Around 3.30am on 4 March, Polish officials reported that the transfer of US weaponry across Ukraine’s western border, which sustained the country’s defence against the Russian onslaught for the past three years, had stopped. US transport aircraft loaded with urgently needed military aid for Ukraine were turned around. In the hours that followed, Washington also cut off the flow of intelligence that helped the Ukrainian military to coordinate counterattacks and strike Russian targets. “They brought it on themselves,” Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, declared shortly afterwards of the Ukrainian leadership. It was “sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four [heavy plank] across the nose,” Kellogg said. “Got their attention.”
It was not just Kyiv that got the message about the return of an “America First” foreign policy in Trump’s second term – harder, faster and even more ruthless than the first time around. US allies and partners around the world have watched with barely concealed dismay as it became clear the US was not only prepared to suspend military aid to Ukraine in the middle of a war – Ukrainian troops have lost ground and officials say at least 21 civilians have been killed in the days since – but that the Trump administration was determined to humiliate its Ukrainian counterparts in the process. Kellogg’s comments, comparing Ukraine to a farm animal that needs to be beaten into compliance, were entirely consistent with Washington’s stance towards Kyiv in recent weeks.
Trump has boasted of his “lengthy and highly productive” talks with Vladimir Putin. He has called Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator”, accused the Ukrainian leader of starting the war with Russia, and pressured his government to sign over a sizeable share of the country’s mineral rights. On 24 February, the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the US voted with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine and its European allies on a UN resolution calling for an end to the war. Then there was the now infamous encounter in the Oval Office on 28 February, when Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, berated Zelensky for raising the question of security guarantees for Ukraine, and ordered him out of the White House, telling him to “come back when he is ready for peace”.
“Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service,” remarked the independent French senator Claude Malhuret, a Ukrainian flag pinned to his lapel, in an address to the upper house of France’s parliament after the suspension of military aid on 4 March. “We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.”
The slogan “America First” has been in use since the 19th century, and has been employed by white supremacists such as the Ku Klux Klan and at times by both Republicans and Democrats. It became the rallying cry of an isolationist political movement in the 1930s, leading to the foundation of the America First Committee (AFC) in 1940. The AFC was supported by figures including the aviation pioneer and Hitler admirer Charles Lindbergh, and the Ohio senator Robert Taft, who advocated against US entanglements overseas and opposed US involvement in the Second World War until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Trump resurrected the slogan in his 2016 election campaign, vowing in his first inaugural address: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First.”
In practice during his first term, this translated to starting a trade war with China and repeatedly questioning the value of US alliances. But Trump returned to power in January with a far more forceful approach, treating the world beyond the country’s borders as little more than a playground for American gain. In its latest incarnation, Trump’s “America First” doctrine seems to mean naked transactionalism. Ukraine’s significance is assessed largely through the value of its critical mineral deposits, Gaza is a beachfront property complex waiting to be developed, and all the world is a stage for Trump’s supposed dealmaking prowess. The guiding tenets of the new American foreign policy appear to be asking what’s in it for the US and how a given decision will play for Trump’s image, long-standing American values be damned.
“The steps taken by the Trump administration since January and the brutal humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House should leave European leaders in no doubt that the US has reversed its approach to the war,” Sabine Fischer, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me. The resulting shock was comparable to that experienced at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, she explained. “This is the second time in three years that a major international player has overturned the whole playing field, creating a fundamentally new and very dangerous geopolitical environment.” It was unfortunate, Fischer said, that European governments needed this crisis to reckon with the full extent of the threats to the continent’s security. “We can only hope that it is not yet too late.”
The US announced on 11 March that it would resume aid and intelligence to Ukraine after talks in Saudi Arabia, but it was not only Europe that is reeling from the fallout of Trump’s first six weeks in power. The president also imposed 25 per cent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, the US’s closest trading partners, which he has since mostly paused, along with 20 per cent tariffs on China, which remain in place. The nominal rationale was to “stop the flood of illegal aliens and drugs” into the US, but Trump has also issued other contradictory explanations, including balancing trade, bolstering domestic manufacturing, and “protecting the soul of our country”. Given his repeated comments in recent weeks about his desire to make Canada the “51st state”, and the vanishingly small amount of fentanyl that crosses the Canadian border, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, has dismissed Trump’s claims as “completely bogus”. “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy,” said Trudeau on 4 March. “Because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
Trump has vowed to take control of the Panama Canal, “take over” the Gaza Strip, and acquire Greenland, a self-governing territory that is part of Denmark, a Nato ally. “One way or the other,” Trump declared on 6 March, to cheers from Republicans in the US Congress, “we’re going to get it”.
“If the US continues on its current path under the Trump administration, I think this will be the moment historians say that 80 years of American collective security across the Atlantic came to an end,” said Kori Schake, who directs the foreign and defence policy studies programme at the American Enterprise Institute and previously served in senior roles in the US state and defence departments. Under the banner of “America First”, Schake believes Trump has “overinterpreted his election success into believing that he has a mandate to take a wrecking ball to the international order”.
Trump is casting aside the crucial lessons of the two world wars and the great depression in pursuit of a foreign policy that seeks to “wring the maximum amount of advantage out of all American leverage”. In fact, Trump seems to be ignorant about the more recent history of allied security, too. On 7 March he questioned Nato’s principle of collective security, asking: “Do you think they’re going to come and protect us? Hmm… I’m not so sure.” He was apparently oblivious to the fact that the US is the only Nato member ever to invoke the Article 5 commitment after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks. “It breaks my heart to say it,” Schake said. “But I do think America’s allies ought to consider the Trump administration fundamentally unreliable – politically, militarily and economically.”
[See also: America is turning on Trump]
Trump’s defenders argue that he is simply correcting a long-standing imbalance that has allowed US allies to outsource their security to Washington, while profiting from the benefits of trade. Moreover, some insist, his outreach to Putin is not driven simply by his admiration for the Russian leader, but by a complex strategy to counter China by drawing Moscow away from its embrace with Beijing in what has been called a “reverse Nixon” manoeuvre. (The reference is to the former US president’s overtures to China during the Cold War following the Sino-Soviet split.)
This is “utter nonsense” said Eric Edelman, co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast and ex-US ambassador to Finland and Turkey, as well as an undersecretary of defence during the George W Bush administration. “If the US wants to take on China, it needs its allies in Europe, but instead we’re about to declare a trade war with them and we’re alienating them by saying their security doesn’t matter to us anymore.” As the Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko noted recently, if anyone is in a position to enact a “reverse Nixon” manoeuvre, it is not Trump but Xi Jinping, who may well attempt to exploit the emerging US-European schism to improve China’s relations with the latter.
“I think it’s a mistake to attribute too much strategy to Trump,” Edelman told me. He views Trump as an a-strategic leader who is motivated instead by a series of “core biases”, which he has articulated with remarkable consistency over his decades in public life. “The first is that our [political] leaders are stupid,” Edelman said. “Two: our allies have been taking us for suckers. And three: the terms of international trade have been very unfair to America, and we ought to put up tariffs. In his view, trade is zero sum, and if we have a trade imbalance with anyone, then they’re stealing our money.”
Edelman sees a degree of historical continuity with the America First movement of the 1930s and 1940s. In some respects, Trump is “the legatee of Robert Taft”, Edelman said. “But he is also clearly animated by the question, ‘What’s best for me, Donald Trump?’ He’s clearly looking for personal benefit.”
Trump’s antagonism towards Europe and antipathy to free trade also has a more recent antecedent. It draws on popular weariness with the “forever wars” arising from the American war on terror, and the backlash against globalisation that followed the destruction of many of the country’s former manufacturing heartlands. “The reality is that Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump to a certain extent,” said Edelman. “If you go back and read the interviews he gave towards the end of his administration, he berates our allies and derides free trade. In effect, he provided an intellectual permission slip for Trump to come along and articulate this in a much less nuanced and much more brutish way.”
Joe Biden was similarly sceptical about free trade, and maintained the tariffs imposed on China in Trump’s first term, as well as introducing some of his own. Edelman points, too, to Biden’s foreign policy missteps, such as the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan and his handling of the Aukus defence pact to build nuclear-powered submarines with the UK and Australia – despite the latter already having a contract with a French company worth billions of dollars to build a new fleet of submarines. The French government was only informed of the deal hours before the public announcement, in what the then foreign minister called a “stab in the back”. “The view you hear from some European colleagues is that they’re looking at going-on 16 years of this,” said Edelman. “And it does look like a deeper trend.”
[See also: How the right weaponised the “vibe shift”]
Viewed from Taiwan, Trump’s America First foreign policy is especially alarming given the pace of China’s military build-up and growing doubts among Taiwan’s citizens about whether the US would defend them against an attack. Brian Hioe, the editor of Taiwan’s New Bloom magazine, recalled watching the reaction on social media in Taiwan to Trump’s confrontation with Zelensky at the White House. “Some people were shocked and it very quickly became headline news,” Hioe said. “In one sense, it confirmed what was already known about Trump, but it also raised a lot of questions about the reliability of the US, which will be weaponised for Chinese disinformation.”
Taiwan does not need to imagine what it means to be abandoned by the US. When Washington established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, it severed official ties with Taipei along with their mutual defence treaty. (Congress then passed the Taiwan Relations Act, committing the US to provide Taiwan with arms for its defence, but leaving the question of whether the US military would defend Taiwan ambiguous.)
“There have always been these anxieties regarding the US, but Trump has made it particularly acute,” Hioe said. The US response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “wasn’t reassuring” for many in Taiwan, he said, noting the absence of US boots on the ground and the handwringing debates in Washington and Europe over whether to send military equipment such as tanks and fighter jets to Kyiv.
Trump has exacerbated those concerns in recent months by suggesting that Taiwan is too small and too far away to defend, and that it “took our chip business away”. Yet even giving Trump what he nominally wants might not turn out to be enough. After Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced a $100bn investment in US production facilities on 3 March – in what was widely viewed as an attempt to head off tariffs and assuage Trump’s complaints – he appeared to suggest that this would, in fact, lessen the imperative to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. “That would be a catastrophic event obviously,” Trump remarked. “But… we would have a very big part of [semiconductor manufacturing] in the US. So it would have a big impact if something should happen with Taiwan.”
Summing up the trajectory of recent American foreign policy in a speech last month, Singapore’s defence minister Ng Eng Hen said that the image of the US in his region had “changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent”. The consequences for American allies around the world as they contemplate the new regime in Washington and its priorities are stark. The post-1945 international order is not merely crumbling, it is being torn down by one of its primary architects, leading to urgent talk of rearmament and the need for nuclear weapons. On 7 March, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, announced plans to introduce mandatory military training for “every adult male” and said Poland would consider acquiring its own nuclear arsenal. Germany and Denmark have indicated their interest in a French proposal to extend the country’s nuclear umbrella over the continent. (France developed its independent nuclear deterrent after being burned by the US during the 1956 Suez Crisis.)
The Trump administration’s America First approach is “going to cause a major reconsideration of nuclear proliferation”, Schake warned. “Another major consequence is that other countries are not going to want to buy American military equipment if the US government can turn it off in the way they have turned off intelligence sharing and weapons to Ukraine. So we have made ourselves an unreliable commercial partner.”
For the first time, long-standing American allies are also having to contemplate the previously unimaginable question of whether they could even end up having to defend themselves against the US. When I asked Eric Edelman whether it was conceivable, given Trump’s recent remarks, that the US could use military force to attack Greenland or Canada, he paused. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But the fact that you have to put the question at all, and that I have to hesitate before answering, already tells you how far we have strayed into terra incognita.”
[See also: Mark Carney can’t save Canada]
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This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working