Trump Has Betrayed Our Allies and Our Principles | Opinion

Less than a month into his second term, President Donald Trump has succeeded in gutting what remained of the American-led global security order. Because that order survived, barely, his first term, there was some reasonable hope that it would do so again. But by siding so publicly with Russian President—and strongman—Vladimir Putin in his desire to dismember Ukraine—to the point of blaming Kyiv for being invaded and deliberately leaving Ukraine out of the "negotiations"—he has quickly brought the worst-case scenario to pass.

America can no longer be trusted to side with its democratic allies against authoritarian aggression, a realization that is slowly dawning on leaders around the world and which will have far-reaching implications in the years to come.

Between 2016 and 2020, European leaders could make a case that Trumpism was an aberration and that the United States could repair relations and shore up the NATO alliance by bringing either a Democrat or some kind of pre-Trump Republican back into the White House. That was the promise of Joe Biden's presidency, and he largely delivered on it.

But the outcome of the 2024 election has forced a reckoning with a harsh, inescapable reality: in November, the American people willingly turned their country over to the same malevolent authoritarians who tried to overturn their constitutional order live on national television in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The voters went in with their eyes open and they picked the autocrat. Among many other things, it means that both the rank-and-file and the elites in one of America's two major political parties are implacably hostile to the core obligations of the NATO alliance.

Now, even a best-case scenario of the next four years which results in the election of another Democrat to clean up whatever political superfund site is bequeathed to them by Trump and Elon Musk's goon squad cannot easily undo the damage. The reason is that even if Democrats succeed in rescuing the country from this madness, the GOP will remain in the grip of it. If voters are willing to turn over power to people like this every time they are mildly dissatisfied, they are likely to do it again at some point. If you're, say, tiny, democratic Latvia, facing a radicalized, revanchist Russia on your eastern border, and your continued existence depends on the security guarantees of the United States, can you really put your faith in Washington's willingness to go to war for you?

The answer is that you cannot and should not and will not. The unraveling of the NATO alliance may not happen all at once, but it is coming, and Europeans will have to put something in its place. Countries that have long felt comfortable under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, like Germany and Canada, will need to ramp up military spending and seriously consider nuclearization. Nearly every country in Europe is a so-called nuclear threshold state that possesses the technological know-how, resources and wealth to build nuclear weapons quickly. If their hands are forced, it will undermine one of the greatest and most improbable achievements of the post-WWII liberal architecture—keeping the nuclear club in the near-single digits despite the enormous security benefits that such weapons seem to confer on those who possess them. If nothing else, having even a small stockpile of nukes makes a country functionally impossible to invade.

That temptation will almost certainly be too much for many countries menaced by Putin's Russia to resist. But it's not just that Trump has thrown the alliance into chaos by siding with its principal adversary against the victim of brutal aggression—it's that Trump himself is now threatening to turn America and its military might into a revisionist power.

Trump has mused about turning Canada into the 51st state and seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal, three actions that would require unprovoked military aggression against peaceful democracies and longstanding allies. These countries don't have the luxury of trying to figure out whether to take him literally or seriously. If the United States of America—arguably the most militarily dominant power in world history—is now an expansionist state led by ethnonationalist autocrats, it will trigger an unparalleled emergency in democratic capitals around the world.

That's because to Trump and his allies, the world should be restored to its pre-WWII condition of pure anarchy, and countries should have no obligations to one another—economically, morally or geostrategically—beyond what can be extracted via the application of blunt force and power.

Every transaction is zero sum. Institutions designed to reduce conflict should be dismantled if they impose even modest restraints on America. The idea that deepening economic and security cooperation with a society of fellow democracies, even if not every single arrangement directly benefits the United States in a measurably material way, is anathema to this crew. To them, it's all a simple ledger, and we're in the red. They believe we can do better by joining forces with Russia, bullying small, peaceful democracies, withdrawing from painstakingly constructed international institutions and shedding any obligations to the rest of the world.

As impossible as this would have been to imagine 15 years ago, America has joined the axis of tyranny and turned its back on both its principles and its democratic allies. The fallout will reverberate for decades.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.