The World Is Cutting Ties With America. It’s Already Costing Us.

Opinion

Guest Essay

The World Is Cutting Ties With America. It’s Already Costing Us.

 

July 12, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET

By Jon Finer

Mr. Finer was a deputy national security adviser from 2021 to 2025.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/america-trump-nato-europe-world.html

 

In March 2023, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, laid out a strategy for managing the coercive policies of China. Europe, she argued, should “de-risk” from its dependence on the economic juggernaut by joining forces and building homegrown alternatives.

 

Three years later, de-risking from predatory superpowers remains the fundamental challenge facing European leaders, but China is no longer the main country of concern: The United States is. As they publicly seek to mollify a vindictive American president, policymakers across Europe are quietly working to reduce their decades-long dependence on the United States by increasing their own defense, energy and technology industries and diversifying their relationships with other nations. That dynamic was on display last week at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where President Trump renewed his threats against the U.S. allies Denmark and Spain.

 

It’s not just Europe backing away from the United States. Leaders of America’s partners in Asia and the Middle East are quietly doing the same. The second Trump administration’s ostentatious corruption, trade conflicts, military adventurism and mercurial artificial intelligence regulation have produced a new moment in international affairs: a nearly global grand strategy of countries distancing themselves from the world’s most powerful nation.

 

For the United States, which has called itself the “indispensable nation” for decades, this represents a sea change. Countries have long sought the protection of America’s mighty military and access to its markets and technology. That in turn has benefited our economy and national security.

 

Now, amid intense competition from China, the erosion of key partnerships is undermining our military edge and world-leading technologies and limiting our ability to respond to China’s industrial advantages.

 

The Trump administration tends to view weaker foreign ties as positive, on the logic that countries’ doing more for themselves frees America to focus more on its interests. But in a world where big countries increasingly weaponize the dependence of small ones, and self-sufficiency is its own form of power, the global de-risking is already hurting Americans at home.

 

One doesn’t have to look far to see the costs. The lost war against Iran, the first in which we didn’t have diplomatic or military alignment with our closest allies in Europe and Asia, caused a spike in gas and fertilizer prices that contributed to a $132 billion hit to American consumers, according to Moody’s. Even as Europe increased its military spending by 14 percent, to $864 billion, in 2025, its military purchases from American companies actually fell by almost half.

 

Mr. Trump’s immigration policies are also driving countries away. Four million fewer visitors came to the United States in 2025 than in 2024, at an estimated cost of more than $8 billion. America is hemorrhaging future skilled labor as enrollment by international university students dropped 17 percent last fall from the prior year, already costing universities at least an estimated $1 billion, and potentially costing the country hundreds of billions in future revenue.

 

The chilling effect is spreading. As Mr. Trump muses about making Canada a 51st state, it has embarked on a “new strategic partnership” with China, opened its market for the first time to 50,000 Chinese electric vehicles and joined a more than $150 billion European defense fund aimed at breaking the dependency on the American defense industry.

 

 

In East Asia, where Mr. Trump has paused the sale of arms to Taiwan in deference to President Xi Jinping of China, Taipei and allied capitals are recalibrating their relationships. Japan is overhauling its concept of national defense to develop greater offensive strike capabilities. South Korean contractors are displacing American arms sellers around the world.

 

India is deepening commercial ties with Europe, the Middle East and even, grudgingly, China. India is one of a growing number of countries sufficiently worried about reliable access to American frontier A.I. models that it is reconsidering Chinese or domestic alternatives. “People here say we need to look again at China, or maybe even build our own,” a senior Indian official told me last year.

 

But nowhere is the push to de-risk from the United States more costly to both sides — and disadvantageously timed — than on the continent that coined the phrase. Once-unthinkable conversations are underway in European capitals. European officials tell me they are quietly developing plans for responding in the event of a full-blown trade war with America that would include choking off our technology companies’ access to the continent’s vast market or limiting key inputs like semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

 

Talk of de-risking from the United States predates Mr. Trump’s return to office. America’s partners chafed in recent years at earlier policies they believed trampled on their sovereignty and interests, including sanctions tied to America’s geopolitical projects, parts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that gave a government-funded leg up to U.S. business, and other measures that restricted the export of advanced semiconductors.

 

And some de-risking can have some benefits for the United States. Expanded European defense capacity could eventually free up American resources. Iran’s recent victory is triggering a healthy debate in Washington and the Middle East about reducing the U.S. military footprint in the region. A growing number of leading Democrats and even the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, now grudgingly acknowledge that Israel must learn to live without billions of dollars a year in untethered U.S. military aid.

 

But the divisions Mr. Trump is causing are different. In 2021, for example, Australia agreed to invest billions of dollars in the U.S. submarine industry, on the promise that new boats would appear near Perth sometime in the mid-2030s. Fewer countries are willing to make such long-term bets on America anymore; many are planning their relations with the United States in four-year increments. For the United States that presents a real challenge for managing threats that may run decades into the future.

 

Some costs of the world’s de-risking from America are already hitting home. Others won’t be evident overnight. Allies were right not to join Mr. Trump’s unnecessary Iran fiasco, but our ability to deter future conflicts is weakened by our greater isolation. Lacking a clear alternative partner, most countries will hedge gradually, rather than immediately “decoupling” from the United States. As Ms. von der Leyen said about China three years ago, “our relations are not black or white, and our response cannot be either.”

 

As our partners enhance their own resiliency to us, future American administrations must prepare plans for avoiding a more fundamental rupture. Whoever succeeds Mr. Trump will be the first to take office with countries around the world asking not what America can do for them, but rather seeking to do as much as possible without us. The first step to coping with the fallout is realizing just how much — and how permanently — the world has changed.