The writer is an FT contributing editor
Canada’s Mark Carney has picked up the gauntlet. Britain’s Keir Starmer prefers to look the other way. Japan and South Korea lead the queue to strike a bilateral deal. Atlanticist Germany declares Europe must go it alone. As much as America’s old friends are appalled by Donald Trump’s trashing of the liberal international order, they differ on how best to respond. We should beware of taking sides — the pugilists and pacifists both have a point.
Kudos generally goes to those willing to stand up to “the bully”. Carney has transformed his Liberal party’s electoral prospects by relishing the fight. In Europe, Gaullism has gone mainstream. Emmanuel Macron’s call for Europe to break free of the Americans is echoed by chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz in Berlin. Trump’s admirers on the populist right such as Nigel Farage have been destabilised.
There are no plaudits for keeping quiet, Starmer has discovered. As guardian of Britain’s overhyped special relationship with the US, the prime minister has walked the fine line of separating opposition to Trump’s policies from any ad hominem attacks on the president. He has done so with some skill, working with Macron to create a new peacekeeping coalition to support Ukraine and returning post-Brexit Britain to the heart of conversations about European security. European support for Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s aggression has put a brake, at least, on Trump’s eagerness to force Kyiv into submission.
The tariffs-on, tariffs-off chaos in the White House during the past couple of weeks also suggests there is something to be said for Starmer’s holding back on trade retaliation. At some point, Trump’s policies may well collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. In time, the White House will learn that American consumers want to buy all those foreign imports. Avoiding the wrath of the White House in the meantime is not a bad strategy.
Of course, the UK has more to lose than most from Trump’s bellicose unilateralism. Its armed forces are shaped almost entirely by the presumption that in any serious war it would be fighting alongside the Americans. It needs the US to keep its Trident nuclear missiles in service. Cut off by Brexit from its biggest market, it can scarcely afford a collapse in exports to the US.
Japan and South Korea, also in the “tread quietly and make him an offer” camp, share a similar dependency spanning national security and economics. They shelter under the US nuclear umbrella. China’s ambitions for regional hegemony leave them vulnerable to the “might is right” approach to global affairs espoused by Trump. After all, if the US claims the right to run the western hemisphere, who is to say Xi Jinping should not impose China’s will on the western Pacific?
None of this makes pandering to Trump look heroic, particularly when, with characteristic vulgarity, the president publicly mocks the softly spoken. Opinion polls suggest Europeans would prefer their leaders to join Carney in the ring. Appeasing Trump may simply encourage him. He clearly enjoys humiliating America’s old friends. The answer surely is to show him that Trumpism has costs. Didn’t we learn at school that the way to beat bullies is to fight back?
There is something more to the different responses, though, than variations in national interests, tactical preferences or different political temperaments. As it happens, the conciliators and retaliators are both right. They are simply operating on different timescales. America’s allies must break their dependency on Washington. But they cannot do so too quickly.
The Pax Americana has ended. Whatever happens next, the US has proved itself an unreliable ally in an ever more dangerous world. The other advanced democracies have no option but to build up defence capabilities and create new economic relationships. A radical de-risking of the relationship to set a course for what Macron calls strategic autonomy is imperative.
It is also the work of generations. Economic and security dependence cannot be wished away overnight. In the short term, the priority must be to limit the inevitable pain. If the US plans to withdraw from its global responsibilities, erstwhile allies need time before they can take them on. Trump has shown he has no interest in a just outcome in Ukraine. But Europe has no interest in hastening the speed of the American withdrawal of all support for Kyiv. It will take decades for European nations to rebuild their own militaries.
Striking second-best deals with a capricious US president may look like a humiliation. And it certainly must not become an excuse to delay others’ efforts to stand on their own feet. But the US-led order was 80 years in the making. It is going to be a long goodbye.
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