Trump’s NATO talk reflects shift in U.S. role

When former President Donald Trump told a campaign rally in South Carolina last weekend he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who “didn’t pay,” there were gasps of shock in Washington, London, Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere around the world.

But not in South Carolina. At least not in the room that day. The crowd of Trump supporters decked out in “Make America Great Again” T-shirts and baseball caps reacted to the notion of siding with Moscow over longtime friends of the United States with boisterous cheers and whistles. “Delinquent” allies? Forget them. Not America’s problem.

The visceral rejection of the U.S.-led security architecture constructed in the years after World War II serves as a reminder of how much the notion of U.S. leadership in the world has shifted in recent years. Alliances that were once seen as the bulwark of the Cold War are now viewed as an outdated albatross by a significant segment of the American public that Trump appeals to.

The old consensus that endured even in the initial years after the end of the Cold War has frayed under the weight of globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession of 2008-09 and Trump’s relentless assault on international institutions and agreements. While polls show most Americans still support NATO and other alliances, the increasingly vocal objections in some quarters hark back to a century ago when much of America just wanted to be left alone.

“The alliance structure was built to win the Cold War, and it’s sort of atrophied,” said Michael Beckley, a scholar of great power competition at Tufts University. “Trump was obviously very jarring when he came to office, but it was part of a long-term trend.” Indeed, he added, “if you look at U.S. history, the last 80 years I really look at as an aberration.

“Through most of U.S. history, Americans thought they had a pretty good thing going here on the continent and they were largely independent economically of other countries, and that’s still largely true today.”

That historic tension between go-italone nationalism and broad-coalition internationalism has played out in stark form in the past week. Just days after his speech, Trump followed up by vowing to end all foreign aid “without the hope of a payback” if he wins his old job back, offering only loans to be reimbursed.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., and House Republicans refused to even consider a $95 billion security aid package for American friends in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

“Our allies are watching this closely,” Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters Wednesday as he urged passage of the security aid. “Our adversaries are watching this closely.”

“There are those who say U.S. leadership and our alliances and partnerships with countries around the world don’t matter or should be torn up or walked away from,” he added.

“We know from history that when we don’t stand up to dictators, they keep going. And the consequences of that would be severe for U.S. national security, for our NATO allies, for others around the world.”