President Donald Trump takes questions after signing Executive Orders, Tuesday, February 18, 2025, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Since the end of WWII the United States has stood with Western Europe in solidarity on most issues, creating a global order that . In his recent comments, though, President Donald Trump appears willing to rethink the longstanding order of things and to move on. Alexander Ward reports for The Wall Street Journal:
President Trump has dramatically shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy in four short weeks, making the U.S. a less reliable ally and retreating from global commitments in ways that stand to fundamentally reshape America’s relationship with the world.
His top envoys have floated concessions to Russia in peace talks that stunned European allies, followed by Trump calling Ukraine’s leader a dictator, and he kept Europeans at arms length as the negotiations began. He has dismantled the leading U.S. aid agency providing assistance to the developing world where China aims to establish a foothold. Trump’s plan to own Gaza and remove Palestinians from the enclave erased decades of Washington’s efforts to broker a two-state solution. And his plans to increase tariffs heralded an end to American-fueled globalization.
No one expected Trump to handle global affairs like his predecessors. But few expected him to move so rapidly to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from the course it has charted since 1945.
Since the end of World War II, the American-led system of alliances has bolstered U.S. power, most foreign policy experts say. By vowing to defend allies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the U.S. more than any other country took on the role of global guarantor of free trade and stability, a mission that included countering first the Soviet Union and, more recently, China.
Trump has a different take: Allies take more than they give. Instead of relying on the U.S. military and its nuclear umbrella for their security, other countries should spend more on their militaries while providing economic incentives to stay in America’s good graces. Trump’s is a far more transactional, win-lose vision of foreign policy.
“It’s not that President Trump is abandoning the post-World War II order,” said Victoria Coates, vice president for national security and foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “It’s that we are no longer in the post-World War II era and we have to accept that the geopolitical landscape has shifted.”
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