This article explores how Trump's coercive foreign policy is casting doubt on US alliances, eroding American credibility, and reshaping Europe's strategic relationship with Washington.
American power rests on an exceptional concentration of military, financial, technological and diplomatic resources. Yet the United States has never exercised its global influence through material superiority alone.
Since the Second World War, Washington has built a system of alliances and institutions that extends its reach, distributes the costs of international security and gives American leadership a degree of legitimacy beyond the boundaries of its own power. NATO, the transatlantic partnership, the dollar-centred financial system and a network of security agreements have enabled the United States to shape international affairs through relationships that reinforce its strategic position.
Donald Trump's second presidency is placing this model under increasing strain. His administration has approached alliances through a transactional logic that measures their value according to immediate American returns.
Tariffs are used to extract concessions, security commitments become conditional on political compliance, and disagreements over military operations invite threats of punishment. The underlying assumption is that Washington's structural advantages give it sufficient leverage to compel cooperation without compromising the relationships that make such cooperation possible.
This approach misunderstands the relationship between power and leadership. A state can possess the resources to pressure its partners while weakening its ability to persuade them, coordinate their actions or secure their long-term commitment.
The distinction matters because American hegemony depends on more than the capacity to impose costs. It also depends on the willingness of other states to participate in an order whose rules, institutions and security arrangements have historically served American interests.
The disputes surrounding Greenland, the war with Iran, support for Ukraine and trade with Canada and Mexico reveal different dimensions of this problem. They demonstrate how the administration's pursuit of immediate concessions can undermine the predictability on which alliances depend.
The European paradox
European governments, in particular, face a strategic dilemma: they continue to require American military capabilities, yet they must increasingly prepare for a Washington whose commitments may shift with its domestic priorities.
This crisis also exposes a deeper contradiction within the Western-led international order. For decades, the United States and its allies have promoted sovereignty, institutional cooperation and a rules-based system while exercising considerable control over states with fewer economic and strategic alternatives.
The Global South has experienced this asymmetry through colonial legacies, debt dependence, sanctions and unequal access to international decision-making. Europe occupies a fundamentally different historical position: it comprises wealthy and powerful states that helped construct and benefit from the Western-led order. Nevertheless, Trump's treatment of European allies illustrates how a dominant power can exploit asymmetrical dependence even among its partners.
The central question, therefore, is not whether the United States will remain a major global power. The question is whether Washington can preserve the political relationships through which its material superiority becomes international leadership.
The cost of managing allies
Trump's approach to alliances begins with the premise that the United States contributes more than its partners and consequently deserves greater deference. This argument draws on genuine asymmetries. European militaries rely on American intelligence, logistics, airlift capacity, advanced weapons and nuclear deterrence. NATO's collective defense arrangements also depend heavily on American capabilities. Washington can therefore demand greater burden-sharing and question whether existing arrangements adequately serve its interests.
Burden-sharing negotiated through established institutions can strengthen an alliance by distributing responsibilities more sustainably. Coercion, by contrast, treats the alliance itself as an instrument through which the stronger party extracts concessions. It replaces a negotiation over shared objectives with a test of obedience.
The Greenland dispute offers a particularly revealing example. Trump has repeatedly asserted American ambitions concerning the territory, challenging Denmark's authority over a strategically significant part of the Arctic. Greenland's location matters to American defense planning, including surveillance and the protection of North Atlantic routes. These interests provide a legitimate basis for security cooperation and negotiations with Denmark and Greenland. They do not, however, erase the sovereignty of either the territory or the people who live there.
Denmark is a NATO ally whose security is embedded in the same system through which the United States projects power across Europe. When Washington pressures an ally over its territorial sovereignty, it introduces a form of uncertainty into the meaning of the alliance itself. European governments must consider whether American guarantees protect their political independence only when their decisions align with Washington's preferences.
The war on Iran has sharpened this tension. European governments have not uniformly supported American military objectives, and some have restricted access to bases or airspace. Their decisions reflect national interests, domestic political constraints and disagreements over the war's objectives and consequences.
Washington, however, has treated reluctance to participate as evidence of inadequate alliance loyalty. In April 2026, Reuters reported that an internal Pentagon email explored punitive options against NATO allies, including suspending Spain from the alliance and reconsidering American diplomatic support for Britain's colonial claim to the Falkland Islands. These were proposed options, not adopted measures, but their circulation exposed the extent to which alliance participation had become linked to the threat of retaliation.
The disagreement raises a basic question about collective security. NATO provides a framework for defending members against external threats; it does not automatically require every member to support every military operation undertaken by the United States. Treating such support as the baseline condition for membership expands the alliance's purpose according to the preferences of its most powerful member. It also places smaller states in the position of choosing between their own political judgment and the risk of American retaliation.
Trump's tariff policies toward Canada and Mexico similarly use economic dependence as a means of extracting political and commercial concessions. The integration of North American production has created mutual benefits, but it has also produced vulnerabilities that Washington can exploit because of the relative scale of the American market.
Across these disputes, the administration's transactional approach makes the terms of cooperation less predictable. Allies can negotiate over expenditure, trade and strategic priorities, but they cannot easily plan around commitments that Washington repeatedly redefines according to immediate political demands.
Interdependence, punishment, and authority
The effectiveness of Trump's approach derives from a structural feature of the international system: the United States occupies central positions in networks that other countries rely on. Its financial markets and currency, technological infrastructure, intelligence capabilities, military systems and global commercial reach provide Washington with opportunities to influence the choices of other governments. This centrality allows the United States to exercise power without resorting to direct military force.
Scholarship on weaponized interdependence explains how states that control important nodes in international networks can use those positions to monitor, restrict or pressure others. Economic and institutional integration does not distribute power evenly.
Trump's policies make this asymmetry explicit. Tariffs threaten access to the American market; defense demands draw on European dependence on US military capabilities; and diplomatic pressure seeks to convert the provision of security into political compliance.
Governments respond to vulnerability by developing alternatives, widening partnerships and reducing exposure to a dominant actor's decisions. These adjustments can be costly, slow and incomplete, particularly in areas where the United States possesses capabilities that cannot be quickly replicated.
Nevertheless, the expectation of future coercion changes how states assess the benefits of interdependence. An arrangement that once appeared efficient may become strategically dangerous if one participant can abruptly withdraw access or attach new political conditions to it.
Canada and Mexico illustrate this dynamic in the economic sphere. Their deep integration with the United States makes a clean separation impractical, but tariff threats create incentives to broaden trade relationships and strengthen domestic economic resilience.
Diversification does not require either country to abandon the American market, but it might require them to reduce the risks associated with relying on Washington as their overwhelmingly dominant partner. For example, Canada turned to the United States' top economic competitor, China, when faced with Trump's tariffs.
The same principle applies to Europe, although its dependencies are more complex. European countries have spent decades building defense arrangements around NATO and American military capabilities. These include intelligence networks, strategic transport, missile defense and advanced weapons systems. The European Parliament's October 2026 briefing on EU-US defense cooperation identifies continued European reliance on American capabilities alongside growing uncertainty over the future direction of US alliance policy.
Such reliance gives Washington substantial leverage in the short term. It also creates a strategic incentive for European governments to invest in capabilities that reduce their exposure to American policy changes. The objective is not necessarily to replace the United States. It is to prevent any single administration from exercising unchecked influence over European security choices.
In the meantime, Washington can still secure concessions from partners that lack viable substitutes. The relevant point is that coercion changes the calculations through which states decide whether to maintain those dependencies over time.
Europe takes a step back
Europe's response to Trump's policies is best understood as strategic hedging. European governments are not ready to collectively abandon the United States, but they are attempting to preserve the transatlantic relationship while reducing the risks created by its growing political uncertainty.
European security remains closely tied to American capabilities, and the continent cannot reproduce all of them in the near future. The war in Ukraine has made that dependence especially visible. American intelligence, satellite communications, advanced air defense and logistical support remain difficult to replace, even as European states increase military spending and Ukraine develops its own capabilities.
In October 2026, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that Washington had restored intelligence-sharing with Ukraine after a period of tension. The episode followed disagreements over Trump's approach to Russia, sanctions, and the deal to import Russian diesel into the United States.
The diesel agreement is particularly significant because it brings competing strategic priorities into direct conflict. Washington presented renewed Russian energy trade as a response to fuel-market pressures, while Ukraine and critics in the United States argued that easing restrictions could benefit Moscow while the Russia-Ukraine war continued. The first shipment is expected in October, amid concerns that renewed commercial cooperation could weaken the credibility of sanctions intended to constrain Russia.
Credibility in an alliance rests on the expectation that commitments will retain meaning across changing political circumstances. It does not require complete agreement on every operation or diplomatic initiative. Indeed, alliances are designed to manage disagreements among states that retain their own interests. Their resilience depends on established procedures, consultation and a shared understanding of what partners can reasonably expect from one another.
When the United States treats disagreement as disloyalty, it narrows the space in which those differences can be negotiated. European governments must then prepare for two possibilities at once: continued American cooperation and the potential withdrawal or politicization of that cooperation. The resulting hedging is a rational response to uncertainty.
The European Union's defense agenda reflects this calculation. Investment in military production, joint procurement and greater capacity for independent action can make Europe a more capable partner within NATO.
It can also give European governments greater freedom to resist American demands when those demands conflict with their national interests.
The future of US leadership
The United States might remain a global power for the time being. Its economic scale, military reach, technological capabilities, and institutional position give it advantages that no immediate European initiative can replicate. The erosion of American leadership, however, does not require the disappearance of American power.
Trump's coercive diplomacy places this distinction at the center of American foreign policy. Pressure over Greenland, demands for European support in the war on Iran, uncertainty over Ukraine, and tariff threats against neighbouring countries all draw on the same assumption: that dependence gives Washington the freedom to extract concessions without enduring lasting damage to its relationships. That assumption undervalues the importance of credibility, consultation and the confidence that commitments will survive political disagreement.
European governments remain constrained by their dependence on American security capabilities, but they are responding through greater defense investment, diversification and efforts to preserve room for independent decision-making. These changes will affect how readily Washington can mobilize its partners and how much political influence it can expect from its existing advantages.
While American hegemony has always combined coercive capacity with the ability to secure cooperation, Trump is placing increasing emphasis on the former at the expense of the latter. His central strategic risk is that the pursuit of greater control over America's allies will weaken the relationships through which the United States exercises global leadership.
Source: Al Mayadeen
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