How Trump Supercharged Distrust, Driving U.S. Allies Away

 

News Analysis

How Trump Supercharged Distrust, Driving U.S. Allies Away

 

Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy. America and its partners are caught in a spiral of distrust.

 

Damien Cave

By Damien Cave

Damien Cave covers global affairs and is The Times’s Vietnam bureau chief.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/world/trump-foreign-policy-trust.html

March 31, 2025

Updated 1:59 a.m. ET

 

The F-35, a fifth-generation fighter, was developed in partnership with eight countries, making it a model of international cooperation. When President Trump introduced its successor, the F-47, he praised its strengths — and said the version sold to allies would be deliberately downgraded.

 

That made sense, Mr. Trump said last week, “because someday, maybe they’re not our allies.”

 

For many countries wedded to the United States, his remark confirmed a related conclusion: that America can no longer be trusted. Even nations not yet directly affected can see where things are heading, as Mr. Trump threatens allies’ economies, their defense partnerships and even their sovereignty.

 

For now, they are negotiating to minimize the pain from blow after blow, including a broad round of tariffs expected in April. But at the same time, they are pulling back. Preparing for intimidation to be a lasting feature of U.S. relations, they are trying to go their own way.

 

A few examples:

 

Canada made a $4.2 billion deal with Australia this month to develop cutting-edge radar and announced that it was in talks to take part in the European Union’s military buildup.

 

Portugal and other NATO nations are reconsidering plans to buy F-35s, fearing American control over parts and software.

 

Negotiations over a free trade and technology deal between the European Union and India have suddenly accelerated after years of delays.

 

Brazil is not only increasing trade with China, it’s doing it in China’s currency, sidelining the dollar.

 

Several allies, including Poland, South Korea and Australia, are even discussing whether to build or secure access to nuclear weapons for their own protection.

 

Some degree of distancing from the United States had already been in motion as other countries became wealthier, more capable and less convinced that American centrality would be permanent. But the past few months of Trump 2.0 have supercharged the process.

 

History and psychology help explain why. Few forces have such a powerful, long-lasting impact on geopolitics as distrust, according to social scientists who study international relations. It has repeatedly poisoned negotiations in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It kept Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union burning for decades.

 

So-called realists — who see international relations as an amoral contest between self-interested states — argue that trust should always be assessed with skepticism, because believing in good intentions is risky.

 

But Mr. Trump has sparked more than cautious suspicion. His own distrust of allies, evident in his zero-sum belief that gains for others are losses for America, has been reciprocated. What it’s created is familiar — a distrust spiral. If you think the other person (or country) is not trustworthy, you’re more likely to break rules and contracts without shame, studies show, reinforcing a partner’s own distrust, leading to more aggression or reduced interaction.

 

“Trust is fragile,” Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, wrote in a seminal 1993 study on risk, trust and democracy. “It is typically created rather slowly, but it can be destroyed in an instant — by a single mishap or mistake.”

 

In Mr. Trump’s case, allies point to a sustained assault.

 

His tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, which ignored the North American free trade deal that he signed during his first term, stunned America’s neighbors.

 

His threats to make Canada an American state and send the U.S. military into Mexico to go after drug cartels were brash intrusions on sovereignty, not unlike his demands for Greenland and the Panama Canal. His blaming of Ukraine for the war that Russia started further alienated allies, forcing them to ask: Is the United States a defender of dictators or democracy?

 

Relatively quickly, they have determined that even if Mr. Trump’s boldest proposals — like turning Gaza into a Mideast Riviera — are fantasies, the trend lines point in the same direction: toward a world order less like the Olympics and more like Ultimate Fighting.

 

Perhaps no country is more shocked than Canada. It shares the world’s largest undefended border with the United States, despite their wide disparity in military strength. Why? Because Canadians trusted America. Now, in large part, they do not.

 

Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said on Thursday that his country’s traditional relationship with the United States was “over.”

 

“Trump has violated the deep assumption in Canadian foreign policy that the U.S. is an inherently trustworthy nation,” said Brian Rathbun, a global affairs professor at the University of Toronto. “That is very threatening to basic Canadian interests in trade and security, leading it to cast around for alternatives.”

 

Economic patriotism is somewhat new for Canada, but it has given rise to a Buy Canadian movement that urges consumers to shun American products and stocks. Canadians are also canceling U.S. holidays in large numbers.

 

More significant in the longer term, Mr. Trump’s threats have forged a surprising consensus around a policy that had been contentious or ignored: that Canada should be building pipelines, ports and other infrastructure east to west, not north to south, to reduce its reliance on the United States and push its resources outward to Asia and Europe.

 

Europe is further ahead in this process. After the U.S. election, the European Union finalized a trade deal with South American countries to create one of the world’s largest trade zones, and it has worked toward closer trade ties with India, South Africa, South Korea and Mexico.

 

Japan, America’s largest ally in Asia, has also been prioritizing new markets in the global south, where fast-growing economies like Vietnam’s offer new customers.

 

“There has been the emerging perception in Japan that we definitely have to change the portfolio of our investments,” said Ken Jimbo, a professor of international politics and security at Keio University in Tokyo. For the current administration and those that follow, he added, “we have to adjust our expectations of the American alliance.”

 

On the defense front, what some call “de-Americanization” is more challenging. This is especially true in Asia, where there is no NATO equivalent, and reliance on American support has somewhat stunted the militaries of countries that the United States has promised to defend (Japan, South Korea and the Philippines).

 

On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in Manila, promising to “truly prioritize and shift to this region.” But many of America’s partners are now working together without the United States, signing reciprocal access agreements for each other’s troops and building new coalitions to deter China as much as they can.

 

Europe, too, is years away from being able to fully defend itself without the help of U.S. weaponry and technology. Yet in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, threats and general disdain — as in the leaked Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth called Europe “pathetic” — the European Union recently announced plans to ramp up military spending. That includes a 150 billion euro loan program to finance defense investment.

 

The 27-nation European Union is also increasingly collaborating with two nonmembers, Britain and Norway, on defending Ukraine and on other strategic defense priorities.

 

For some countries, none of this is quite enough. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, told Parliament in early March that Poland would explore gaining access to nuclear weapons, fearing that Mr. Trump could not be trusted to defend a fellow NATO nation fully.

 

“This is a race for security,” Mr. Tusk said.

 

In February, South Korea’s foreign minister, Cho Tae-yul, told the National Assembly that building nuclear weapons was “not on the table, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is off the table either.” By some estimates, both South Korea and Japan have the technical know-how to develop nuclear weapons in less than two months.

 

Bilihari Kausikan, a former Singaporean diplomat, said that a little mistrust can lead to healthy caution, noting that Asia has been skeptical of America since the Vietnam War. He said the end result of the Trump era could be “a more diversified world, with more maneuvering space” and a less dominant United States.

 

But for now, distrust is spreading. Experts said it would take years and a slew of costly trust-building efforts to bring America together with allies, new or old, for anything long-term.

 

“Trust is difficult to create and easy to lose,” said Deborah Welch Larson, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who wrote a book about mistrust’s Cold War role. She added, “Mistrust of the United States’ intentions and motives is growing day by day.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Toronto, Jeanna Smialek from Brussels, Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul and Martin Fackler from Tokyo.

 

Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world. More about Damien Cave