This is how the world will look after Trump

Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.

America’s allies would be making a grave mistake in believing that the status quo will be restored in a post-Trump world. In fact, a more inward-looking strand of politics now permeates both the Democratic and Republican parties.

While Donald Trump’s first term caused considerable consternation, including bellicose rhetoric towards Nato and a campaign call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, he was viewed as an aberration.

America’s allies could not imagine that he would ever return for a second term, let alone shape the world in the way that he has. In hindsight, the first Trump years foreshadowed a shift by the US towards isolationism, coupled with a proclivity to favour coercion over diplomacy on issues spanning conflicts to trade.

Many Americans are tired of wars and of shouldering the responsibility of others as they struggle to maintain a decent standard of living. While most Americans support US global leadership in some form, they do not want to bear sole responsibility for the world’s problems. The real mistake then, would be to again treat the Trump years as an aberration rather than a warning about deeper shifts in American politics that the rest of the world can no longer afford to ignore.

In Trump’s second term, the US has not only ceased to be the guarantor of the international order, it has become one of its disrupters, exposing how an overreliance on US military, financial and political power has rendered allies vulnerable and allowed bad actors to capitalise on their complacency.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, then-president Joe Biden rallied Europe to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s aid and Kyiv became the top recipient of US foreign assistance. But when Trump was re-elected, he quickly made it clear that he would expect Europe to provide more financial assistance to Ukraine as the US redirected its focus on the issues that Trump campaigned on: namely, the economy.

While most discussions at the Munich Security Conference focused on the urgent need for bolstering European defence capacity, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speeches in 2025 and 2026 chose to highlight perceived cultural decline and democratic backsliding across the UK and Europe.

The stark shift in US policy alarmed Ukraine and its British and European allies. As the UK and Europe reeled, Trump embarked on his first foreign trip to the Gulf, where he basked in the pomp and circumstance and secured hundreds of billions of dollars in investment commitments. Like their European counterparts, Gulf states like Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had long bet on American reliability on defence issues. They, too, would soon face a rude awakening.

When in September last year, Israel struck a Hamas meeting in Qatar – a major non-Nato ally of the United States and the host of its largest airbase in the region – the US was seen by Doha as, at a minimum, permissive towards the attack.

Qatar viewed the assault as an egregious violation of its sovereignty. Like Britain and the EU, the Gulf states were soon to understand that diversification was not a luxury, but a matter of national security.

In January of this year, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at a podium in Davos, Switzerland and spoke of a “rupture” in the international order. “The old order is not coming back,” he warned, urging middle powers to act together because “if we are not at the table, we’re on the menu”.

Carney’s speech was lauded as a wake-up call following Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and impose punishing tariffs on European allies and the UK unless they surrendered the territory to America.

What Carney’s speech also revealed, however, was that the world order he referred to had long been fragile. It had been held together largely by a belief in the reliability of the US as the world’s leading superpower, one that would more often than not act as a steadying geopolitical and economic force. It is that long-standing belief in the system that Donald Trump has shattered.

The post-Second World War order was governed by the assumption that the United States would remain globally engaged, and that alliances with America would survive regardless of who was in the White House, be it a Democrat or a Republican president. Values-based alliances broadly moved together, even through deep disagreements such as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Now, a diversification strategy has gained increasing urgency. With the US-Israeli war on Iran wreaking havoc on global shipping and affecting economies worldwide, alliances are shifting: for example, the UAE has doubled down on its security partnership with Israel; Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have formed a defence pact; and Ukraine has signed 10-year defence export deals with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.

For its part, China has maintained a balancing act, maintaining relationships with the Gulf, Iran and the US. In this new, more transparent world order, alignments are likely to keep moving from ideological and permanent to interest-based and temporary.

As hedging and redundancy become the new pillars of national security, world leaders have struggled to manage their relationships with Trump and, by extension, their countries’ interests.

The two extremes of Zelensky’s defiance and Sir Keir Starmer and Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte’s deferential flattery have arguably failed to secure either country with its needs, although the infamous Trump dressing-down of Zelensky in the Oval Office may have convinced the British Prime Minister that the extreme opposite approach was the right one.

The lesson? Neither flattery nor outright defiance are likely to move the New York real-estate-developer-turned-president, but rather a calibrated, interest-driven engagement akin to the one favoured by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who approaches Trump less as an ally or adversary than as a negotiating equal.

In the absence of American dependability, agility becomes valuable strategic currency.

America’s allies would do well to throw out old assumptions and adapt to the disorder – and not only for the remainder of Trump’s term.