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By Dan Perry
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President Donald Trump has developed a strange way of treating America's friends. The mercurial president threatens and humiliates them and toys with their territorial integrity, while lavishing affection on rival strongmen and ideological fellow travelers who have figured out that the quickest route to favor is through his galaxy-sized ego.
It raises the question: is Trump putting the unity of the West itself at risk, and will it be too late to fix it when he finally leaves the world stage?
In the space of a few weeks, Trump has suggested the U.S. might reconsider its position on the Falkland Islands, pleasing his Argentinian friend Javier Milei at Britain's expense, and then, visiting Ireland, declared he would "love" to see Irish unification, which "may as well happen now."
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The Falklands’ residents overwhelmingly wish to remain British (99.8 percent), while Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. under a constitutional settlement whose delicacy has occupied statesmen for generations—while the landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement was a major American diplomatic achievement under President Bill Clinton.
The timing makes this extraordinary: the nationalist leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, meeting in Cardiff, are coordinating demands for separation from Britain, even as the American president has landed, intentionally or otherwise, alongside those who would dismantle the country.
Yet Trump treats such questions as chips in his personal political casino, to be moved around according to which despot he likes, which government offended him and perhaps what occurred to him five minutes earlier.
Britain is hardly alone in discovering that friendship with the U.S. looks paper thin. Around Europe, especially, Trump has been supporting "euroskeptics" and is openly celebrating political forces that would weaken or disband the Union.
When the far-right Alternative for Germany surged to 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt this month, crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats, Trump could scarcely contain his delight on Truth Social, attributing the result to Germany's "absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations" and proclaiming that the movement, whose proposals include easing up on remembrance of the Nazi era, would "Make Germany Great Again." Allies are horrified at this? That’s a feature, not a bug.
Canada, in some ways America’s closest ally over the years, with the longest peaceful border, has been subjected to Trump's tariffs, threats and extraordinary hostility—including repeated posting of maps showing it as part of the U.S. So Prime Minister Mark Carney is heading to Strasbourg this week to address the European Parliament as his government explores deeper economic and security integration with the European Union—instead of the one that Canada and the U.S. have enjoyed.
This is self-imposed damage on the American project to lead the free world in stability and prosperity, backed by all post-World War II presidents.
The interesting question, therefore, goes well beyond Trump's rudeness, narcissism or impulsiveness, subjects that have by now received enough attention to fill several presidential libraries. What remains after he is gone? While policies can be reversed with the stroke of a pen, countries that think they’ve learned a lesson about American reliability cannot be ordered to unlearn it.
Trump treating his election victory as a permanent American rejection of the liberal world order risked turning a political event into a self-fulfilling global prophecy. Carney’s approach is looking less premature by the day.
There is another odious flip side to this retreat from the West: Trump has repeatedly displayed a softness toward the dictators the Western alliance was built to contain. He has treated Russia's Vladimir Putin with a deference rarely extended to democratic allies, while approaching North Korea’s Kim Jong Un with the fascination he seems to reserve for strongmen who rule without constraint.
History occasionally produces political figures whose success depends upon an improbable combination of personality, timing and national neurosis. Trump’s political appeal in 2016 collided with an equally peculiar historical moment: the backlash to the Obama presidency, resentment of cultural and demographic change, fury at elite institutions, social media's cultivation of grievance and a liberal establishment on issues such as immigration and gender that repeatedly gave its opponents gifts.
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And Trump has been right about some things. Europe spent decades free-riding on U.S. military power while simultaneously proclaiming its strategic autonomy. European governments are finally taking their own defense seriously, in part thanks to the president.
The danger is how much may be left of the old relationships by January 2029. More than two or more years on the present could leave Canada economically reoriented toward Europe and the Europeans genuinely hostile to America, building security arrangements permanently designed to function without America and voters across the continent concluding that every U.S. election now carries an unacceptable risk of strategic whiplash. Alliances need not collapse to hand victory to the other side—they can decay. America may be preeminent, but does it really want to be friendless?
So there is an argument that the Democrats should already be communicating with the world. A high-caliber Democrat in 2028 could instead offer its allies a bargain: keep a Europe capable of defending itself, keep secure borders, and restore the elementary proposition that Canada, Britain, the European Union and South Korea are allies rather than economic enemies. And that a U.S. president might comport himself with a little savoir-faire.
It won’t be an easy sell. Trump has shattered the important assumption—which actually existed—that America won’t go off the rails (and then decided to do it again). But history does sometimes work through grotesque detours. Barack Obama liked to invoke Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice. If the end of this episode is a stronger Europe, a saner Democratic Party and an America that rediscovers the value of both strength and decency, that would be a form of justice.
Dan Perry is the former London-based Europe-Africa Editor and Cairo-based Middle East Editor of The Associated Press, chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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