When You Alienate the World, Don’t Expect It to Show Up for You

After a year of insults, tariffs, and broken alliances, Trump is discovering a simple truth: you can’t bully your allies and then ask them to fight your wars.

There’s something almost painfully predictable about where America has landed.

Donald Trump is now frustrated. Or is furious, a better word? He has now realised that the very allies he has spent the better part of a year belittling, insulting tariffing, and publicly undermining are refusing to step in and help manage the escalating conflict with Iran.

Well, what did he expect?

You don’t spend months, no, make that years … this approach was exacerbated as it accelerated significantly during his second term, mocking your allies, questioning their value, slapping tariffs on them while treating your long-standing partnerships like disposable inconveniences. And you certainly do not then turn around and ask for military support as though nothing happened.

That’s not how alliances work. Nor do relationships or trust work that way.

Yet here you are.

From aboard Air Force One, Trump tried to frame the situation as though the United States had been carrying the world on its back. He suggested America is “always there for NATO. We’re helping them with Ukraine. It’s got an ocean in between us, doesn’t affect us, but we helped them.

“Whether we get support or not, I can say this, and I said it to them: We will remember.”

“And be interesting to see what country wouldn’t help us with a very small endeavour, which is just keeping the Strait open. It’s small because Iran has very little firepower left.”

Small? There is nothing small about a war in one of the most volatile regions in the world, particularly one that risks destabilising global energy supply and dragging multiple nations into escalation. And there is certainly nothing small about the consequences of miscalculation.

But what stands out most isn’t the language, it’s the glaring disconnect.

Because while the administration talks publicly about surprise and frustration, reporting has consistently indicated that warnings were given. Intelligence assessments outlined the risks. Military advisors flagged likely retaliation, and the potential for escalation wasn’t hidden; it was part of the briefing.

And still, here you are. And I say that as an Australian watching from a distant viewpoint Down Under. You see, my country, together with Japan, Germany, France, and the U.K., has announced it will not be sending any warships or other reinforcements to help with Trump’s attempts to reopen the vital shipping route.

That’s not betrayal by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a consequence.

You've seen how, in the last year, Trump has terminated direct military assistance to Ukraine as it attempted to repel a Russian incursion that many Europeans perceive as a threat to their entire continent. You saw him cut off the majority of U.S. foreign aid and withdraw from numerous multilateral organisations. He built trade obstacles against nations supplying commodities to the United States and threatened to use military action to take Greenland, until more recently giving in.

It is the natural progression of a foreign policy that has long treated allies as doormats and adversaries with diplomacy as an accompanying weakness.

Alliances aren’t conveniences as Trump is now beginning to realise. They’re a result of consistent mutual respect and the understanding that when one country calls, the others will answer. And it does that, not out of obligation, but out of trust.

Now that trust has been eroded. It’s gone. And once it’s gone, it doesn’t readily reappear just because a self-inflicted situation has suddenly become desperately urgent.

There’s a deeper irony at play. Can you feel it?

So, while traditional allies step back, there’s one leader Trump has consistently gone out of his way to sing the praises of. But it turns out that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is not stepping in to assist the United States either.

Quite the opposite, in fact. According to emerging reports, Russia has been supporting Iran behind the scenes. So that leaves the US in an unfamiliar position: not leading a coalition, but standing largely alone, save for Israel.

Today, the mood toward Uncle Sam across much of the world has noticeably darkened. After a turbulent first year of Trump’s second term, many countries view the current U.S. president unfavourably, not least because his tone toward Europe has been openly dismissive. Speaking in Switzerland in January, Trump even taunted Europeans, claiming that without U.S. help in World War II, “you’d all be speaking German.”

And this is the part worth sitting with.

During the World Economic Forum in Davos, he ridiculed French President Emmanuel Macron. Next, he criticised Canada for not being more grateful. NATO copped it when he characterised it as a money pit. He even said that NATO countries didn’t send their troops to front-line duty in Afghanistan to help U.S. forces. He had to backtrack on that little faux pas. Despite everything the U.S. has done for allies, he said, they never return the favour: “All we are asking for is a place called Greenland.”

We’ve seen it before: warnings delivered, dismissed or downplayed, followed by outcomes that unfold exactly as predicted.

And once again, foresight was ignored.

The implications are no longer hypothetical. Geopolitically, economically, and above all, humanly, they are unravelling at a rate of knots.

Lives are affected by these decisions. Stability is affected. The global balance, already fragile, is pushed further toward uncertainty.

And perhaps the most sobering truth of all is this:

You can’t run foreign policy on grievance.
You can’t build alliances on intimidation.
And you can’t expect loyalty from those you’ve spent your time alienating.

The world doesn’t work that way.

It never has.

If this moment teaches anything, it’s this: respect isn’t a switch you turn on when you need help. It’s something you build long before you ask for it.