Europeans need to understand the US – and fast. Too many of us still think that Washington’s instinct is to defend the West, and hence that Trumpism is a passing aberration. It surely can’t be normal for Americans to hate one another so much that more than half the nation voted for a leader who gabbles about annexing countries instead of opting to be ruled by liberals. But Trumpism is an extreme reset back to the US’s default position;: largely indifferent toward Europe, driven by the belief that there are far more urgent matters at home to take care of. Europeans find this hard to grasp because their entire history has made it clear that the biggest threats to their lives and freedoms comes from militarised neighbours.
To understand why things look different across the Atlantic, let’s channel John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the US and the great-grandaddy of isolationism. Imagine that what he called “this Western World” is a different planet altogether: “planet USA”. On this planet, which was originally inhabited by a small number of easy-to-evict residents, lies everything that progress requires. M, most important of which is a complete lack of dangerous neighbours. With wealth for the taking and no one to threaten the settlers, the only real battle to be fought is among the planet’s people. Despite engaging victoriously in many major battles, the US’s civil war – the war that cost the most American lives – continues to define its politics.
During the Cold War era it seemed possible that communism could forcibly unite the world under an ideologically hostile regime. As a result, the US supported all non-communist countries. In 1990 a clique of so-called neo-conservatives in Washington hit upon a breathtaking new plan: they would beam down to any troubled land on Earth and terraform it into a simulacrum of “planet USA”. As Germany’s ex-foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, told me last year, “I was once a revolutionary myself, so I knew straight away that these weren’t conservatives – they were revolutionaries.” This revolution, like so many others, didn’t go well. As a result, Americans voted to concentrate on a far older and more existential issue: the battle for their nation’s character.
If you’re on “planet USA”, why would you worry about what Russia does in its terrestrial backyard? Russia is eager for mutually profitable deals and has a defence budget smaller than that of the UK and Germany combined. Vladimir Putin is not going to take away Republicans’ guns, raise taxes on the rich or destroy law and order with “wokeness”. Only the planet’s own, treacherous “libtards” can do that. Conversely, victory for a free Ukraine won’t save DEI programmes, women’s rights or Medicare. For that, the US Democrats must beat the screaming Magas at home.
Engaging with the rest of Earth is back to being merely an option for “planet USA”. Civil war, declared or not, is what really matters. That said, we earthlings should heed another of John Quincy’s insights: America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” it does this at home. The US isn’t planning to save us from our own monsters (again). We have to learn to look after ourselves.
Hawes is the author of several books, including ‘The Shortest History of Germany’.
The sabre-rattling has never been louder as Donald Trump plots the first foreign tour of his second administration, which begins on Monday with a three-day jaunt in the Middle East. The US president is expected to visit Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar while in the region, conjuring up memories of a similar itinerary in 2017. This time, however, Trump will not be including a stop in Israel, which has used the tour as a pretext to demand yet another Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal. Israel’s security cabinet has announced a plan to “capture” Gaza and displace its population if a truce fails to be finalised before Air Force One’s departure back to the US.
Despite Washington’s bombardment of the Houthis in Yemen this spring, Trump has clearly tired of war. Indeed, just hours after Israel bombed Sanaa’s main airport in retaliation for a Houthi attack on Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, he announced that the US and Houthis had reached a truce. The deal, which doesn’t include Israel, clearly took Jerusalem by surprise. The US has also scheduled yet another round of negotiations with Iran to end its nuclear programme this weekend (likely in Oman) – another red flag for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his hawkish cabinet.
One highlight of Trump’s upcoming Saudi visit will be a summit with leaders of the Gulf Co-operation Council aimed at boosting investment between the sheikhdoms and the US. Such talks, beyond their favourable photo ops, further reinforce the White House’s commitment to co-operation over conflict, at least in the Gulf. Even as Trump continues to talk tough on Tehran and Hamas – including threats of a direct attack on Iran if diplomacy fails – his real objective appears to be peace.
Trump’s most lasting foreign-policy legacy from his first term are the Abraham Accords, a success that established relations between Israel and various Arab nations. The deal, which has miraculously survived the war in Gaza, serves as a bulwark against Iran while furthering regional economic integration. Trade between Israel and the UAE actually grew by 11 per cent in 2024, the year following the Hamas attack on Israel.
But without Riyadh in the mix the Accords remain incomplete — and so does Trump’s foreign-policy legacy. This month’s Gulf visit aims to remedy this, even if US negotiations with Iran fall flat. As with his approach to everything from tariffs to foreign aid, Trump’s true motivations with Iran are as fluid as they are elusive. The president has promised a “very, very big announcement” before he heads to the Gulf. At this point, the world should expect nothing less.
Kaufman is an editor and columnist at the ‘New York Post’. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
US president Donald Trump is often regarded as a divisive disruptor whose principal political skill is pitting people against each other. Twice in the last fortnight, however, Trump has revealed another side to his character: a remarkable unifier, who has persuaded the diverse peoples of somewhat discontented countries to rally together as one.
Trump should not clear space on the Oval Office mantlepiece for that long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize yet, however. He didn’t bring people together on purpose – indeed, quite the opposite. In Canada and Australia, Trump accidentally helped floundering centre-left governments return to office and just as inadvertently damned his fellow conservatives in both countries to the kind of sensational defeat in which the party leader loses not only the election but also their seat. As recently as Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, Pierre Poilievre and Peter Dutton had every reason to believe that, by now, they would have congratulated each other on becoming prime minister of Canada and Australia respectively. Instead, both are unemployed.
The two situations are not precisely analogous. Trump has not, at least as of this writing, threatened to annex Australia – though he has imposed punitive tariffs on several Australian territories, including the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are inhabited only by seals and penguins, and are holders of no known trade surplus with the US. But just as Trump’s musings on Canada becoming America’s 51st state and his deriding of Mark Carney’s predecessor as “Governor Trudeau” galvanised Canadians to deliver the result that would vex him most, Australia’s incumbent Labor party won partly by tagging their conservative opponents as Trump surrogates.
Australia’s conservatives – the confusingly named Liberal Party – did not help themselves. Their leader, Peter Dutton, who is a doughty culture warrior, spoke highly of Trump. Dutton endowed the Liberals’ shadow indigenous affairs minister, senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, with an unsubtly foreshadowed portfolio for “government efficiency”; she spoke of wanting to “make Australia great again.”
It was foolish on a couple of levels. Recent polls show Australia’s enthusiasm for the US ebbing since Trump’s return – and Australia enforces a compulsory vote. It’s tough to win elections pandering to a base of seething weirdos marinated in social-media conspiracy theories. Australia has its own rumbustious billionaire with political aspirations: Clive Palmer, whose Trumpet of Patriots party spent a fortune in this election, did not win a single seat.
Tellingly, Peter Dutton’s concession speech was notably un-Trumpian. He was graceful, humble and generous, telling the re-elected prime minister, Anthony Albanese, that his single mother who raised him in public housing would be proud. In Australia, this was received with bemusement akin to that which might be prompted in Maga-land if Trump posted an image of himself enjoying the latest book by Hillary Clinton or indeed the latest book by anybody.
Centre-left parties across the Western world will be wondering whether invoking Trump might also work for them. In the UK, this month’s local elections were a triumph for Reform UK, the latest flag of convenience for inextinguishable Brexiter populist Nigel Farage. It would be surprising if the UK’s governing Labour Party has not pencilled in an early election for 2028 while Trump still occupies the White House, with a view to upholstering the country with pictures of Farage leering in Trump Tower’s gold elevator.
In the meantime, such parties have to find a way to govern in a world that is dominated by Trump. Mark Carney visited the White House this week – one hopes that he took flowers, much as Alice Cooper thanked the British moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse in the early 1970s for her efforts to get “School’s Out” banned from the BBC (it topped UK charts). Carney was firm but courteous, and hailed Trump as a “transformational president”. Perhaps during his stint as governor of the Bank of England, Carney acquired a taste for passive-aggressive British obituary euphemisms, in which an infamous crook will be recalled as an “enterprising businessman”, a pestilential lecher a “ladies’ man” and an illiterate yobbo a “man of simple tastes”.
Trump shortly faces two further foreign electoral tests. In presidential elections in Poland and Romania, Trumpism is on the ballot in some shape or form. Opponents of those candidates should not be shy about saying so.
Donald Trump’s disdain for the US’s traditional partners is emerging as a central feature of his administration’s foreign policy. Washington’s Indo-Pacific allies have so far avoided such ire but Trump will eventually turn toward them – and likely pick the same fights that he has with Europe. South Korea seems particularly vulnerable because it has the two characteristics that Trump dislikes most in American allies: a large, expensive US security commitment and a substantial trade surplus. Japan has these traits too but a Trumpian assault on Tokyo would jeopardise the entire US position in East Asia, so Seoul will likely come first.
During his first term, Trump’s treatment of South Korea was brusque and dismissive. In 2017 he notoriously threatened to rain “fire and fury” down on North Korea. Then in 2018, he suddenly declared North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un his friend and met him three times. Throughout all of this, Trump ignored South Korean input and concerns. The US president’s 2017 war threats were not cleared with Seoul and unnerved then-South Korean president Moon Jae-in so much that he publicly stated that no military action could be taken against North Korea without the South’s permission. This norm had always been informally understood within the alliance because South Korea would carry most of the costs of any conflict. Trump characteristically ignored that tacit understanding.
Similarly, when Trump and Kim negotiated in 2018 and 2019, Moon and the South Koreans were explicitly cut out. The Trump administration did not clear any proposals made to Pyongyang with Seoul and Moon was never invited to any of the summits with the US president in attendance. Indeed, Trump later attacked Moon in the US media, stating that he intended to “blow up” the US-South Korea alliance if re-elected. Trump’s foreign policy has become even more vindictive in his second term. The US president gleefully trolled former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau with suggestions that his country should be annexed. And Trump’s falling out with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky seems mostly motivated by the latter’s refusal to grovel before him on camera. When Trump eventually turns to South Korea, it is reasonable to expect that his behaviour will be even worse than last time. South Korean officials and foreign-policy intellectuals are already preparing for this eventuality. Among other things, a previously niche South Korean debate on nuclearisation has grown dramatically since Trump’s arrival on the US political scene.
South Korea is particularly vulnerable to Trumpian threats. Like Poland or the Baltic states, it is a front-line democracy adjacent to a belligerent, nuclear autocracy; two, in fact: North Korea and China. Some 28,000 US troops stationed in the country have back-stopped South Korea’s rapid economic growth while acting as a tripwire to contain North Korea. Every US president since Harry Truman has supported this commitment. Trump, judging by his behaviour in Europe and general affection for dictators, does not. The US is still committed by treaty to South Korean security – as it is to Nato. But just as Trump seems unlikely to cleave to the Transatlantic Alliance’s collective-security guarantee, he is also likely to abandon South Korea should it become embroiled in a major conflict with North Korea or China.
Seoul’s response will probably mirror what European leaders have also declaimed over the past few months: major rearmament. Unlike Europe, South Korea has the industrial bases and defence manufacturers to rapidly churn out a large number of high-quality munitions. More controversial, however, will be the inevitable nuclear debate. South Korean public opinion has been strongly in favour of acquiring nuclear weapons for at least 15 years – a 2023 poll put the figure at 76 per cent. Political opinion is slowly tilting this way too, though it has been restrained by both intense US opposition and Washington’s support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), intended to block the spread of nuclear weapons. Given its disdain for multilateral commitments, the Trump administration is unlikely to care much about the NPT. Since many in Seoul now believe that the US would not come to South Korea’s aid against its nuclear-armed autocratic opponents, the logical step is for the country to develop its own weapons. This would act as a demonstration for exposed US allies – most obviously Poland – to do the same. Trump is ushering in a world of nuclear proliferation – and he does not seem to care.
Robert E Kelly is a professor of political science at Pusan National University.
How would you like your country’s leader to act if intimidated? As the US’s traditional allies consider their response to the election of Donald Trump, it’s a pertinent question.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, claims that Europe must stop being a herbivore and become an omnivore so as to avoid consumption by the world’s carnivores. It’s no secret that most of Washington’s partners in Europe and Asia were hoping for and even anticipating a Democratic victory. I attended a media roundtable in London on the evening of 5 November featuring some of the most illustrious names in foreign affairs journalism. All of those who offered a prediction on the outcome of the vote said that Kamala Harris would win and far more time was devoted to discussing her potential appointees than Trump’s. Thankfully, no one will suffer as a result of that faulty guesswork – but the same cannot be said for any diplomats or government officials who are inadequately prepared.
Had they sought advice in the aftermath of the shock result, they would have found no shortage of purveyors. Much of what most commentators say boils down to an insistence that leaders should indulge the new president’s allegedly transactional nature and narcissistic tendencies – that he must be flattered and bribed into doing the right thing. But this betrays the same cynicism that has led to the election of politicians such as Trump, who have exploited voters’ antipathy towards the institutions of government and their leaders, who he has labelled as dishonest and corrupt. What is more dishonest and corrupt than kowtowing to someone who you believe to be wrong?
Of course, we don’t know how Trump will treat the likes of France when he begins work on 20 January. Portentous warnings of a vengeful isolationist could well be overblown. But if the president does use intimidation and threats to force Washington’s erstwhile friends to do his bidding, those same friends should not be cowed. Foreign relations, especially those conducted by the world’s economic and military hegemon, have always been transactional. Even the Marshall Plan, often presented as proof of the US’s inherent nobility, had cynical motives – namely, curbing the influence of the Soviet Union in Western Europe.
Moreover, though the US has often claimed to be acting selflessly, while invoking its self-declared exceptionalism, no country is exceptional when it comes to how it should treat others. One need only look at the number of nationalist strongmen currently in power across the globe to understand that America’s situation in 2025 is far from sui generis. Each of these leaders has preached their country’s innate superiority in order to win elections. And while it’s true that none of them are running as powerful a nation as the US, neither are they bound by the checks and balances of that country’s constitution.
What should the US’s allies do if they are faced with a combative Trump? What they think is right, of course. This might sound idealistic but it will protect their countries (and careers) in the long term. Much of the present crisis in liberal democracy stems from the fact that voters are so enraged by their leaders’ prevarication on certain issues that they are drawn to those who they believe are at least genuine. It is in the darkness between the official explanation and the concealed truth that populism festers and metastasises. Trump is not the first US president whose election has confounded the country’s allies; nor will he be the last. He will only be in the job for another four years but the damage done to voters’ faith in politicians who find themselves lying to placate him will take far longer to repair. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
