Pathetic in Ankara

Who’s afraid of the big bad Trump?

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal describes a tense meeting among European leaders early this year, convened after Donald Trump threatened to use military force to seize Greenland from Denmark. According to the Journal,

heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.”

Yesterday, soon after he arrived in Ankara for the NATO Summit, Trump reiterated his demand that Denmark hand him control of Greenland. But reactions were subdued. As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously.

What has changed? According to the Journal, European leaders have largely given up on hopes that they can bring back the America they used to know, and are quietly, in effect, declaring independence:

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.

Their willingness to de-Americanize partly reflects recognition that reconciliation is hopeless: Trump is who he is, and a nation that elected him twice simply can’t be trusted.

However, Europe’s turn away from Trump also reflects plummeting perceptions of his power. At one time the world feared Trump although it never respected him. The silence that met his renewed demand for Greenland shows that the world no longer takes him seriously.

America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.

There are three big reasons for that precipitous decline.

First, there is the debacle in Iran. Not only did Trump’s war of choice fail in all its objectives, it revealed that U.S. military power is far more limited than almost anyone realized. The insistence by Trump and his lackeys that this humiliating defeat was a great victory shows that American foreign policy only serves to pander to Trump’s fragile ego. And when his ego meets reality, it slithers away.

In addition to showing the limits of U.S. military power, the war also showed the limits of U.S. financial power: It is increasingly easy for nations to bypass U.S. banks and the dollar using cryptocurrency — and Chinese yuan.

A second, in its way equally important, blow to U.S. prestige and influence has been Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.

For make no mistake: everyone at that summit in Ankara knows that Trump, JD Vance and company both expected and hoped that their betrayal of Ukraine would lead to Russian victory. Surely, they imagined, Ukraine would be unable to hold off the onslaught from its much bigger neighbor without U.S. aid. To America’s everlasting shame, Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he didn’t “have the cards.”

Yet after Trump cut U.S. aid to Ukraine by 99 percent, Ukraine not only survived but began gaining the upper hand. Europe has stepped up financially, more or less replacing the lost American dollars. And Ukrainian military innovation has largely made up for the loss of American weapons.

The result has been to make the U.S. increasingly irrelevant. Put it this way: Iran taught foreign governments not to fear American might; China, along with the crypto industry, has taught rogue countries that they needn’t fear American financial control; and Ukraine has taught foreign governments that they don’t need American support.

Finally, Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.

And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.

The combined effect of these humiliations for Trump and his minions has been a drastic reordering of America’s place in the world. For most of last year foreign leaders kept trying, desperately, to appease Trump. These days they’re mostly just humoring him, building a world in which his sundowning won’t matter.

It’s extremely unlikely that anything substantive will come out of this NATO meeting. And a year ago the prospect of a failed summit would have been a source of deep concern. Now it will be met with a shrug: Nobody expects anything but chaotic bluster from Trump, and what he does matters less and less.

Note: I’ll be doing a Substack Live at noon with Heather Cox Richardson