The one thing Trump forgot about alliances

In a biting article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 17, journalist Andrew Egger described "the Trump doctrine" as a pattern in which U.S. President Donald Trump berates and insults longtime allies — many of them members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — only to turn around and demand their military help during his war against Iran. Trump, Egger argued, is burning bridges left and right yet wondering why those he is alienating are unreceptive to him.

Trump's foreign policy is drawing a lot of criticism from other NATO countries, including his proposal to annex Greenland (a colony of founding NATO member Denmark) and his push for Canada to become "the 51st state" — which Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is adamantly opposed to. And the Iran war, according to The Atlantic's Adam Serwer, is driving even more of a wedge between the U.S. and other major democracies.

Serwer, in an article published on March 18, emphasizes that the U.S. is becoming increasingly isolated during wartime.

"After a decade of trashing American allies as freeloaders," Serwer explains, "President Trump is begging for their help in opening the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway adjacent to Iran sometimes referred to as the 'jugular' of the world economy. Those allies aren't exactly jumping at the chance to join Trump's war on Iran — not a single one has taken the offer. That leaves the president trapped in a needless war of choice that he started and is unable to finish. Iran's leverage over the global economy is increasing as oil prices rise and the strait remains closed to the U.S. and its allies. Now, basically anyone could have told Trump that spending the past few years antagonizing allies with aggressive tariffs, belligerent arm-twisting, and imperial dismissiveness would hurt him when the time came to ask those same allies for help."

Serwer continues, "But this isn't a simple strategic miscalculation or even a typical Trumpian incompetence — it's the result of a particular ideological fantasy of American independence from foreign alliances, one that is oblivious to how those alliances long served American interests. Americans are learning the hard way that the economic costs of the autarky pursued by Trump are far worse than those of the 'globalism' he opposes."

The "fantasy of complete independence," according to Serwer, is a "longstanding part of American culture" but doesn't hold up during a crisis like a war or a pandemic.

"This distorted strain of American individualism came to the fore during the coronavirus pandemic but was present earlier as well," Serwer observes. "If nothing else, the pandemic revealed how dependent we are on others — and a lot of people didn't like that…. Now, the United States is at war, the global economy will face disaster if the strait remains closed indefinitely, American allies are reconsidering their reliance on the U.S., and Iran's previous theocratic leader has been replaced by an even more hardline successor. The outcome of the conflict itself cannot be known yet, but one thing is certain: Most all of us will be affected, one way or another. Society is a lot like reality. It exists whether you believe in it or not."