Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump shakes hands with vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, on July 16.Paul Sancya/The Associated Press
The signal has been sent to the world: Don’t count on us. In a second Donald Trump presidency, the U.S. won’t believe in enduring alliances.
Mr. Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate only heightened concerns about the Republican inclination to abandon support for Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had already met with Mr. Trump last week and written to European leaders that Mr. Trump intended to quickly broker an end to the war if he wins the presidency again – and that Europe would have to take on more financial burden for Ukraine’s war effort.
Mr. Vance had already called for all of that months ago, notably in an op-ed in the Financial Times. He has also framed that as a necessary step to shifting U.S. support to Asian allies to counter China. But Mr. Trump clearly doesn’t see Asian security the same way.
When asked if he would have the U.S. defend Taiwan against the Chinese invasion, Mr. Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek on Tuesday that Taiwan should be paying the U.S. for its defence. Not for weapons, which Taiwan buys with cash, but for U.S. protection. “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company,” Mr. Trump said.
This doesn’t come out of the blue. Mr. Vance might believe in a pivot to Asia, but his bedrock message is about avoiding foreign entanglements unless they directly affect U.S. interests. And Mr. Trump is purely transactional. That is his core. It might have been impeded in his first term, but in second, we could expect to see the Donald Trump who just declared that defending Taiwan “doesn’t give us anything.”
“I think it’s reflective of the emerging U.S. foreign policy doctrine that they won’t have enduring alliances anymore,” said Charles Burton, a senior fellow at Sinopsis. A second Trump administration will base its foreign policy on the cold calculation of the interests of the U.S., and the U.S. alone, he said.
That’s not just consequential for Ukraine and Taiwan.
Canada has to expect changes, not just because Mr. Trump’s protectionist tendencies aren’t frozen by his renegotiation of the continental trade agreement. Canada’s foreign policy leans heavily on group initiatives with the U.S. and the U.S. wouldn’t be interested in groups.
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Mr. Burton said Canadians might no longer be so certain that the U.S. would continue to protect Canada’s far north against Russian incursions. That would still be a U.S. obligation under NATO, but U.S. ambivalence might mean Canada would be forced to build its own northern defences more quickly.
On Thursday, Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, told a Politico panel on the margins of the Republican convention that her message to the U.S. is that supporting Ukraine against Russian invasion is related to securing North America. “We have a northern flank that requires protecting as well and protecting specifically from Russia and from China,” she said.
If the upshot of a new, no-alliances policy is simply that Europeans and Canadians spend more on their own defence, the U.S. interest would be pretty clear. But it’s also a message to U.S. adversaries. Europeans fear victory in Ukraine will embolden Russia to threaten others. And embolden China, too.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance see China as a dangerous rival, but their foreign policy message plays into a key strategic goal for Beijing: weakening U.S. alliances in order to weaken U.S. power.
In that, China has an ally in Russia. Their developing axis – a “no limits” partnership touted in meetings of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin – has helped Russia get around western sanctions over Ukraine. Western allies acting together are constraints they’d like to remove.
Both Russia and China have worked to find their own allies to divide U.S. allies, such as Hungary’s Mr. Orban, a pro-Russian leader who opposes European Union support for Ukraine and doesn’t want the bloc to become anti-China. China’s economic influence in Greece, including its state ownership of the port of Piraeus, is seen as the reason Greece has opposed tougher EU positions on China.
When a U.S. president tells allies the country isn’t really committed to alliances, more will be tempted to hedge their bets, or bend to Beijing’s will out of concern for economic interests or security. China is already working to rewrite the rules of multilateral organizations and develop client nations. If the U.S. isn’t interested in its allies, China and Russia will be.