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Republican presidential nominee and former president Donald Trump shakes hands with vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 16. Paul Sancia/The Associated Press
The message to the world is: don’t count on us. If Donald Trump becomes president again, the US will not believe in lasting alliances.
Mr. Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate has further raised concerns about the Republican Party’s tendency to abandon support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with Trump last week and wrote to European leaders saying he would try to broker a swift end to the war if Trump is re-elected and that Europe would have to shoulder more of the financial burden for Ukraine’s war effort.
Vance had already called all this out months ago, notably in an op-ed in the Financial Times, and called it a necessary step to shift US support to Asian allies to counter China. But Trump clearly doesn’t see Asian security in the same way.
Asked on Tuesday by Bloomberg Businessweek whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, Trump said Taiwan should pay for its defense — not for weapons it buys with cash, but for the protection of the U.S. “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company,” Trump said.
This is not out of the blue. Vance may believe in pivoting to Asia, but his underlying message is to avoid foreign engagement unless it directly affects US interests. And Trump is totally transactional. That’s his core. His first term may have prevented that, but in a second term we may see a Donald Trump who has declared that defending Taiwan “produces nothing.”
“I think this reflects a new tenor in U.S. foreign policy that says you can’t build lasting alliances anymore,” said Charles Barton, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. A second Trump administration would shape foreign policy with a sober calculation of the interests of the United States, and only the United States, he said.
It is not just a major issue for Ukraine and Taiwan.
Canada must prepare for change, and not just because President Trump’s protectionist tendencies will not be frozen by the renegotiation of the Intercontinental Trade Agreement, but because Canada’s foreign policy depends heavily on grouping with the United States, which may not be interested in grouping with the United States.
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Barton said Canadians may no longer have confidence that the United States will continue to defend the Canadian North against a Russian invasion. That remains a US obligation under NATO, but the U.S. ambivalence may mean Canada will be forced to build up its own northern defenses more quickly.
On Thursday, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, told a Politico panel on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention that her message to the U.S. was that supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression has implications for North American security. “We need to protect our north, and we need to protect it especially from Russia and China,” she said.
If the result of the new nonaligned policy were simply that Europe and Canada spent more on their own defenses, the U.S. interest would be clear. But it also sends a message to America’s adversaries: Europe fears that a victory in Ukraine would embolden Russia to threaten other countries. And China would be emboldened.
While Trump and Vance view China as a dangerous rival, their foreign policy messaging is aligned with Beijing’s key strategic objective of weakening U.S. alliances to weaken U.S. power.
In this sense, China has an ally in Russia. The axis of development between the two countries is the “no-holds-barred” partnership touted in the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which has helped Russia avoid Western sanctions over Ukraine. The cooperation of Western allies is a constraint that Russia wants to remove.
Both Russia and China have tried to find allies to divide US allies. One example is the pro-Russian Hungarian Prime Minister Orban. Orban opposes the European Union’s (EU) support for Ukraine and does not want the EU to become anti-China. China’s economic influence in Greece, especially the nationalization of the port of Piraeus, is seen as a reason for Greece to oppose the EU’s hardline stance against China.
If a U.S. president tells allies that the U.S. is not serious about the alliances, more countries will be tempted to avoid risks or to bow to Beijing’s wishes, driven by economic interests or security concerns. China is already working to rewrite the rules of multilateral organizations and cultivate client states. If the U.S. is not interested in allies, China and Russia will be.