Trump win collapses NATO

American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.

As for the use of military power abroad, Trump mostly favored withdrawals during his term (though he did authorize a drone strike to kill a key Iranian commander in Iraq in 2020 and, according to the Associated Press, considered an invasion of Venezuela in 2017). Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea, Germany and Somalia, but critics warned that those moves would be devastating to global security and alliances. A second term might see them come to pass, Feaver says: “There’s a higher likelihood that the president would take risky action, but they would be risky actions of retreat, or abandonment of allies … rather than invasions of countries, although downstream they could result in that.”

“One might argue that’s the starting point,” the former senior Pentagon official told me. “Withdraw all U.S. forces and diplomats from Africa, withdraw all U.S. forces from Germany. … And depending on his views of Putin and the conflict in Ukraine, he might just stop the flow of arms, ammunition and material to Kyiv.”

If in 2025 Ukraine still depends on American aid for survival, halting it would hand Vladimir Putin the victory that he was denied in 2022. Recent work to restore America’s leadership and ability to coordinate allies against rogue actors would be undone. “You’ll see a Putin summit,” predicts Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who worked in the State Department for Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. NATO would be undermined if not abandoned. “Trump’s election,” says Wilentz, the Princeton historian, “means the end of the Western alliance.”

American foreign policy would not only be upended vis-a-vis Russia and NATO. “The overriding interest in the Gulf isn’t going to have anything to do with national security,” Miller says. “It’s going to have to do with the security of the Trump Organization.”

Beyond an issue-by-issue restoration of Trump’s isolationist version of an “America First” foreign policy, Miller foresees a ruinous blow to the country’s stature in the eyes of friends and foes. “The Europeans understand that the bloom is off the rose on our capacity to tell and lecture others about what freedom and democracy mean. But never before have they looked into a window where the basic concept of America, the stability of our political system … has been now replaced with one party essentially no longer being willing to respect norms and institutions that are essential to good governance. … Another four years of Donald Trump, and what that could do to faith in government, our institutions, our political stability and our values, would fundamentally open … a more permanent set of questions about America. What does this country stand for now? Is it so deeply divided and polarized that it can’t create a coherent image to the world?”