For three decades, the architecture of international politics rested on a single assumption so deeply embedded that few bothered to state it: that dependence on the United States was an asset. Access to its markets, shelter under its security umbrella, integration with its technology — these were the dividends of alignment, and nations competed for them. That assumption is now dead. What is remarkable is not that it died, but how quickly its funeral has been organised — and by whom.
The mourners, it turns out, are the allies themselves. Across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, governments that once measured their standing by proximity to Washington are methodically engineering distance from it. The vocabulary is instructive. “De-risking” — a term Ursula von der Leyen coined in 2023 to describe Europe’s careful disentanglement from Chinese coercion — has been turned around and applied to the relationship with Washington itself, deployed openly by leaders and panellists at the Munich Security Conference. When the language designed for managing a rival is repurposed for managing a patron, something fundamental has shifted.
The shift did not arrive from nowhere. Allied resentment had been accumulating for years — over extraterritorial sanctions, over the industrial favouritism of the Inflation Reduction Act, over semiconductor export controls that treated partners as afterthoughts. But the second Trump administration converted a grievance into a strategy. Tariffs against friends, musings about annexing Canada, designs on Greenland, the public berating of Spain and Denmark at the Ankara Nato summit, and above all the Iran war — fought without the diplomatic or military alignment of a single major ally — persuaded capitals from Ottawa to Tokyo that the problem was not a policy to be waited out but a structural condition to be insured against.
The insurance policies are now being written at speed. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum that allies must “diversify to hedge against uncertainty” amid a rupture in the global order — and received a standing ovation. His government has translated the applause into paper: a journey to Beijing to unfreeze Sino-Canadian trade, followed within days by Britain’s Keir Starmer arriving in the Chinese capital to negotiate deals of his own.
Europe’s defence industrial strategy is deliberately routing the continent’s swelling military budgets away from American contractors; even as European defence spending surged, purchases from US firms fell by nearly half. France has ordered officials off American video-conferencing platforms; Britain’s major banks have opened talks on a home-grown card payments company to loosen the grip of Visa and Mastercard. Piece by piece, the plumbing of American primacy is being rerouted.
Two rival readings of this moment are now contending, and both deserve a hearing. The first — the view from anxious quarters of Washington itself — holds that the unwinding is a self-inflicted catastrophe for the United States. The ledger of costs is already filling. The Iran war’s disruption of energy and fertiliser markets landed a blow on American consumers that Moody’s put at $132bn. Four million fewer visitors arrived in 2025 than the year before; foreign student enrolment has slumped, draining both university revenues and the pipeline of future skilled labour. Most corrosively, allies now plan their American relationships in four-year electoral increments rather than generational bets. The Australian submarine deal of 2021 — a multi-decade wager on American constancy — belongs to a category of commitment no capital is willing to repeat. A superpower whose word is discounted at four-year maturities is a superpower operating with a fraction of its former leverage.
The second reading, gaining currency in allied capitals, is more unsettling for Washington precisely because it is more cheerful. On this view, the anticipated catastrophe of American abandonment has turned out, on inspection, to be survivable — even liberating.
Canada’s worst-case tariff modelling suggested a painful but absorbable blow to growth; in the event, collapsing exports to the American market were almost entirely offset by new demand elsewhere. Commodities, it transpires, find buyers regardless of who is threatening whom. The chess maxim beloved of the hypermoderns — that the threat is stronger than the execution — has proved apt: once the feared rupture actually arrived, the paralysis of avoidance gave way to the energy of adaptation.
On this reading, the United States has become a power that can still lash out but can no longer organise, and the rational response is not appeasement but exit.
Both readings, it should be said, have their sceptics. James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations notes that the depth of allied dependence on American technology makes de-risking a daunting, years-long prospect, with Europe’s atrophied defence industry unable to meet internal demand and neither Russia nor China acceptable as alternative suppliers.
Alina Polyakova, an expert on transatlantic relations, European security, Russian foreign policy and technology policy, and Alexander Gray, chief executive of American Global Strategies, the advisory firm he co-founded with former Trump national security adviser Robert C O’Brien, have pressed the point further, warning that de-risking from America leads in only one direction — dependence on China — citing Beijing’s swift mineral-export retaliation against Japan as a preview of what political strings attached to Chinese investment look like. The hedgers, in other words, may simply be trading a capricious patron for a colder one.
Yet even the sceptics concede the direction of travel. The question is no longer whether allies will reduce their exposure to the United States, but how far, how fast, and at what cost to both sides. And here the deepest change is psychological rather than material.
What has been lost is not capability but predictability — the belief that American commitments outlive American elections. Many abroad have concluded that no successor administration, Republican or Democratic, can restore it; the volatility, they judge, is now in the system rather than the man. That belief may be wrong. But in international politics, as in banking, confidence once withdrawn is not restored by assurances. It is restored — slowly, expensively, if at all — by decades of boringly consistent behaviour.
Whoever next occupies the White House will inherit a world no longer asking what America can do for it, but calculating, with new-found composure, how much it can do without America altogether. That calculation, once begun, is very hard to stop.
- The writer is Deputy Managing Editor, Gulf Times.