SHENZHEN, the pulsing heart of China’s industrial machine, sitting across from one of the country’s legendary entrepreneurs—a man who has built billion-dollar supply chains and navigated every tectonic shift in global commerce for four decades. I expected our conversation to center on the Iran war, the Strait of Hormuz blockade, or the spiraling oil premiums strangling Asian manufacturers. Instead, he offered an observation that has haunted me ever since.
“For us, Trump’s attack on Iran is less consequential than his threat to attack Greenland,” he told me, swirling his tea. “When he did that, to America’s oldest allies—Denmark, the Netherlands, the Europeans—I knew immediately that Europe would not follow America’s approach to China. If he treats his friends this way, who needs enemies?”
That remark, delivered with the clinical detachment of a man reading a balance sheet, captures something profound about the tectonic shift underway in global geopolitics. The costs of President Donald Trump’s systematic contempt for allies are no longer theoretical. They are materializing in defense budgets, trade agreements, currency arrangements, and diplomatic realignments from Brussels to Tokyo. Governments that once anchored their entire foreign policies to the reliability of American power are now actively hedging against its absence.
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To understand the velocity of this realignment, one must revisit January 2026—the month Donald Trump threatened to annex Greenland, a sovereign territory of NATO ally Denmark, using military force if necessary, while simultaneously threatening escalating tariffs of 10% to 25% on eight European nations to coerce compliance.
The European response was swift and unprecedented. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned Washington to keep its hands off Greenland, declaring the island’s sovereignty “non-negotiable” and Europe’s response would be “unflinching.” The European Union activated its trade “bazooka”—the Anti-Coercion Instrument—at an emergency leaders’ summit in Brussels.
But the deeper damage was psychological. As the Council on Foreign Relations noted, “the president’s attempt to take control of Greenland could prove existential for the NATO alliance” and “Europeans have lost all illusions about the transatlantic relationship.” The Economist described Trump’s Greenland gambit as having “created the biggest rift in the transatlantic alliance since the 1956 Suez crisis.”
This was not a dispute over burden-sharing or defense spending targets—arguments that, however abrasive, operated within the guardrails of alliance management. This was the United States threatening to seize territory from a founding NATO member. For European capitals, the message was unambiguous: if Washington could treat Copenhagen this way, no ally was safe.
The accumulation of abuse—tariff wars, insults hurled at allied leaders, open support for far-right parties seeking to fracture the European Union—has reached a tipping point. As Daniel DePetris recently wrote in the U.K. edition of the Spectator, a conservative and ardently pro-American magazine: “The war in Iran has forced Europe to grow a spine. European leaders are no longer interested in dropping to their knees and groveling to stay on Trump’s good side.”
The shift from rhetoric to action is now unmistakable. The European Union’s ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030 plan commits approximately 800 billion euros (roughly $935 billion) to defense investment in the coming years. Crucially, the objective is no longer simply to buy American weapons—the model that sustained the transatlantic security bargain for decades. Europeans now want their money to stay at home, building European firms and supply chains to gain strategic autonomy from Washington.
The same logic is spreading beyond defense. The European Payments Initiative is actively building a European alternative to Visa and Mastercard, with its CEO explicitly citing “Trump fears” as a catalyst for adoption. The era of “de-risking” was once discussed exclusively in relation to China. Now, European leaders are openly discussing de-risking from the United States.
This is not merely about defense procurement or payment rails. It represents the embryonic architecture of a post-American Europe—one that is increasingly unwilling to subordinate its economic and strategic interests to the whims of an erratic White House.
If Greenland shattered the illusion of American reliability, the Iran war has pulverized what remained. When U.S. and Israeli forces launched large-scale strikes across Iran in late February 2026, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior regime figures, Trump expected allied solidarity. What he received was a collective shrug—and then active opposition.
As The Economist reported in early April 2026, European allies are “losing hope of keeping America in NATO,” with President Trump “fuming about their refusal to send ships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the reluctance of some to facilitate American operations.” European NATO allies declared they would not get involved in Trump’s Strait of Hormuz blockade, further ratcheting up tensions within the increasingly fragile alliance.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace captured the European mood precisely: “Donald Trump has certainly done irreversible damage to NATO, but the reasons why there is no way back are long-term and structural. U.S. strategic interests have shifted away from Europe. The transatlantic relationship may get more normal after Trump, based on narrower shared interests, respectful communication, and predictability, but Europeans will have to grow up.”
The Iran war has done something no amount of diplomatic persuasion could achieve: it has forced Europe to contemplate a future in which American security guarantees can no longer be taken for granted. France and Germany have launched a nuclear steering group to discuss extending the French nuclear umbrella across the continent—a conversation that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. French President Emmanuel Macron announced a major doctrine shift, opening deterrence exercises to European allies and dispatching French strategic nuclear forces to allied territory.
Germany, historically the most reluctant European power to assume security leadership, is now actively discussing coming under the French nuclear shield. Poland’s president has openly mused about developing Warsaw’s own nuclear capability. These are not fringe debates. They represent the most fundamental reimagining of European security architecture since the 1950s.
Perhaps the most damning indicator of how far American standing has fallen comes from the global survey data. The European Council on Foreign Relations found that a year after Trump’s return, a substantial portion of global respondents believe China is overtaking the United States as the world’s dominant power—and that Trump is “making China great again.”
Only 16% of EU citizens now consider the United States an ally, while 20% see it as a rival or an enemy. In Germany, trust in American leadership has dropped by a staggering 39 percentage points. A POLITICO poll of major NATO allies found that majorities in Germany, Canada, and France describe the United States as an unreliable ally—including 57% of Canadians and half of German adults.
Critically, this is not because Europeans have suddenly fallen in love with Beijing. They have not. Europe has deep conflicts with China over Ukraine, subsidies, electric vehicles, critical minerals, and market access. But the strategic calculus has shifted. In a world where the United States threatens allies with annexation and economic warfare, maintaining a second channel to Beijing becomes not a preference but a necessity.
As the European Parliament’s own assessment concluded, transatlantic relations since early 2025 have been “marked by rising tension and uncertainty regarding the reliability of the United States as an ally” across multiple domains including NATO, Greenland, Ukraine, trade, technology, climate, and relations with China.
The contagion is spreading far beyond Europe. Across the Asia-Pacific, American allies who have built their entire defense postures around U.S. security guarantees are now running the same calculus that Europeans have already completed: Can we still count on Washington?
A recent Taiwan poll found that 57% of respondents did not believe the United States would send troops to defend the island if war broke out in the Taiwan Strait. In Japan and South Korea, the probability of independent nuclear arsenals—long considered a taboo—is now being openly discussed in policy circles, precisely because the American nuclear umbrella is increasingly viewed as an unreliable asset.
The European Council on Foreign Relations report warned explicitly: “If Washington’s security guarantees are regarded as transactional, Asian partners may view the American nuclear umbrella as unreliable. An unforeseen consequence is that it increases the probability that Japan and South Korea will seek independent nuclear arsenals for strategic survival.”
This is the ultimate cost of Trump’s contempt: a world in which American allies, rather than pooling their security under U.S. leadership, pursue their own nuclear capabilities—weakening nonproliferation norms, increasing the risk of miscalculation, and eroding the very architecture of American hegemony that has kept great-power peace for eight decades.
There is a paradox at the heart of Trump’s approach. His stated goal is to make America stronger, richer, and more respected. But the actual result is the systematic dismantling of the alliance system that amplifies American power at a fraction of the cost of unilateral action.
As CFR scholars have noted, “Washington’s network of alliances has granted the United States extraordinary influence in Europe and Asia, imposing constraints on Moscow and Beijing at a scale that neither power can replicate.” Chatham House’s analysis of Trump’s national security strategy observed that “hedging remains the best way for other countries to respond” to U.S. volatility and unpredictability—not just to gain leverage but “to protect against volatility.”
The irony is that allies are doing precisely what Trump claims to want—spending more on defense, building indigenous industrial capacity—but in ways that reduce American leverage rather than enhance it. The ReArm Europe plan will generate hundreds of billions in defense spending, but increasingly those euros will flow to European defense contractors rather than American ones. The French-German nuclear dialogue, once unimaginable, is now in active planning stages. The European Payments Initiative is building infrastructure that could one day challenge dollar dominance in trade settlement.
Trump’s defenders argue that this is all part of the plan—that burden-shifting is the objective, and if Europe finally takes responsibility for its own defense, that represents American strategic success. But this argument conflates European capability with American influence. A Europe that can defend itself without the United States is also a Europe that can act without the United States—including on China policy, trade policy, and technology standards.
The Shenzhen businessman I spoke with understood something that Washington’s strategic community is only beginning to grasp: reliability is the fundamental currency of alliance leadership. Once squandered, it cannot be quickly restored—even by a future administration that reverts to traditional alliance management.
As Foreign Affairs noted in its assessment of the Trump administration’s approach, “By extorting old friends for short-term gain, threatening to annex allied territory, and applying tariffs indiscriminately, he has squandered decades of cooperation that has served U.S. interests.”
The Brookings Institution’s analysis captured the structural nature of this shift: “As that confidence dissipates, investors and governments hedge. There is no true alternative to the dollar today, but Europe remains an incomplete financial and political union, and China’s renminbi lacks credibility as a freely trusted reserve asset. Still, the direction of travel is unmistakable.”
The costs of Trump’s contempt are no longer prospective. They are being priced into defense budgets, trade agreements, currency reserves, and diplomatic alignments across the globe. The world is not waiting for America to become reliable again. It is building systems that do not depend on American reliability at all.
For a country whose post-1945 strategy has rested on being the indispensable nation, there is no greater strategic defeat than becoming dispensable.
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