U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as U.S. Vice President JD Vance reacts at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 28.Brian Snyder/Reuters
The British magazine The Economist was all of us on Tuesday when, in its story about U.S. President Donald Trump’s ruinous tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, it opened its piece with a simple sentiment: “He has actually gone and done it.”
Combined with Mr. Trump’s breathtaking pivot away from America’s western allies and into the arms of the Kremlin, the unjustified and unnecessary trade war he launched on Tuesday has now isolated the United States from the rest of the liberal democratic world – a world that America built and nurtured, in part for its benefit, and is now trying to tear down, at great cost to itself.
Mr. Trump calls this “making America great again,” but the opposite is occurring. He is in the process of reducing the U.S. to a loner country, one looking on from the sidelines while the rest of the world continues along the arc of history put in place after the Second World War.
America was indeed a great country through most of the last century and into this one, when you measure it against the standards it set, and the goals it aspired to.
The U.S. belatedly joined the Second World War but, the minute it did, Nazism was doomed. It helped secure victory on the Western Front, and then it went to work to ensure peace by spending billions of dollars on aid to help European countries – West Germany included – to get back on their feet.
The Marshall Plan was both an altruistic act and also perfectly self-serving, giving the U.S. a say in the affairs of the continent and allowing it to establish a permanent presence there that would come in handy during the Cold War.
The U.S. was also a founder of NATO in 1949, an alliance so dependent on America that, under the alliance’s rules, a country that wants to pull out has to do so by informing the U.S. government of its intention.
Part and parcel with that, the U.S. created an international monetary system at Bretton Woods, and set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to support it.
And, most galling this week, it was a key figure behind the push to reduce tariffs that began with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, continued with the World Trade Organization in 1995, and led, in its way, to the North American Free Trade Agreement that Mr. Trump renegotiated in his previous term in office.
In that same post-war era, the U.S. became a global military, economic and cultural powerhouse. It continued to lead the fight against totalitarianism, even if at times its agenda was murky. Domestically, it stood for the progress expressed in the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement and other efforts to live up to its Declaration of Independence.
Sometimes America’s influence rubbed people the wrong way; some called it imperialism. But no one could deny that it ushered in a period of relative peace and remarkable prosperity that is justifiably known as Pax Americana. The post-war period made the U.S. the greatest economy on Earth, a beacon of democracy, peace and hope – and the leader of the free world. What Mr. Trump calls freeloading by NATO allies and trade partners was the cost of preserving that status.
Now, in the space of a week, with his absurd trade war and his outrageous pro-Kremlin demands on Ukraine, Mr. Trump has ended Pax Americana. Countries that (perhaps too) happily revolved around the United States will have to take charge of their own security, and will have to develop more dependable trading partnerships.
That is already happening. Europe took concrete steps this week to re-arm itself and vowed to put troops in Ukraine to protect it from Russia in the event of a ceasefire. Canada, too, has been awoken by Mr. Trump’s betrayals and abuse, and has no choice but to follow Europe’s lead.
Those same countries will by existential necessity be obliged to reconfigure with whom and on what terms they trade, which could isolate an unreliable United States.
Given enough time, the Western world will learn to exist without its former dependence on the United States, a historic transformation that will give the upper hand – the “cards,” as Mr. Trump likes to put it – to those countries that hope to continue the progress of the past 80 years.
Pax Americana is over, and with it any American influence that isn’t built on shortsighted strongarm tactics. The rest of the West must now get to work building and maintaining peace on new terms, for better or worse.