How Alliances Survive

In 1984, months after the Reagan administration’s decision to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Western Europe brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets of Europe’s major cities, a clutch of senior French, German, and Italian officials cornered NATO Secretary-General Peter Carrington outside his Brussels office. Tensions were still running high, and the Americans, they complained, were rude, reckless, and dismissive of allied counsel. Carrington heard them out. Then he shrugged and offered his usual verdict on why American indispensability demanded allied forbearance: “Alas, they are the only Americans we have.”

Today, that forbearance is being severely tested. In less than two years, the second Trump administration has threatened to seize Greenland and leave NATO, withdrawn troops from Germany, meddled in allies’ elections, and levied tariffs on friends—all while lavishing summitry and flattery on Beijing and Moscow. Allies have responded with understandable alarm. “The old relationship we had with the United States,” declared Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, “is over.” A “deep rift” was forming, warned German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” declared European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Ng Eng, Singapore’s defense minister, lamented that the United States had gone from a partner to a “landlord seeking rent.”

In the United States, a growing consensus holds that the alliances are unlikely to recover. Former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Greg Meeks has questioned “whether or not our friends and allies will ever trust the United States again.” The scholar Robert Kagan, in a eulogy for an era in which U.S. allies stuck with Washington, declared that “those days are now over and will not soon return.”

This pessimism is understandable—but significantly overstated. The grievance in allied capitals, while heartfelt, is not a lasting guide to what comes next. Dire as the moment appears, the United States’ alliances will survive the Trump shock for reasons the headlines miss. First, the alliance system has weathered now forgotten shocks at least as serious as these, and the present ones owe more to presidential personality than to durable new politics. Second, the threats that gave rise to the alliances have not faded but intensified and converged, as allied perceptions of China and Russia align as never before. Third, powerful gravitational forces continue to pull allies together economically, technologically, and militarily, overcoming efforts to “de-risk” from Washington, while professional bureaucracies quietly advance cooperation far from the glare of politics.

Allowed to harden into conventional wisdom, pessimism risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, as policymakers, convinced the alliances cannot be saved, stop doing the work to ensure they endure. But together, these uniting forces will carry the alliances through the Trump moment and set them up—should allied capitals seize the opportunity—for the transformation required to meet the challenge of a China, backed by a newly aggressive Russia, that can outscale every other country on the metrics of power that matter most. The current anxieties, however inadvertently, may even strengthen the alliance system: as they have in the past, tensions can spur reforms that create tomorrow’s capability. Allies could be transformed from dependents into co-creators of power, pooling capacity into what we have previously called “allied scale.” The Trump administration has called on allies to do more so that the United States can do less; in fact, in the future, both the allies and the United States will need to do more, creating two-way flows of capacity and interdependence that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It is true that as French President Emmanuel Macron and other allied leaders have argued, “there is no going back.” That does not, however, mean the end of the alliance system. It means reforging the alliance system for a new era.

THE NEW FATALISM

The damage that U.S. President Donald Trump has done to U.S. alliances so far in his second term exceeds that done in the entire four years of his first term. That is in part because the internationalist staff that imposed guardrails the last time is gone. But the growing concern over the future of American alliances is not just about Trump. It is driven by a belief that longer-standing corrosive forces compounded by Trumpian attacks on trust are eroding the system to the point that it will be beyond salvation.

The first set of corrosive forces is within the United States. As senior Biden administration officials Phil Gordon and Mara Karlin observed in these pages, a generation of failed interventions, economic challenges, and inward-looking politics have left Americans more reluctant to underwrite global order than at any time since before World War II. Trump, the argument goes, is as much a symptom as a cause. The first Trump term might have seemed an aberration, but the second marks a pattern—suggesting that the pendulum might not swing back.

The second set of corrosive forces is within allied capitals. Gutted American credibility, in this account, is prompting allies to adjust their strategic orientation in ways that will prove irreversible. Trump’s treatment of alliance commitments in Europe and Asia as conditional and transactional changes their essential character even without major troop withdrawals or the use of force against allies. Already, European governments are elevating “strategic autonomy” and pursuing defense independence from the United States, with France and the United Kingdom even proposing a new nuclear umbrella for Europe. Asian allies, too, are revisiting a founding bargain of the U.S. alliance system—extended nuclear deterrence—and considering acquiring their own nuclear capabilities. And both sets of allies are forming new middle-power coalitions to reduce reliance on Washington, from recent European arrangements with India to the trade agreements Japan is pursuing with Latin America. All are searching for ways to de-risk from the United States. The skeptics worry that no matter how pro-alliance the next American leader might be, such hedging will persist: Why would allies stake decades of military planning—bases, procurement, force structure—or pursue economic and industrial integration with Washington if the alliance is itself called into question every four to eight years?

The answer to that question is more complex than it seems and should lead away from despair. Allied collapse remains far less likely than allied endurance and evolution for reasons observers often miss. Because alliances surprised strategists by surviving the Soviet collapse, they came to be seen as products of the softer elements of international politics: sentiment, institutions, trust, shared values, nostalgia—precisely the elements the Trump administration has battered most. But they were forged and have always been sustained by hard material realities. Far from vanishing, those material realities are pulling harder than before.

THE GOLDEN AGE THAT WASN’T

The current pessimism juxtaposes today’s challenges against an alliance golden age that never existed. The real history of U.S. alliances is one of recurring crises: allies expelling American troops, presidents blindsiding partners, capitals erupting in protest, and in every era, confident predictions of a coming collapse.

Although many foreign policy elites think this time is different, American and European publics do not agree. According to Chicago Council on Global Affairs polling data, which runs as far back as 1974, the share of Americans who believe Washington should make major decisions together with allies rather than go it alone now stands at a 50-year high. Throughout the Trump era, from 2016 to today, the belief that maintaining existing alliances is “very effective” for advancing U.S. aims increased from 32 percent to 55 percent, reaching ten-year highs among both Democrats and Republicans. Across the Atlantic, polling from the European Council on Foreign Relations has shown alarming dissatisfaction with the United States. But what is most striking is that a clear majority of citizens in 13 of the 15 European countries polled, and a plurality in the remaining two, believe that the relationship will “get better again” once Trump leaves office. Fewer than a third believe the damage will last after he leaves office. European publics, it would seem, think that Trump is an aberration and not a true representative of the United States.

Their faith that “this too shall pass” carries some significant historical weight. In the security domain, today’s challenges are real—threats to seize Greenland, to abandon Ukraine, to quit NATO, to pull forces from Germany, to tie Taiwanese arms sales to Beijing’s preferences. But the alliances have weathered worse.

Even under Trump, the United States has not credibly threatened financial calamity against an ally, as it did to the United Kingdom, in the 1950s, to halt its intervention in Suez. Nor has an ally expelled American troops or seriously undermined an alliance structure, as France did, in the 1960s, after withdrawing from NATO’s unified command. The United States has not withdrawn large numbers of troops from allies, as the Senate nearly forced it to do, in the 1970s, when it only barely beat back the Mansfield Amendment, which would have cut U.S. forces in Europe by roughly half.

At a NATO leaders’ summit in Ankara, Turkey, July 2026 Yves Herman / Reuters

In Asia, there is no present analog to the major shocks of the 1970s, which drove Seoul and Taipei to pursue covert nuclear programs. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Guam Doctrine instructed allies to furnish the manpower for their own defense, an imperative underscored by the withdrawal of 20,000 U.S. troops from South Korea. His 1972 opening to Beijing blindsided Taipei and Tokyo. A few years later, the fall of Saigon raised alarms about American resolve and led Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew to declare that U.S. influence in the region would “never be the same.” Despite serious dissatisfaction with the United States, there have been no mass protests in allied capitals, such as those against the Pershing II deployments. Nor has the shared threat perception of the alliance system evaporated, as it did in the 1990s, following the Soviet dissolution.

The main exception is the threat of U.S. force against Greenland, which could indeed collapse the alliance system if Washington followed through. But this threat is so peculiar and personalistic and so extreme that no serious figure in either party has endorsed it. Democrats have vocally opposed it, and so have Republican leaders: House Speaker Mike Johnson said that U.S. military intervention in Greenland “would not be appropriate,” and Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, “I don’t see military action being an option here.” Trump walked it back.

The economic record looks similar to the security record. The “Liberation Day” tariffs have hurt the perception of the United States as a credible economic partner—but this is not the first time Washington has turned its economic heft against its own allies, including through the use of tariffs. In August 1971, the “Nixon shock” did both at once: it unilaterally ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, blindsiding allies whose economies were anchored to it, and imposed a ten percent across-the-board import surcharge. In 1985, the Plaza Accord forced allies to make a major currency adjustment under the shadow of protectionist pressure, straining the German and Japanese economies more severely than the tariffs allies confront today; within three years, the yen doubled against the dollar, an adjustment far larger than the 15 percent tariff on Japanese exports.

The current tensions are the most significant since the end of the Cold War. And yet the lesson of history is that alliance systems often prove more resilient in retrospect than contemporary observers expect at the time. Crises repeatedly generate predictions of collapse, but alliances adapt precisely because the underlying incentives remain compelling. The first Trump administration’s browbeating over burden sharing was bitterly received in allied capitals and did real damage—but it also pushed European defense budgets toward the NATO two-percent target, drove Japan to double its defense spending, and prompted coordination on China’s technology challenge. Under the Biden administration, many of those same allies joined a dense web of initiatives that would once have been inconceivable: the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; the Quad security partnership focused on the Indo-Pacific; rapprochement between Seoul and Tokyo; joint export controls on semiconductors; a coordinated European and Asian response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. None of this was Trump’s design, but it shows how the tensions of one era can produce capability in the next, handing subsequent leaders the opportunity to strengthen alliances in ways previously beyond reach.

CONVERGENCE AT LAST

Today, that dynamic is especially powerful given that threat perceptions are increasingly converging and intensifying around a shared challenge from Beijing and Moscow, even with allies facing a short-term challenge from Washington. This is notable because, since the end of the Cold War, allied threat perceptions have often diverged. Europe, for example, gradually grew more anxious about Russia’s military challenge but generally treated China as a market and manufacturer. Asian allies often saw it in reverse: they were wary of China’s growing military strength but less concerned about Russia, seeing its energy as an economic opportunity. That divergence worked to Beijing’s and Moscow’s advantage. For decades, Washington strove to align perceptions across theaters, to little avail.

That convergence is at last arriving. Chinese and Russian conduct has, more than any Western initiative, forged links between Europe and Asia. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered Europe’s remaining illusions not just about Moscow but also about Beijing. China has become Russia’s most important patron, providing dual-use technological and even lethal military support on the battlefield as well as critical financial, industrial, and diplomatic reinforcement. It is China that is building the Russian defense industrial base and military capability that now menaces Europe. Reflecting that realization, NATO’s communiqués now brand China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war, and its secretary-general argues that the Indo-Pacific and European theaters must be viewed “as one.” Asian states, for their part, see Russia’s shocking use of force as a sign of the risks that face them if the military balance with China erodes further. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and even Singapore have rallied behind Ukraine, seeing a Russian defeat as essential for restraining Chinese ambition. The leaders of NATO’s four Indo-Pacific partners—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea—now regularly attend its summits. Meanwhile, Beijing and Moscow are also binding themselves more tightly together in Asia, staging exercises and strategic bomber patrols around U.S. allies, including during major multilateral gatherings.

Allied threat perceptions have shifted not only in the security dimension but also, perhaps most strikingly, in the economic and technology dimensions. Asian and European governments alike are coming to see China as the United States long has: a mercantilist power targeting the foundations of their industrial strength. European leaders now speak of a second “China shock,” a flood of subsidized manufactured goods that, as Macron has put it, are “literally killing a large part of European industry.” Von der Leyen has warned of Chinese “overcapacities that erode our own manufacturing base” and calls the situation “simply not sustainable.” Merz has floated a new Plaza Accord to force an appreciation of China’s currency.

None of this yet amounts to a single allied policy. Convergence on the nature of the threat does not mean full alignment on the response in either the security or economic dimensions; there are divisions, too, over how far to de-risk from China, how to balance economic and security interests, and how to manage Taiwan and Ukraine policy. But a shared diagnosis is the precondition for common action, and for the first time in a generation, the diagnosis is beginning to align.

This convergence is a remarkable geopolitical fact. Even during the Cold War, allies differed on threat perception, with West Germany pursuing Ostpolitik and détente even as frontline states pressed for deterrence, and the Euromissile deployments split publics and governments alike. By some measures, there is today comparably more unity even against a less urgent threat. What is particularly transformative is that the Atlantic and the Pacific are ceasing to function as entirely separate strategic spaces—setting the stage for truly global alliance efforts, even if the Trump administration is unlikely to take advantage of this convergence over the next two and a half years.

TIES THAT BIND

There is little question that allies are seeking to de-risk from the United States in key domains through new middle-power coalitions. But the shift toward de-risking is being offset and ultimately outweighed by larger megatrends: surging Chinese exports in the economic realm, the AI revolution in the technology realm, and increases in defense spending in the military realm. These are creating new linkages with Washington faster than the old ones can be broken.

In the economic domain, the United States now absorbs around 20 to 30 percent of all allied exports, a much higher share than even five years ago, as China buys less. Last year, even amid the trade war, Europe, Japan, and India all exported significantly more to the United States than to China; over the last five years, exports to China fell roughly 15 percent for Europe, 20 percent for Japan, 20 percent for South Korea, and 20 percent for India—while exports to the United States rose roughly 30 percent each for Europe, South Korea, and India. That dependence on the U.S. market will only grow: the second China shock will make the U.S. market an even more critical lifeline. And American reindustrialization efforts are increasingly dependent on allied investment and technology sharing, from shipbuilding to semiconductors to batteries, reinforcing interdependence.

Technology is increasingly sticky in both directions, too, partly because of the AI revolution. Reports abound of European governments instructing officials to abandon Microsoft Teams and Zoom, migrate off American operating systems, and stand up “sovereign” alternatives in the cloud and AI. But the new wave of technology innovation is re-creating allied dependence. Yesterday’s dependence on American mobile and desktop operating systems has not abated, and now U.S. allies also depend on American cloud infrastructure, advanced chips, and AI models. Three U.S. “hyperscalers”—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—account for about two-thirds of the global cloud market, while European providers hold barely 15 percent of their own domestic market. U.S. hyperscalers are expected to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, against European sovereign spending of roughly $13 billion. And the gap is growing. Europe’s efforts are for now too modest, too regulated, too fragmented, and too focused on alleviating government restrictions rather than promoting commercial use to fundamentally change dependencies that have accumulated over decades. (Meanwhile, the United States will remain dependent on Dutch lithography machines, German optics and lasers, Japanese chemicals, and Taiwan’s semiconductor plants for its AI agenda.)

The military ledger is where the binding may be the tightest. Allied efforts to de-risk from the United States are being offset by the fact that every ally is simultaneously pursuing its most significant defense buildup in a generation in the face of rising Chinese and Russian threats in ways that draw them closer to Washington. The logic is clear in Asia. Even as Trump periodically blasts Asian allies rhetorically, Taiwan has sought $25 billion in new U.S. weapons, Japan has pursued buying more F-35 fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles while integrating command structures with the United States, South Korea has pursued new nuclear submarine cooperation, and India has deepened its reliance on U.S. jet engines. Although Europe has done more to de-risk, even here the linkages are powerful. More than 80 percent of Europe’s new $860 billion rearmament effort is completely open to U.S. companies, and the remaining 20 percent, meant solely for European firms, has several carve-outs to allow American participation. Europe’s new defense technology champions, from Helsing to Stark, are substantially funded by American capital from New York to Menlo Park. And in the past few years, the share of European defense procurement going to U.S. companies climbed by one measure from about 28 percent in 2019–21 to 51 percent in 2022–24, as the urgency of the war in Ukraine brought demand that only the United States could meet at speed and scale. Even as Canadians and Europeans turn away from some U.S. platforms and buy from each other, those new platforms—which will not arrive for another decade—deepen reliance on the United States for the substructure of high-intensity warfare—such as the tactical data links that enable allied command and control. And European allies have no alternative to the United States for space-based missile early warning or critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Even Merz has conceded that Europe will “remain dependent on the United States of America for a long time to come.”

Hedging by middle powers is not only being overcome by larger forces; it is also less indicative of alliance trouble than many believe. Middle powers continue to work with Washington even as they seek to build new relationships elsewhere. And in most cases, those new relationships are with U.S. allies and partners, many of them stretching across theaters in ways Washington has long encouraged, with key players such as India and Japan at the center. What looks like de-risking now will in the long run serve as reinvestment in the alliance network and in the capabilities Washington has long sought to bolster: defense production, supply chain resilience, and interoperability. The Trump administration’s policies may be the impetus, but the increase in allied cohesion and capability will last beyond him.

THE REAL DEEP STATE

It is not only the forces outside the alliances that are drawing them together but also the forces within. Trump and his team have tried to root out a supposed “woke” deep state of activists, but the real deep state is both more mundane and more consequential. Alliance professionals carry on the daily business of cooperation outside the glare of public recrimination—military planners and intelligence officers, export control experts and sanctions specialists, central bankers and trade negotiators, and the engineers and standard setters who keep allied systems talking to one another. They form a dense network of relationships built and tended across decades. Because the work is technical rather than political, and because it runs on timelines of years and often decades, it is slow to build but also slow to unwind. The very dullness of it lends the alliances a ballast in the face of a turbulent political cycle.

That steady momentum is visible in how much has continued—and even deepened—under the Trump administration, despite the strains at the top. Even as India seethed under the record tariffs the United States imposed, the defense relationship stayed insulated from the trade fight: in October 2025, the two countries signed a new ten-year defense framework strengthening interoperability across every domain. AUKUS, subjected to a skeptical “America first” Pentagon review, emerged intact, having by then survived changes of government in all three member states. In the Philippines, the annual military exercise called Balikatan (meaning “shoulder to shoulder”) swelled in 2025 to its largest iteration ever with 16,000 troops, allied contingency plans, and Japanese forces. Trade tensions with South Korea did not preclude greater collaboration on nuclear submarines.

Congress has played a part in keeping these relationships strong, too. Despite polarization, bipartisan majorities continue to back NATO, Indo-Pacific partnerships such as AUKUS and the Quad, and defense-industrial integration. Whatever the disputes over burden sharing and trade, few serious members of either party favor wholesale or even partial abandonment of the alliance structures. Even Republican leadership is more mainstream in this regard. Thune, for example, declared, “We got an awful lot of people who think that NATO is a very critical, incredibly successful post–World War II alliance. And I think in the world today, you need allies.” And indeed, Congress has barred NATO withdrawal without express congressional approval.

American allies, for their part, sometimes appear to endorse a kind of magical thinking about the United States: a desire to sustain long-standing favorable views of the United States despite competing evidence. Japan, despite serious grievances over U.S. tariffs and Trump’s soft détente with Beijing, as well as Washington’s flagrant failure to support Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in the face of intense Chinese pressure, is determined to act as if the alliance remains as strong as ever. The United Kingdom has clung with similar determination to the idea of a “special relationship,” and NATO’s secretary-general has greeted the administration with a confidence in the relationship that many find difficult to explain. Some of it represents a genuine faith in the alliance system; some of it represents a kind of “fake it till you make it past Trump” kind of pragmatism. Regardless, the rhetoric has stabilizing benefits that can effectively buy time.
 

APRÈS MOI

Allied doggedness in the face of Trumpian hostility is driven not just by today’s security and economic imperatives. It also reflects an intuitive understanding that the likely alternatives to a world secured by the alliance system are considerably worse for the allies. Even the real damage Trump has done to trust and predictability leaves the alliance structure the better bet.

The first possible alternative for allies is global multipolarity, a world with no rules, no fixed alignments, and every state out for itself. This Hobbesian scenario could produce catastrophic war, as it did before World War I. It would cause small states to lose sovereignty, middle powers to acquire nuclear weapons, and great powers to pursue arms races. A second alternative, spheres of influence, adds a bit of stabilizing structure as each great power governs its own neighborhood and the United States retreats to the Western Hemisphere. But great powers perpetually contest the spheres of others, as they did after the Napoleonic Wars and again after Yalta, and spheres cannot stop supply chain warfare or address transnational challenges from AI to rising sea levels. A third possibility that supplies even more order than the other two is a great-power concert that produces a managed peace among the major capitals. But this seems implausible today, when great powers cannot even cooperate on addressing climate change, let alone the full shape of world order. And even if these latter two scenarios proved viable, they would be markedly less favorable to the economic and security interests of current U.S. allies.

A fourth alternative is more likely than all three: partial Chinese preeminence. Multipolarity, spheres of influence, and great-power concerts all presume a general equality among the great powers that seems unlikely given China’s sheer scale: China has twice the United States’ manufacturing capacity, an economy 30 percent larger by purchasing power, the world’s largest navy, an unprecedented $1.2 trillion global goods surplus, and a commanding lead in technologies from electric vehicles to robotics. Partial preeminence would create a world organized around deference to Beijing underwritten by China’s mass, leaving the United States and its partners hollowed out industrially, surpassed technologically, displaced commercially, possibly defeated militarily, and stripped of well-paying jobs. The resulting dependencies on China would cause the United States and its partners to slide down the global value chain into real estate, tourism, commodities, finance, and perhaps transnational tax evasion.

It is increasingly clear to policymakers in allied capitals, just as it should become clear to post-Trump American leaders, that allied scale is the only path to balancing China—a fifth alternative for world order in the future. This would involve allies pooling markets, investment, technology, and military capability, with alliances functioning as platforms for capacity building, not just military deterrence. Coming together in this way would produce a coalition that would have more than twice China’s GDP adjusted for purchasing power and more than twice its military spending; it would be the top producer of active patents and top-cited publications and the top trading partner of most countries in the world, and it would account for half of global manufacturing to China’s one-third. Far from making such allied scale impossible, structural realities are making its realization more likely, highlighting its necessity even as responses to Trump’s policies put U.S. allies in a position to offer more to Washington.

One of the most important indicators that this path is plausible is how hard Beijing is working to thwart it. Political scientists such as William Wohlforth and Victoria Tin-bor Hui have found that throughout history, dominant states sought to actively split the coalitions arrayed against them before those coalitions could cohere. Even the Cold War alliance of the twentieth century—ultimately a great success story—faced challenges as Moscow openly meddled in Western European politics to pry Europe away from the United States. And to that end, Beijing is pursuing its own coalition-splitting strategy, exploiting its control over global supply chains to threaten or punish other governments. This inhibits collective action because each country, offered selective relief in some cases, has reason to cut its own deal rather than hold the line with the others. But what is striking today is how little such Chinese efforts have achieved so far, despite everything Trump has done to help Beijing’s cause.

FROM SURVIVAL TO SCALE

In the wake of Trump, allied scale will not arise on its own. Like any ambitious construction project, it will require engineers and a plan. But this is more plausible than it may seem. Every successful renovation of the alliance system has been driven by a forward-looking agenda rather than a nostalgic restoration, and the shock of Trump’s second term is burying nostalgia and spurring a needed reckoning in Washington and allied capitals alike.

Greater pragmatism should replace the current pessimism in Washington, in part so that it does not needlessly become a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes the way forward more difficult. The move from documenting challenges to discussing solutions is overdue. The question of how to rebuild and reform the U.S. alliance structure must become a central question in the “what comes next” debate ahead of the 2028 U.S. presidential election.

Many are skeptical that any of these options are still possible. And yet the model already exists across administrations and is being employed even now. Its defining features have long been consistent: powered by the White House, built around concrete projects, and organized through ad hoc coalitions of willing allies. The Biden administration worked in this fashion to launch AUKUS and sustain the coalition behind Ukraine. At times, so has the Trump administration—resourcing inherited initiatives such as AUKUS Pillar 2 in significant new ways and pursuing new ones such as a critical minerals partnership with more than 50 countries that Vice President JD Vance described as a “trading bloc among allies and partners.” That the same model has surfaced under such different administrations is the strongest evidence that allied scale is achievable after Trump.

The first step is a shared assessment of the challenge—and as the convergence described above suggests, allied perceptions of China and Russia are aligning for the first time in a generation. Building on that shared perception will require turning the page on the current era and making proactive efforts to rebuild trust. Washington will have to persuade allies that its most offensive moves were the product of a particular personality rather than a permanent mutation in the political system. A clear, bipartisan repudiation of military threats against Greenland would help. So would a deliberate preference for commitments that outlast any single president: executive orders can be unwound with a signature, but statutes are far harder to reverse, and it is statutes that give allies the confidence to make investments measured in decades.

A joint military drill in Funabashi, Japan, January 2026 Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

It would also be wise to start with small, concrete projects that prove the value of allied scale in select cases and create reservoirs of trust. Quick wins build confidence, and there is scope for innovative trial efforts in areas such as pharmaceutical supply chains and munitions coproduction. The watchword should be humility. The instinct might be to reach for sweeping alliance compacts, but that instinct should be resisted. If discrete efforts targeted areas of greatest consensus—a chokepoint in which Chinese control is especially acute, for example—then a large payoff could build momentum. It could also help overcome obstacles in the domestic political environment.

That could lay the groundwork for moving from small projects to broader, more ambitious efforts involving more partners. The organizing principle of these projects must be mutual benefit, expressed as two-way flows of capacity. The legacy alliance model treated partners as dependents—recipients of American protection and markets. A coalition sustained by one-sided concessions is brittle. Mutual dependence, by contrast, would create constituencies for the relationship in every capital, which is why early projects should be designed to give visible political wins across allied countries. New allied capabilities—and a vivid understanding among American voters of the costs of squandering them—could make this kind of genuine reciprocity possible in ways it simply was not a few years ago.

Ultimately, renewing alliances will require an affirmative purpose. It cannot be only a defensive crouch against China, a coalition defined by what it opposes. It has to stand for something—an open, prosperous, and technologically dynamic order that its members actively want to inhabit and that others want to join. Beginning to craft such a vision should be a core task for U.S. foreign policy in the coming years.

At the moment, that prospect may seem optimistic. But that makes it all the more imperative to recall how grave the crises of the past have been and how powerful the structural drivers are today. The interests of the United States and its partners still run together, and that logic has sharpened as China’s power and the alignment of its fellow revisionists have grown. U.S. allies would be wise to remember that for all their legitimate anger and anxiety, today’s Americans are the only Americans they have. But Americans would be wiser still to invert Carrington’s admonition. At a time when the United States needs its allies more than ever, forbearance is essential. They are, after all, the only allies Americans have.

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