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The writer is a FT collaborating editor
Mark Carney from Canada has collected the glove. Keir Starmer from Great Britain prefers to look the other way. Japan and South Korea lead the tail to reach a bilateral agreement. Atlantist Germany declares that Europe must do it alone. As much as the old friends of the United States are horrified by Donald Trump’s garbage about the liberal international order, they differ in the best way to respond. We must be careful to take sides: pugilists and pacifists have a point.
Congratulations generally go to those willing to face “the bully.” Carney has transformed the electoral perspectives of his liberal party by savoring the fight. In Europe, gaullism has become the main current. Emmanuel Macron’s call so that Europe will free from Americans, Friedrich Merz echoes in Berlin. Trump’s admirers to the populist right, like Nigel Farage, have been destabilized.
There are no applause to stay silent, Starmer has discovered. As guardian of the special overvalued relationship of Great Britain with the United States, the prime minister has walked the thin line of separating the opposition to Trump’s policies from any ad hominem attacks against the president. He has done it with some skill, working with Macron to create a new peace maintenance coalition to support Ukraine and return Brexit Great Britain to the heart of conversations about European security. European support for Ukraine against the aggression of Vladimir Putin has stopped, at least, in Trump’s eagerness for forcing kyiv to immerse himself.
The chaos of rates and tariffs in the White House during the last weeks also suggests that there is something to say so that Starmer stops in commercial reprisals. At some point, Trump’s policies may collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Over time, the White House will learn that American consumers want to buy all those foreign imports. Meanwhile, avoiding the anger of the White House is not a bad strategy.
Of course, the United Kingdom has more to lose than the majority of Trump’s unilateral unilateralism. Their armed forces are almost completely formed by the presumption that in any war it would be fighting next to the Americans. You need the United States to maintain its Trident nuclear missiles in service. Brexit cut of its largest market, can barely allow a collapse of exports to the US.
Japan and South Korea, also in the “pita in silence and turn it into an offer”, share a similar dependence that encompasses national security and the economy. They take refuge under the nuclear umbrella of the United States. China’s ambitions for regional hegemony leave them vulnerable to the “power is correct” approach for global issues adopted by Trump. After all, if the United States affirms the right to execute the western hemisphere, who can say that Xi Jinping should not impose China’s will to the Western Pacific?
None of this makes Trump look heroic, particularly when, with the characteristic vulgarity, the president makes publicly mocks the soft voice. Opinion surveys suggest that Europeans would prefer that their leaders join Carney in the ring. Applying to Trump can simply encourage it. Clearly likes to humiliate the old friends of the United States. The answer is surely to show you that Trumpism has costs. Didn’t we learn at school that the way to overcome thugs is to defend themselves?
However, there is something else in the different responses, than variations in national interests, tactical preferences or different political temperaments. As happens, reconcilers and reprisals are right. They are simply operating in different time scales. The United States allies must break their Washington dependence. But they can’t do it too fast.
The American Pax is over. Whatever happens later, the United States has proven to be an unreliable ally in an increasingly dangerous world. The other advanced democracies have no choice but to develop defense capacities and create new economic relations. A radical elimination of the relationship is essential to establish a course of what Macron calls strategic autonomy.
It is also a job of generations. Economic and security dependence cannot be desired during the night. In the short term, priority must be limited inevitable pain. If the United States plans to retire from their global responsibilities, the former allies need time before they can assume them. Trump has shown that he has no interest in a right result in Ukraine. But Europe has no interest in accelerating the speed of American withdrawal of all support for Kyiv. The European nations will take decades to rebuild their own military.
The first best agreements with a capricious American president may seem humiliation. And certainly should not become an excuse to delay the efforts of others to stand on their own feet. But the order led by the United States was 80 years in process. It will be a long goodbye.