Exit stage right: Trump blows up the West as we know it as America's allies flinch

By Nick Bryant, ABC

Analysis - The promise in Donald Trump's inaugural address was bright shining: of a "golden age" with sunlight "pouring over the entire world".

To many international observers, however, his first two months in office have felt more like the total eclipse of America: a darkening of the leader the world has known since it entered World War II.

To those living in the most impoverished parts of the globe, such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, it has meant the world's richest nation turning off life-saving funding to USAID.

To soldiers on the frontline in Ukraine, it has meant the interruption of vital intelligence and military assistance in their fight against Vladimir Putin's army.

To close friends as well as foes, it has meant the imposition of punitive tariffs. To those who rely on the Voice of America in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, where information is heavily censored by authoritarian regimes, it has meant radio silence.

Loud and clear, Canadians have heard their closest ally threaten annexation and their absorption into America as its 51st state. In Europe, diplomats who attended the Munich Security Conference listened dumbstruck as the US vice president aligned the Trump administration with the European hard and far right - a message JD Vance jack-hammered home by meeting Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), on the eve of the German election.

In Australia, we have watched the Albanese government pay US$798m into US coffers as a down payment on the AUKUS security pact only to be slammed afterwards with punitive tariffs on steel and aluminium.

"This is against the spirit of our two nations' enduring friendship," complained Anthony Albanese, like a groom jilted at the altar. But Albanese is not alone. Other long-standing US allies are gripped by the same fear of abandonment.

Every action has a reaction

At a time when the Trump administration is taking a chainsaw to the international rule book - a rule book penned in the main by successive post-war US presidents - the immutable laws of science are arguably more applicable.

Foremost amongst them is Newton's third law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Therefore, the weekend after Vance's speech in Munich revealed an oceanic divide in the trans-Atlantic alliance, the incoming German Chancellor stated Europe should "achieve independence from the US" - words, he added, that "I would never have thought I would have to say."

The French president, Emanuel Macron, has raised the spectre of extending his country's sovereign nuclear deterrent, which comprises almost 300 warheads, to provide a security umbrella for other European nations. Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, fearful of an emboldened Russia on the other side of their shared 232km border, developed plans for the military training of all Polish men.

The roughing up of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office by Trump and Vance, in which an angry president and vice-president raised their voices as they ventriloquised talking points from the Kremlin, was even more instantly historic.

The fact that it became such a memeable moment on social media meant it became a cultural as well as geopolitical event.

Again, the response followed Newtonian principles. In London the following day, the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer rolled out the most luxuriant of red carpets for the bruised Ukrainian president and made a point of hugging Zelensky on the steps of Downing Street.

Then the Ukrainian president was whisked off to Sandringham for an audience with King Charles.

Diplomacy is often as much about gestures as words, and, though hurriedly arranged, Zelensky's visit was intricately choreographed. To Washington, it seemed, the UK was directing a very British middle finger.

Doubly striking that March weekend was the show of solidarity in London from other international leaders - including Macron, Tusk, the departing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, as well as the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Not since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have we seen such a mobilisation of Western powers.

This time, however, there was an epochal difference. Then it was the Russian president who awakened the European powers. Now it was a Kremlin-friendly US president who was so galvanising.

This week's much-hyped "Liberation Day" doubled as a declaration of trade war against virtually the entire world. Goods entering the United States from the EU will face 20 percent tariffs.

Japan, a close ally, has been hit by 24 percent tariffs. Trump declared that Australians were "wonderful people" but nonetheless imposed 10 percent tariffs, the new baseline, on all imports to the US. Even the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Australian external territory a two-week boat voyage from Perth, was included on the White House list.

"Nowhere on earth is safe," said Prime Minister Albanese.

Stung by what she called a "major blow to the world economy," Ursula von der Leyen held a 5am press conference in Brussels to state the EU would retaliate, her dawn o'clock start yet another marker of these out-of-the-ordinary times.

With the tariff regime tougher than expected, international stock markets slumped sharply out of fear of a Trump-induced US recession, and its global ramifications. Wall Street suffered its steepest tumble since the Covid pandemic, a huge 4.8 percent daily drop for the S&P 500, continuing the downward trend since Inauguration Day.

As for the longer-term economic fallout, it will be felt for years to come, for "Liberation Day" marked the biggest shock since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, which created a multilateral system centred on eliminating trade barriers.

What makes this moment in history all the more remarkable is that we can no longer be sure whether the United States is a bona fide member of "the West," the group of like-minded nations that since the end of World War II has sought to uphold democratic values.

What is certain is that Washington has relinquished its leadership of the free world.

That became evident in late February at the United Nations on the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When the General Assembly voted on a text drafted by European diplomats naming Russia as the aggressor and supporting Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, the United States joined the Kremlin, Belarus and North Korea in opposing it.

This siding with authoritarians raised the question of whether Trump is willing to abide by democratic principles, the unifying idea at the heart of the Western alliance.

America's first felonious president - who was sworn in for a second term inside the US Capitol, the scene on 6 January 2021 of MAGA's most grievous crime - has already defied courts, maligned judges, attacked individual journalists, sought to re-write the US Constitution with the flourish of his Sharpie pen and said he was "not joking" about seeking a third term, which would breach the 22nd amendment on presidential term limits.

Under his leadership, the United States is in danger of becoming an anocracy, the term for a country that is neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian.

Just as America is remaking its relationship with the world, so the world is re-evaluating its relationship with America. As a result, we need to rethink the very concept of US isolationism. Conventionally, isolationism has been perceived as an active American choice - the foreign policy it pursued from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, when it adhered to the advice of its founding president George Washington "to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

In the Trump era, however, US isolationism is increasingly being imposed on America from the outside. Trump's transactional approach to foreign policy is being matched by a transformational approach from longtime allies. Europe is repurposing and inverting a foundational American idea: independence.

In Australia, even cheerleaders of the US alliance are having to be more clear-eyed about Washington's dependability as an ally.

A line often used during Trump 1.0 has even more resonance in Trump 2.0: America First increasingly means America alone.

The US is in danger of becoming a friendless state.

What's more, the Trump White House seems to view international opprobrium as a badge of MAGA honour. With history coming at us thick and fast, we are in the midst of an up-ending.

The rise of the manosphere

Things looked differently on 20 January 2025. A more MAGA-leaning narrative initially took hold.

As he was sworn in for the second time as president, Donald Trump not only appeared to savour his American victory but to bask in something of a global triumph.

A worldwide rightward vibe shift appeared palpable and profound.

Obituaries were composed for diversity, equity, and inclusion not just in the United States, where giants such as McDonald's and Walmart announced the termination of their DEI schemes, but throughout the corporate world.

The prominent seats at the inauguration granted to the princes of Silicon Valley - Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (who runs Google) and, of course, Elon Musk - signalled that the men who control so much of the global information flow would not stand in Trump's way.

Indeed, they had the look of fellow travellers. Corporate America, which had been more resistant to Trump during his first administration, seemed to have virtually capitulated.

The MAGA manosphere was in the ascendant.

The podcast king Joe Rogan was also seated prominently at the inauguration, as was the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The Irish UFC fighter Conor McGregor - who a jury in a civil case in Dublin last year found liable for sexual assault - got a seat in the overflow room.

In late February, Andrew Tate, along with his brother Tristan, returned to the United States after travel restrictions were lifted by Romania, where he was charged with rape and human trafficking. Tate is a self-proclaimed misogynist, famed for spewing the most ugly sexism to his millions of followers on social media.

Yet this did not stop US special envoy Richard Grenell from raising the Tate brothers with Romania's foreign minister on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. Just six years after the #MeToo movement had altered gender dynamics, and brought significant gains for many women, macho MAGA was back.

In this changed world, centre-left governments looked especially vulnerable, not just to anti-incumbent rage but to pro-Trump sentiment.

Even before Trump's return to Washington, the beleaguered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his departure, partly because his Liberal Party was staring at defeat in the upcoming election.

In Germany, the centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz was also on his way out. In Australia, Anthony Albanese was another centre-left leader facing an election in which he would struggle to preserve his Parliamentary majority.

Peter Dutton, sensing the Trump-inspired rightward cultural shift, spoke in a podcast chat with entrepreneur Mark Bouris of an "anti-woke revolution" occurring globally and how young men had "had enough" of diversity hiring.

The Liberal leader, seemingly inspired by Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk, also announced the creation of a shadow minister for government efficiency.

From the moment Trump was elected and became the first Republican in 20 years to win the nationwide popular vote, he created an authorising environment for right-wing politicians the world over to speak out more forcefully in a Trumpian tongue.

Though Dutton tried to differentiate himself from Trump on transgender issues and abortion, he nonetheless provided a case study of that rightward swing.

Two months on, however, there has been another vibe shift: a global backlash against Trump.

Trump rejectionism

The serious pushback began in the aftermath of the air collision over the Potomac River in Washington, which killed all 67 people aboard both aircraft, which Trump blamed on the DEI, without citing any evidence. The inference from Trump's remarks was that air safety should be entrusted solely to white men.

The "war on woke" came with racist and sexist overtones.

Trump rejectionism intensified in early February when he shocked the international community with his call for a US "takeover" of Gaza and a "Rivera of the Middle East."

JD Vance's Munich speech brought on an acid shower of European criticism.

So, too, Elon Musk's appearance, via video link, at a far-right AfD rally. A week after Vance's Munich speech came the vote in the UN General Assembly when the US sided with Russia.

America's dominant position as a scientific trailblazer, another pillar of its post-war security and prosperity, has been imperilled by the cuts made to world-leading bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 10 percent of the workforce was laid off in February, and the National Institutes of Health, where 1500 staff have lost their jobs.

European universities are offering US academics "scientific asylum": jobs at research facilities where they can enjoy academic freedom. Already in Germany, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, the country's elite research institution, said applications from the US have doubled in some disciplines and tripled in others.

Here again, we are seeing the inversion of a phenomenon that has conventionally worked in America's favour: a brain drain away from the United States.

The Trump trade war strikes at the super-structure of America's pre-eminence: its post-war alliance system.

The rupture in the trans-Atlantic alliance has driven the emergence of a new diplomatic grouping, independent of the United States. The "E5," formed in November, following Trump's election victory, brings together Europe's biggest defence spenders, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Poland.

This group calls itself the "coalition of the willing", the very terminology once deployed by the US in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September, when European nations rallied around America and NATO, for the first and only time in its history, invoked Article 5, based on the principle of collective defence.

Nor is it just European nations rethinking their relationship with Washington. In Asia, treaty allies such as Japan, South Korea and The Philippines hope the presence within the Trump administration of so many China hawks offers a blanket of protection.

Nonetheless, as in Europe, leaders are having to consider how to de-risk their relationship with Washington. In calling for a rethink about the US relationship, a former Japanese ambassador, Ishii Masafumi, has even used the phrase "America's wolf warrior diplomacy", a term associated with a belligerent China.

After Trump revealed his proposal for a US takeover of Gaza, the 22-member League of Arab States hastily agreed to an Egyptian reconstruction plan widely seen as a rebuke to the White House. Not mincing his words, the Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit told the summit: "We cannot accept illegal American projects and visions in the region."

For sure, longstanding allies of America have adopted a Janus-headed approach, flattering Trump on occasions and being passively aggressive at others.

Keir Starmer, for instance, sought to curry favour with Trump during a visit to the White House in February by dramatically pulling from his pocket a letter from King Charles inviting the president for an unprecedented second state visit - demonstrating the kind of reality TV stunt which Trump would have appreciated.

But his words and deeds in leading the "coalition of the willing," especially in showering Zelensky with so much love, come with an implied criticism of the Trump administration.

As well as a distancing from America, there has been a counterblast. It is evident in the resurgence of Canadian nationalism, and the shunning of US goods. Protests have been held in once tranquil Greenland, again in response to Trump's annexation threats and provocative visits from senior administration officials, including Vance. Tesla cars have been hit by a customer boycott, a protest directed against Elon Musk.

A French member of the European Parliament, Raphaël Glucksmann, called for the United States to hand back the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France 140 years ago.

Even populist fellow travellers have been critical. After Vance appeared to describe the UK during a Fox News interview as a "random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years", Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist party, Reform, described it as "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong."

The domestic politics of America's allies have shifted. Just consider Canada. For the past 18 months, the Conservative opposition boasted a 99 percent probability of forming the next government under its leader Pierre Poilievre, who has been labelled a Maple Leaf MAGA.

However, a revitalised Liberal Party, under former central banker Mark Carney, has edged ahead, largely as a result of the groundswell against Trump.

In the German election, the AfD surged into second place, but it was the moderate conservative party, the CDU, which will lead the new German government, with the far right excluded from the coalition. The Trump effect may also have contributed to the Albanese government's recent fightback.

What's been striking over the past two months is how international pushback against the Trump administration has often been stronger than the internal resistance from the Democratic Party in America. Again, America First increasingly is leading to an alienated America.

Back to the 19th century

Another way of thinking about Trump 2.0 is not as an eclipse of America but as a reveal. He has pulled off the mildewy dust sheets to uncover how the United States existed prior to its internationalist phase, the faltering start of which came with its entry into World War I and was affirmed more strongly, after a return to isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was drawn into World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Rather than the 20th century, the historical reference point for Trump is primarily the America of the 19th century.

Back then, the United States did not have an alliance system. It was an expansionist power, striving to become a truly transcontinental nation by acquiring, and fighting for, land held by Mexico and European colonial powers.

Routinely, relations with Europe were antagonistic. The Monroe Doctrine, articulated by the 5th president, James Monroe, regarded as hostile any intervention in the Americas by European colonial powers.

The notion of American exceptionalism, the belief that the US was a global exemplar and arsenal of democracy, had not then taken hold. The prevalence of slavery and, after its abolition, the brutal apartheid of Jim Crow, made the United States more a pariah than a paragon.

In a largely inward-looking nation, most Americans did not give any thought as to how they were thought of internationally.

Nor did they care.

Symptomatic of Donald Trump's 19th-century inclinations is his lionisation of President William McKinley, the so-called "Napoleon of Protectionism," who championed tariffs as a congressman and initially as president after he won election in 1896 (although by the time he became the third president to be assassinated in 1901, he had come to believe in the mutual benefits of reciprocal trade).

He also lauds McKinley as an American imperialist: the commander-in-chief during the Spanish-American war, which ended with the United States acquiring the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam - its first steps towards becoming a global power. During McKinley's tenure, America also annexed Hawaii, to prevent this strategically important island from falling into the hands of a European power.

Here we find a foreshadowing of Trump's designs on Greenland.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president, Trump also regards as a kindred spirit: a nationalistic populist who sought to assert the primacy of the presidency over the legislature and judiciary by riding roughshod over Congress and the Supreme Court. Early in Trump 1.0, he made a pilgrimage to The Hermitage, Jackson's old slave plantation in Tennessee.

The nature of Trump's 19th-century mindset was on full display during his inaugural address. Rather than paying homage to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, greats who went unmentioned, he name-checked McKinley and announced that America's tallest mountain would again take his name after the Obama administration renamed it Denali in recognition of Alaska's Indigenous peoples.

The inaugural address also included a futuristic twist on a 19th-century nostrum, "manifest destiny" - the belief, underpinned by a sense of white racial superiority, that America's expansion was divinely ordained and thus inevitable.

"And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars," declared Trump, "launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars."

Partly because of Elon Musk's ecstatic response to this modern-day mission to Mars, that line inevitably got a lot of play in the coverage afterwards. However, it was the passage beforehand that signalled Trump's earthly territorial ambitions.

"The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation - one that increases our wealth expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons."

So often we draw parallels between current-day presidents and their 20th-century predecessors: Ronald Reagan, John F Kennedy, and Franklin D Roosevelt.

Here, though, Trump could have been channelling James Polk, the country's 11th president, who in the 1840s oversaw the largest territorial expansion of the United States in its history.

Polk's portrait now hangs in the Oval Office, even though many Americans would not recognise his face or pompadour-style hair.

In the 19th century, the federal government was small and extremely limited in its functions. Business went largely unregulated. Monopolies were not policed. Most of the country did not pay income taxes.

It was not until FDR's New Deal that the modern-day federal government began to take shape, and with it America's version of a welfare state.

Back then, there was no constitutional limit on how many terms a president could serve, although no one broke the unwritten rule set by the country's first leader, George Washington, that two were ample.

When Grover Cleveland, the only president other than Trump to make a return to the White House after being evicted by voters, raised the possibility of serving a third term, his own party warned him not to do so.

So while it has become fashionable to claim we are starting to see the emergence of a post-American world and the end of the US-led world order, it could also be argued that we are returning to the pre-American world of the 19th century.

Indeed, we could be witnessing a return to the great power geopolitics of the 1900s, when the world was carved up into spheres of influence by a few dominant players - back then the UK, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia.

Under this scenario, the multinationalism of the post-war years when the US worked collegially with allies on the basis of shared interests and values could be superseded by a multipolar system shaped primarily by a triumvirate of American, Russian and Chinese presidents.

Small wonder that the go-to quote for diplomacy in Trump 2.0 comes from the 19th-century British statesman, Viscount Palmerston: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

It was the 20th century, of course, which was dubbed the American century, as the United States became the world's indispensable nation, economically, militarily, diplomatically and culturally.

But what now?

Donald Trump sees himself as the leader of a global movement, aimed at eviscerating liberalism at home and abroad. And, for sure, it has adherents and converts around the world, on the traditional, hard and far right, as evidenced by the rise of the AfD in Germany and the Reform party in Britain.

But the countervailing force also appears to be strong, especially from leaders, such as Mark Carney, Friedrich Merz and Keir Starmer who are trying to immunise their countries from the Trump effect.

To describe this as "the anti-America century" feels overwrought and premature. But if this becomes the more lasting direction of US travel, perhaps historians will one day speak of the Trump years as the start of the anti-Americanisation century.

Liberation Day would form part of that narrative, another milestone moment that brought shade to the United States rather than emitting golden sunlight.

- ABC