Donald Trump’s bruising return to the White House has sent many longtime foreign allies scrambling to get their distance, and according to a new piece from The Atlantic, that distance will last long after Trump is gone.
Trump’s second term as president has been marked by notable and widespread disrespect toward nations once seen as close U.S. allies. Between his attempts to level massive tariffs against nearly every nation in the world and his frequent breaches of diplomatic norms, Trump has created a hostile global environment in which allies no longer feel safe trusting in the stability of the U.S.
In a new piece for The Atlantic on Tuesday, staff writer Vivian Salama argued that this new dynamic, in which the nations of the world are working to establish a safe distance from the U.S., is bound to become the new normal for years to come, even after Trump leaves office and is potentially replaced by a more traditional, dependable administration.
As an American I have no doubt that our relationship with our allies will improve once we restore some sanity to the White House, but we’ve forced our allies to diversify their trade to brunt the impact of our tariffs and now that they’ve done so I don’t see any sane reason why they would undo that.
The damage done will take decades to undo. No one trusts USA anymore. Even when Trump is gone, no one will trust you. We saw you vote him in TWICE. So who knows who you will vote for in the future.
Germany voted in Hitler who was most certainly worse than Trump, and they recovered completely in just a few decades. I doubt you’ve told any Germans lately that you don’t trust who they might vote in in the future (though current events suggest perhaps you should). America will sort itself out, and the world keeps spinning.
Around 4 decades.
So we agree?
Its going to take at least 50 years of good faith, and I wish you good fucking luck with the insane 4 year flip flop political bias your country has.
We Canadians have been scratching our heads over the course of your increasing instability for 20 years, and we aren’t going to forget that over night.
Trump is a sign that the political landscape in the US is so unstable that nothing promised by any political figure can be trusted by your allies.
Only a foolish nation forgets that overnight. We won’t.
If it was only the US, that would be something, but it’s happening to a lesser extent elsewhere too. The UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, and probably more I missed, are all showing a surge in right-wing support despite the mess Dumold Trump is making. In the UK Nigel Farage is like mini-Trump, and despite proof of his lies and corruption his support seems to grow.
Something is rotten in the societies that are allowing this to happen, and I envy Canada for how it seems to be resisting it. Long may it continue.
The damage being caused to US reputation on the world stage won’t be fixable without fixing the rot first, because without that it could all happen again, and US allies know it.
Nobody will forget anything overnight, but the world keeps spinning and we all move on eventually.
Well then you haven’t been paying attention.
We have committed some of the worst war crimes of the modern era
We threatened to INVADE MULTIPLE ALLIES
We have constantly lied and broken multiple signed agreements
Our allies have permanently changed large scale trade operations to China for stability
The dollar has decreased in value
Allies have removed bonds and gold reserves from our country.
Allowed a bloated and swollen pedophilic rapist to go on tv and threaten to nuke a civilization at the UN
Ostracized ourselves by launching state run media and threatening to dismantle the ICC (which is investigating us for warcrimes)
Allowed the president’s family to invade and steal islands from sovereign nations (we all know what they want islands for)
And more!
No. There is no going back. The country was couped and is dead. Take a look at who is running every agency within government and you go ahead and tell yourself in the mirror that when trump doesn’t accept the election results, he won’t, that Kash Patel and Tom Homan will send DHS and the FBI to arrest trump. Maybe the Military run by kegsbreath and the businessman secretaries will come get him? Maybe the US Marshals will come get him- oh wait, they gave Trump a marshal badge and said he is the “highest law enforcement officer in the land”
A country of delusional peasants.
Trump is just a symptom of a rot that goes so much deeper. Nixon was forced to resign because he was caught spying on his political rivals. Trump tried to overthrow the government, faced no consequences, ran for president again, and won.
That’s what I am saying.
If anyone in the government wanted to keep him out of office,because they absolutely knew what Trump was before he was in the political spotlight, they could have…
If they ever wanted to arrest him, they could have.
They could all stop him at any point right now, but they won’t.
None of that is going to change when he says, “the election wasn’t fair” or “it was rigged” or some lame fake AI attack.
He will just do it. Dems will feign outrage and then we will be mad about something else. Why is everyone ok with this?
I hate it but you’re right. No two ways about it.
I think the only thing that could POSSIBLY put us on a positive path again would be if we were to wrest control back to the People again, and quite publicly show the world we’re locking away all these nazis forever on some forgotten rock in the middle of the Pacific, and throwing away the key.
But yeah, something like that would be truly incredible and unexpected…
Unfortunately I’m with you, we proved to the world that our country as a whole is morally bankrupt. The best way forward could be splitting the county in two and letting the lunatics drown in their own stupidity.
Unfortunately they’d never give up their nukes and they’re stupid enough to use them so WTF do you even do?
Honestly, I’m not sure yet. In a perfect world, we take back the government and rebuild it in an actual way that democracy can be enforced (like the Scandinavian countries)
I would personally prefer that blue states join Canada and the EU because the red states will fall into poverty and debt and they will blame us and invade.
But the true root of all of the issues we have always had are generational wealth (extreme wealth) and corporations. So idk how we can stop this cycle with those
I’ve laid all this out in another comment of mine but nearly all of these things we’ve done before (and worse) but diplomatically recovered from, or were done (and far worse) by our allies, which they’ve diplomatically recovered from in less than 50 years.
If you’ve only been alive since 1990 and never learned anything about US or global history and 1990-2016 is your only frame of reference for global politics, all of these things would certainly seem so extreme and unprecedented. But the reality is America’s reliability and dependability were always an illusion, and thinking that the rest of the world is somehow enlightened enough to hold America to account for its failings of the last 10 years forever is a very sophomoric idea of global politics
I disagree and you will never find this many inprecedented actions in history that worked
What we witnessed was a second “Business Plot”. The first one didn’t work out because we had principled leaders and Veterans wouldn’t betray the nation.
The oligarchs that failed (mostly the same companies as today) lost principled Republicans and were universally hated while FDRs popularity soared. Republicans learned from this and systematically dismantled education in this country and courted the racist south.
What we have just witnessed, is a business plot that succeeded. We were couped by a coalition of extreme generational wealth, christian nationalists, and the tech facsists.
We have witnessed the dismantling and conquering of every agency and institution that could hold them responsible (to include putting a dictators face on them). Every agency that was investigating this group was taken over and is still being dismantled. The heads of these agencies are cult members.
We witnessed an unelected businessman with open conflicts of interest invade our government and sabotage every investigation against him and STEAL OUR MOST SENSITIVE DATA. they stole OPM records, social security information, etc and put it on an unknown server. They also installed their AI into every agency and the Pentagon. There is no recovering from that.
-this would be all of the actions that I previously listed
-the Epstein files and lack of response from our government has shattered the entire IDEA of justice in this country and unmasked the hidden depravity of extreme wealth.
No. Your snyde comment shows a lack of sophomoric comprehension of history and current events.
Please show me a comparable time in our history equal to this?
And no, the Gilded Age was not this bad as far as everything mentioned
This is not enough unfortunately. Your checks and balances need to be checked and balanced. If they are not working now, why would they work in the future?
They could use some TLC for sure. The Trump administration is dismantling them day by day. They seem to have prevented him going full coup up to now, but I bet the MAGA leaders have a plan to knock the remainder down before the next election.
I suspect they were put in place by people who never expected the population to stand by and watch them get torn apart.
If the Democrats get back in, do you expect them to reinstate the destroyed checks and balances and implement greater restrictions? Or do you expect them to continue (ab)using the same Trump processes?
I suspect the majority of the world expect the latter.
Indeed, I expect they won’t reinstate them fully, and I also suspect most of the world will expect the same. This is why it will be so difficult to repair the US reputation on the world stage.
Agreed.
They are working currently. Though admittedly many cracks in the armor have been revealed, and the complacency America had in its expectations of presidential tradition and precedent has clearly done damage of its own.
Working? You are hilarious. Congress and Senate or Supreme Court should have put the brakes on Trump a year ago. They are still siding and abetting him instead. Even the military is happy to ignore the Constitution to do Trump’s bidding. It’s less than given that the Nov elections will be honoured. Doesn’t look like checks and balances to the outside world.
Yes they are objectively and inarguably working. Even with several members of the Supreme Court compromised it has still been a regular obstacle to his plans. The panic the administration has for and the effort put into the upcoming elections are further proof that they’re working. The fact that the upcoming midterms happen only half way through his presidency is not an accident either. The American system was designed to minimize the amount of damage a president or any other branch of government can do.
Nobody promised the system of checks and balances we have could prevent the president from doing any harm. It only provides the people with the power to put a stop to it.
These “barely hanging together” checks and balances are the reason I favour the parliamentary system. Obviously I only speak for myself.
When you have a lower house designed around real and regular debate with the leaders and real opposition who are expected to form their own “govt in waiting”, there are more opportunities to hold the govt to account and challenge them before it gets to the judiciary.
The spiderman standoff between three institutions supposedly watching each other but vulnerable to being manipulated by the same malevolent forces and vested interests seems weak these days.
You can elect someone who is extremely hard to eject if they’re bad for the country. A US president is in for 4 years precisely, and the supreme Court has made them legally immune to acts taken as president. We are seeing the impacts of this guarantee and they won’t stop at least until the term is over.
Etc.
That these even exist are proof that the checks and balances are NOT working. This is why the world is turning away. Trump is the symptom of a bigger underlying cause.
None of those are proof that the checks and balances have failed.
This is why the Supreme Court is a panel. This check has succeeded.
The balance of the judicial branch has successfully thwarted several illegal attempts at rigging the election.
The emoluments clause is unclear in how it should be interpreted today. Trump hasn’t directly violated it in any way. There is ongoing debate about whether or not some indirect forms of compensation violate it or not, and something may yet come of this.
There is too much legal precedent supporting this being considered a campaign promise and not a bribe. Because it’s offered to all citizens as a benefit of the outcome of an election, it’s functionally no difference from saying “Elect me and I’ll lower taxes”
Technically speaking, a full ceasefire agreed to by both sides resets this clock. No rules have technically been broken. Congress retains the ability to shut the war down, the republicans in power just don’t want to. The upcoming mid term elections are the remedy for that.
But we agree members of the Supreme Court compromised. Their existence is a failure.
But not all. For example, machine-stamped postmarks now reflect the date an item is first sorted at a regional processing. Checks are failing. In November we will see how many.
Bullshit. How can you not see this as a failure?
Bullshit. Crypto tokens, golden bars, planes, even the admitted $122,050 in gifted tickets to ten major sporting events.
Bullshit. The check has failed. Trump should have been impeached the moment he lowered tariffs on Swiss imports from 39% to 15% immediately after receiving $130k.
Bullshit. It is a failed check. If there is precedent then those are also failures.
Bullshit. It’s the same war.
None of these checks have failed. Asserting your personal definitions of these things and then judging them as failures by your own made up definitions doesn’t really change that. “Nuh uh” isn’t really a valid argument for any of these things.
You elected a 34 time felon to the white house. If they’re currently working, then your country is more fucked than any of us could have forseen.
I don’t think you understand what checks and balances are, or what they’re for
Want to tell me how well they worked out that Trump could organize a coup on the Capitol building, threaten to hang his own VP, attempt to overturn a duly elected peaceful transfer of power, and still be elected President again four years later?
America used to be dependable to its allies. Treacherous, but in predictable ways. Now the seal is broken, and it’s been proved that any norm can be ignored. So that’s never going to return to how it was. Its now firmly in the category of erratic unstable partners and that will not change with any successor.
Was it? I mean America went through a relatively short period of a several decades of stability during its golden age for sure, but the time scale we’re talking about is so short it means little to nothing. The European mindset of some kind of “before and after” due to trump is a level of historical blindness that defies belief.
America has been in open war with most of its modern allies throughout its short 250 year existence, several of which were in this past century. For gods sake America dropped two nukes on civilian population centers in one of its closest modern day allies.
And on the flip side of that, you have to step back and consider the fact that there are people alive today who remember their homes being carpet bombed by German planes during that period where Germany elected a fascist dictator, the likes of which all others to this day are compared against, and proceeded to slaughter half of Europe while simultaneously committing the largest genocide ever recorded in human history. And yet Germany’s reputation among European nations appears to have completely recovered in a shorter time span than America’s “dependable ally” era lasted.
In fairness to Germany we had the Nuremberg trials where the top Nazis were held accountable for their crimes and hanged. You could argue that the current American administrations crimes are not on a par with Nazi Germany’s, which I would agree with but accountability is not in the Americans vocabulary. Trump and his team have suffered no consequences from the Jan 6th insurrection, I don’t think anyone will face any consequences for supporting Israel’s genocide both at the UN and in supplying the weapons to keep it going. I can’t see anyone being punished for the war crimes committed in Iran, worst of all bombing a little girls school killing 120 children.
America’s biggest loss under trump has been in the soft power they have spent the last 100 years building. The mask has fully slipped with no plausible deniability about what America is and where they are headed. We in Europe will still cynically do business with you, the USA remains the global military and financial hegemon but the public support is gone for a generation at least.
The Nuremberg trials were not conducted by Germany and aren’t an example of the nation holding their own leaders accountable, so in fairness it doesn’t really compare to America failing to hold its own leaders accountable for Jan 6th. And in fact despite the Nuremberg trials being conducted by the Allied powers, those same allied powers (USA included) absolutely committed subversions of justice for the Nazis by recruiting many into government research programs.
So Germany failed to hold the Nazis to account, and unfortunately the rest of the world did to some degree too.
I think this whole thread is full of rose-tinted glasses and vague ideas of international justice and American Moral Exceptionalism that didn’t really exist
Germany as a nation teaches its children about all their dark history and acknowledges the atrocities committed. Their leaders were held to account at Nuremberg while the country was under allied occupation, I accept your point that it was not Germany themselves holding them to account but the country as a whole accepts responsibility for their crimes in a way the USA couldn’t even imagine.
The USA on the other hand has never accepted formal responsibility for the genocide of the native American population.
The subversions of justice you mentioned by the allied powers, I fail to see the point you are making mentioning this.
Your view that it will be business as usual after the current American regime is what I think is rose tinted. The USA used to get away with the atrocities they committed using a combination of plausible deniability and soft power. This is no longer an option post the current trump regime, this is the point. This loss of soft power with their former allies will only hasten the USA’s downfall and it is hard to see them maintaining their current dominant position going forward. The USA’s current prosperity is borrowed not earned and is in part financed by their allies. The current bond market is an indicator of what is to come.
Germany as a nation teaches its children about their dark history now many years after the fact (it appears to not be working). The U.S. isn’t in the “after the fact” period yet so it’s hard to predict what they could imagine at this point.
The allied European nations didn’t fully hold the Nazis to account for their crimes against humanity, so there’s no historical precedent to suggest that they will fully hold America to account with what’s going on now.
My point is if Germany can be back to business as usual mere decades after the events of WW2, there’s no reason to think the U.S. won’t be back to business as usual in the same timeframe if not even less.
I could not even begin to imagine defending the idea of America replicating the early stages of Nazi Germany and thinking that is why the US is going to be okay.
You cannot be helped.
Is that what you think is happening? Brother I don’t think you can be helped lol
Why do you think Germany teaching kids about the horrors they committed during ww2 hasn’t been working? I haven’t noticed a 4th Reich rising!
We do not need to get into the difficulties in holding other nations to account for crimes permitted in a different nation and the lack of laws at the time to prosecute most of the 2nd and 3rd tier Nazis or the underlying antisemitism that was not limited to Nazi Germany in Europe at the time as that is a different conversation.
I agree with you when you speak of people’s short memories when it comes to making money in a cynical business sense over the long term. The USA’s danger at the moment is all in the short term, the trust they have lost will take decades of good foreign policy and reliability which I can’t see happening with the current divide in American politics. Any olive branches offered by the democrats will likely be undone by the republicans and it is this unreliability that will be the death of the American economy. The USA has been the most reliable and trusted trading partner for the last century. The uncertainty is what has the rest of the world decoupling from the USA right when they are starting to feel the burden of their national debt that used to be bought up by the rest of the world.
The bond market is now showing cracks, the USA’s financial dominance over the last 35 years has been built primarily on the tech boom they have experienced. They went all in on AI and are now doubling down like a gambler as China offers free open source alternatives making an AI dominance look unlikely. China is now the most interesting tech innovator in robotics and manufacturing. I can’t see how things go back to normal for the states after this, only a long period of decline and loss of relevance on the world stage. I do not take joy from this, my own country’s current financial boom is overly reliant on these American companies.
You should pay more attention.
The American economy will hurt, but as long as it remains the worlds top consumer market, twice the size of the next largest, it will withstand short term instability.
The problem is one of who comes next for America and after that.
Now the world knows America is willing to vote people like Trump into office, it has to act accordingly.
Trump Is what you expect from Argentina or some country already in trouble trying to find a way out.
Not the biggest economy in the world! Now everyone has to plan accordingly that this can and probably will happen again.
Why would you not expect that of the U.S. because they’re the biggest economy in the world?
Germany is the third biggest economy in the world and they’re currently dealing with a Huge surge in far-right extremism in their government.
Japan is the fourth largest economy and they’ve seen a Rise in nationalist conservative government
The UK is like the fifth or so largest economy in the world and let us not forget what happenened when they Elected their discount Trump
Italy is the 8th largest and they’ve been Governed by the far right for the last four years
Like the majority of the worlds top 10 economies have seen a far-right shift on some significant level in the last 5 years, so I’m not really sure how you came upon those expectations
White House? You are blind to the gravity of the problem. The supreme courts will still be stuffed. The federal agencies will still be full and led by his cronies. Congress will still be gerrymandered to hell. Voting is now on its way to be directly compromised as well on every level. There are more lobbyists with deeper pockets willing to feed the DINOs, and the protections against their corruption has eroded. Even public sentiment is too stupid to survive the amount of time and administrations it would take to fix the whole system, they will accept that both parties are the same on a dime even when the specifics are on radically different scales.
To be fair, the US isn’t the only country that is having a corruption problem. We are living through a time where corruption continues to get easier and the ultra rich think they have an out with AI and robotics for the future apocalypse.
The big problem with this is that the promise was secretly “forign policy is uniparty. Whether it’s an” R" or a “D” our forign policy will be relatively consistent" and Trump broke that promise. Now every nation has to prepare for the eventuality that different presidents might have different policy toward their allies (and adversaries. No president before Trump would have canceled drills with South Korea on North Korea’s behalf). That will take decades of consistency to repair, and as a fellow American, I’m not certain they will get that consistency going forward with the state of politics in the US.
I hope you are wrong I don’t want a terrorist state as an ally
lol don’t be so emotional
Being responsible of millions of death make you a terrorist state
Which millions of deaths are you referring to
Vietnam victims
Libya victims
Syria victims
Iran victims
Afghanistan victims
Cuba victims
Palestine victims
You’re talking about deaths from war? In that case all your allies are terrorists buddy you’re screwed.
Also you’re Canadian which means your country too
I am talking about imperialism wars and intervention that led to millions of deaths. No other country did that level of evilness
I can think of several…
And what Canada lacks in its own wars of imperialism it makes up for in war crimes lol
As a Canadian, let me assure you that it will not.
I hope we as a country cut ties with you forever. Because the fact you let this happen at all, means no countgry should ever trust you from not letting it happen again.
Until you fix the foundation of your issues, I speak for a LOT of people that say “You’re completely dead to us”.
I can assure you that it will. Your country will absolutely positively not cut ties with America forever. I’m sure you speak for yourself, but let us not forget that nearly a quarter of Canadians support Trump. Don’t think for a second we forgot about the Freedom Convoy either lol.
If you look at what America is going through and your first thought is “they’re crazy, that can’t happen here”, I have some bad news for you.
Please tell me, genuinely, what America has that Canada needs, that we can’t get elsewhere? Because I can assure you the list is incredibly short.
We trade with America out of convenience. Why do you think America has such a massive trade deficit with Canada? You buy WAY more stuff from us than we do you. And we can get almost everything from you from Europe or China.
Who knows we may get our own trump
Poilievre? His own party thinks he sucks.
I don’t think it is hard for the conservatives to find multiple other Poilievre like creatures
The Conservatives have never been more unpopular in 10+ years. Let them find their next Trump and see how well that goes over in this country.
They was literally going to win if Trudeau did not drop out. Carney magic won’t stay forever
Multiple things happened. It wasn’t just because Trudeau stepped down. Hell, Poilievre didn’t even win his seat.
Try and understand the complex timeline that was roughly about 8-14 months, and not “bUt pOiLiEvRe cOuLd hAvE WoN!” I believe you’re better than that.
You don’t realize how dangerous it is to treat politics and elections as predictable. You talk here about complexity, yet you make simple statements like ‘conservatives have not been relevant in over 10 years, therefore the threat is not there.’ Here is an example from Canada: the Parti Québécois lost relevancy in 2011; in 2022 they only won 3 seats, but now in 2026 they are very near forming a majority.
Didn’t you guys promise that in 2010 with Jon Stewart?
I was there actually. Unfortunately the rally was to restore sanity AND OR fear :/
I was supposed to be, and chose to stay in NYC and get drunk with my friend instead. Much better use of time it turns out.
It was actually a pretty good time
What allies?
North Korea and Russia are still buddies with them.
Yeah eventually maybe, but the problem is we’ve shown TWICE now that we’ll elect someone erratic and petulant. Nobody should trust the US because even with a sane leader, you can’t be guaranteed you’ll be greeted with sanity 4 years later. Every deal struck may or may-not be shredded with the next admin.
Uh we’ve done it a lot more than twice.