MAGA-rally stage, used to push back when Trump’s frequent bashing of U.S. allies and alliances was pointed out. One of the most enduring images of Trump’s tenure was from his first overseas trip, in the spring of 2017, when, at a NATO summit in Brussels, he shoved the leader of the tiny country of Montenegro aside in an apparent effort to better position himself for the cameras. At that same summit, the President, who had campaigned as a NATO skeptic—“Here’s the problem with NATO,” he said in 2016, “it’s obsolete”—changed his speech, at the last minute, to omit any mention of America’s commitment to the Article 5 pledge of mutual defense that is at the heart of the alliance.
Worried about the backlash, two of Trump’s more conventionally conservative aides—his national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, and his chief White House economic adviser, Gary Cohn—teamed up on Air Force One to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the way back to Washington. It was headlined “America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone.” The article became, in its way, an instant classic: an inversion of truth that proved the point it was meant to dispute. It was a perfect shorthand for the kind of rationales we were hearing every day from the rear-guard remnants of the pre-Trump Republican Party: He didn’t say what he said! He doesn’t want to do what he says he wants to do!
Rereading it now, when the Republican establishment is no more, and Trump’s White House is filled with sycophants who make his first-term officials seem like paragons of principle, the piece comes across not as parody so much as self-fulfilling prophesy: all that effort by Trump’s aides to pretend that he was not exactly who we knew him to be has, finally, fallen away. If anything, that long-ago Wall Street Journal piece can now be read as a sort of playbook in reverse for Trump 2.0. “Strong alliances bolster American power,” Cohn and McMaster wrote, and the President, they claimed, was deeply committed to “fostering cooperation and strengthening relationships with our allies and partners.”
