by Bill Murray
The world of unquestioned American leadership is gone, and the next American president cannot restore the trust of America’s allies. Donald Trump’s critics have spent a decade condemning his unforced squandering of American influence as needless, senseless and lots of other things besides. It’s time to come to grips, move past complaining and get to work building what comes next.
The world of ten years ago isn’t coming back, and what comes next won’t depend on trust. Been there, tried that, found that system’s limits. The challenge is to assemble a new, networked alliance based on shared capabilities, that ensures continuity across American administrations. Let’s figure out how.
“America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” —President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
“America’s alliances are our greatest asset, and leading with diplomacy means standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and key partners once again.” —President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The 46th president delivered these assurances in his first major foreign-policy address, just twelve days after his inauguration. Because they were precisely the words allies wanted to hear, they went some way toward restoring confidence.
However mollifying their effect at the time, after two Trump presidencies, words like those—any words, really—don’t fly anymore. America will have to rebuild allied trust through commitments durable enough to survive future political instability at home. Now, pledges of commitment will need to be demonstrably binding.
Allies never had to agree with every American decision to assume the United States wants its alliances to endure, because the alliance system advances American objectives: that markets remain open, sea trade stays secure, security commitments are honored and largely Washington-designed institutions—the IMF, World Bank and so on—continue to work. Most Americans make the same assumption.
The Trump decade’s contribution to that world has been to destroy the assumption of continuity. Future security commitments must now be made durable enough for allies to rely on them for multiple presidential terms into the future.
For decades, the United States has regarded itself as the senior partner in its alliances (this week’s headlines about Denmark and Greenland’s future are a good example), sometimes leading Washington to treat allies as subordinates rather than partners.
A rebuilt alliance system should rest on peer-to-peer relationships capable of functioning without Washington as supervisor.
Too often, allies feel they have little choice but to just trust American power, when it should be something they’re happy to invest in. The US must shift its expectations.
Washington’s first question should change from “How do I keep everyone aligned with me?” to “What conditions make this system valuable enough for other sovereign, prosperous and technologically capable states to want to keep participating in it?” The outcome will be stronger allies, more widely distributed capabilities and, important to rebuilding trust, greater institutional durability.
The United States, and not just the Trump administration, has considered dependence on Washington as a demonstration of American power. The next president should stress networking allies more closely together, individually each with all the others, without prior permission from Washington.
Because of the current administration’s willful, decade-long destruction of alliances, reliability will have to be engineered, actually built around shared capabilities among allies, commonsense things like redundancy and multiyear research and development budgets, and procedures for regular, ongoing consultation. That way, allies needn’t necessarily believe every future American president will be selfless, wise and good-hearted.
The stronger and more self-sufficient America’s allies become, the more durable the alliance grows—and thus the less vulnerable it becomes to changes in Washington. Engineering structures to survive American inconsistency will be essential to winning back allied trust.
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Donald Trump says his favorite word is tariffs. Maybe it’s because he enjoys keeping even his allies off balance. That’s no way to run an alliance. But in fairness, the culprit here hasn’t been Donald Trump alone.
Especially since the unipolar moment, allies have sometimes felt like they’re merely informed of America’s imperial decisions, instead of helping to shape them.
To make the United States more ‘essential partner’ than ‘imperial leader,’ a new administration should acknowledge that mistakes have been made and that proper humility is in order. The current administration has gone a long way toward busting up the North Atlantic alliance; the next president will need to accept constraints like multiyear funding commitments and alliance-imposed, more intense multilateral consultation.
European allies, especially NATO partners, have come to equate burden sharing with concessions to Donald Trump. If we tell the Americans we’ll raise defense spending to five percent, the thinking goes, that should placate them for a time.
This arrangement, in which Europeans complain about American dominance while depending on Washington’s protection, is coming to an end. In the system to come, burden sharing should be real. In return for more extensive, step-by-step consultation, set forth in an agreed process, the United States should be able to expect more muscular, substantive contributions from Europe.
In the process, Europe can gain needed military capability (for one much-talked-about example, it should invest in power projection via airlift capabilities and in-flight refueling) and the strategic autonomy that comes with it—something Washington says it wants Europe to take on—while still maintaining close integration with the US. That’s a win all the way around.
More broadly, the mission should be to bind allied interests in ways that become costly for any party to abandon. A post-Trump United States should consider its new leadership role as providing continuity.
INSTITUTIONALIZING INITIATIVES: Making American commitments more durable starts with making them more costly to reverse.
The Constitution grants the presidency substantial authority in foreign affairs, including command of the armed forces and negotiation of treaties. But much of the authority presidents exercise today comes because they’ve seized it. A visionary new president, working with a more responsible Congress, must rebalance the respective branches’ responsibilities.
New initiatives in foreign policy should move through a process of wider governmental involvement, through appropriations, treaties, enforceable procurement contracts with other governments and other permanent bureaucratic machinery yet to be invented.
Future initiatives should be specifically designed to steadily acquire more institutional weight as they progress, perhaps by making reversal or cancellation require navigating a lengthy process, instead of merely requiring a Sharpie and a press conference.
The executive could still set the agenda. But after crossing a defined threshold (perhaps of duration, cost or allied involvement), a newly-established process would hand the initiative forward into a system designed to pocket progress as it’s achieved.
New commitments will be designed to extend across election years. Call this a new ‘durability process.’ A future president can then tell an ally, in effect, “I will initiate this agreement, and if I can move it through the durability process, you will know that it represents something larger than just my administration.”
One possibility: while an initial presidential proposal can be reversible, once Congress funds it, procurement contracts are signed, statutory authorities are enacted and the like, it moves into a more protected category, entering the durability process.
Now allies commit resources. Joint allied coordination structures (or commands) are established. American reversal remains possible, but now requires time and a comparably serious process.
A CAPABILITIES BANK: Let’s consider a theoretical scenario as a way of thinking about our new alliance system. Shared technological advances are figuratively deposited in what we’ll call an allied ‘global capabilities bank.’
Each allied country contributes its own expertise, perhaps unique to its own circumstance or geography. Suppose, for example, a littoral state develops a new, faster way of loading ammunition onto a warship, or a tech-savvy state works out an innovation in first-person drone capability, or an equatorial country with expertise in tropical diseases develops a more efficient way to transport vaccines.
Each innovation goes into the ‘capabilities bank’ so that, at the same time each ally contributes its unique capabilities, it benefits from others’. The ‘bank’ grows more valuable until eventually, allies become reluctant to divest themselves of their accounts. Indeed, they may find they can’t do without them.
Over time, the view in allied capitals changes. In Washington, it’s no longer ‘look how powerful I am.’ There’s no longer a sense that the White House is the center of the universe, bestowing its largesse on dependent allies. One day, for the US, it’s no longer all about me.
As it grows, our renewed alliance develops a portfolio of complementary strengths. It becomes a network of collaborators, not an assemblage of individual beneficiaries.
In time, our allied network’s accumulated capabilities bind American interests to allied interests in ways that become too costly for any party to abandon. Arbitrarily imposed tariffs, say, or defunding institutions after a single election, become too costly even to contemplate.
At that point, our newly arranged network of countries no longer works top down from Washington. Instead, it has stitched allies together, each with the others, collectively and individually, one to one.
For Washington, what began as an initial humbling has built structures capable of surviving the quadrennial changing of administrations, and has gone a long way toward winning back trust.
And in the process, the United States has discovered that in the mid-twenty-first century, it no longer wants to be Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation,’ at the center of everything. After all, indispensability creates its own problems, as we see every day in our current lived experience. An indispensable nation can become a single point of failure for the whole alliance.
Thinking beyond being the center of the universe clears the decks to concentrate on the bigger goals of creating and maintaining a world-class, cooperative allied network that’s denser, more resilient and harder to disrupt—one that’s resilient enough that allies clamor to collaborate.
Military defense is an essential part of any alliance, but defined expansively, our new allied network can become a wider enterprise still, collaborating across all manner of human endeavor, in infrastructure (undersea cables and pipelines), energy technology development, and broader cooperative research in technologies for the future.
This new network doesn’t demand that every ally contribute the same arbitrary percentage of its GDP. It’s more useful to share whatever each country uniquely possesses that leads to more resilience and resistance to threat.
Countries finding they don’t want to do without jointly developed future capabilities shows indispensability of another sort. It demonstrates just the kind of continuity allies find lacking in Washington now.
Our new orientation encourages the network to welcome advancements made by others, rather than Washington’s historic inclination to depend on its own research and development, and then grant access to its ‘dependents.’
And that’s good, because doling out American-developed advances has stopped working. Just consider the sudden new competition for arms sales brought on not so much by issues of performance capability as by new suspicions that American products may hide “kill switches” inside ongoing, expensive software updates for products like F-35 fighters.
The US has the ability to make this change. Its quick embrace of Ukraine’s drone innovation is a case in point. It needs more of this kind of thinking, and fast.
It will require an adjustment to Americans’ current self-image, but embracing a policy of helping partners grow less dependent on Washington will benefit the relationship as a whole.
Administrations will always change policies, as leaders change and new personal chemistries develop between them. Moving to a networked system nudges forward a new systemic continuity, so that when policies do change, the network remains. And here we’re back to the central idea of pocketing progress.
As new tech or infrastructure improvements are adopted and shared across the allied network, allied countries’ industries invest, supply chains diversify beyond national boundaries, and arbitrary reversal by individual leaders becomes less likely as all parties become ever more invested in a new capability’s success.
By intentionally distributing capabilities, systemic continuity increases and the danger posed by occasionally undependable allies, like the US since 2016, diminishes.
It’ll never work, you say? Too much to ask? Here is a real-world example of how this type of networking is working in the real world, right now. American companies design blueprints and hand them off to the world’s largest supplier of photolithography systems, ASML, in the Netherlands.
ASML builds the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines used to print the finest features on the most advanced microchips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, outside Taipei, then uses those machines to manufacture the chips themselves. No one country controls the entire process; the network as a whole benefits.
Among allied militaries, roughly analogous current models are already emerging against the Russian threat in Nordic Europe, where at least three different groupings of frontline states already function, honing joint capabilities across their networks (we discussed them and others previously on 3QD). With its reach, the United States could provide the heft to scale these and other networks into a formidable, worldwide allied coalition.
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There are no guarantees, but we can hope that a new American president will see the error of the Trump administration’s ways. Two years from now Washington will still have an extraordinary ability to realize its ambitions. It will retain depth in essential fields like specialized higher education, high-tech research and development, medical innovation, and its native intellectual exuberance will remain.
It will still be able to bring peerless financial depth to the work at hand, which can lead to a potential convening power that, for all its obstruction, the Trump administration could never quite undermine.
The next administration should convene friends and allies for an extraordinary Project 2029, a present-day Marshall Plan for rebuilding and reengaging in earnest with a world that bears scant resemblance to the post-WWII Pax Americana.
Project 2029 won’t be a forum for narrow-minded partisans on a project of destruction like Project 2025 was. Rather, it can be a means to craft a new way of working together, and a new American relationship with the world.
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It’s a striking geostrategic moment.
A new order is doing its thrashing-about best to be born. International systems that governed the last eighty years are spent. Western politics is reshaping itself in real time and a new, much more inwardly focused and intolerant period looms.
And standing squarely in front of it all, dead center in our field of view, the promise and threat of artificial intelligence demand urgent intervention by our played-out domestic system of politics.
If the promise of AI is half what its promoters and financial backers suggest, the convergence of all these forces with a changing climate that even deniers can no longer deny is a recipe for a scarcely recognizable world in short order.
For the US to remain a player, in a position to champion cooperation over conquest and toleration over tyranny, new presidential leadership in 2028 will require a humble new willingness to play well with others.
Let’s continue the discussion.
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I write more like this every week at Common Sense and Whiskey on Substack.
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