America was born into geopolitics. The Republic’s first decades were shaped by the rivalry between the British and French empires, and George Washington used his farewell address to warn his countrymen against permanent foreign entanglements. For much of the next century and a half, they listened.
Then came the World Wars, and after them a choice without precedent: not just to engage with the world but to organize it. Every American President from Harry Truman onward committed the country to leading a volatile world—building alliances, underwriting institutions, and defending a rule of law that Washington mostly chose to live within. The commitment was bipartisan, and for 80 years it held.
It no longer does. A politics of grievance has taken hold inside the U.S., reflecting a growing conviction that the old bargains no longer pay off for ordinary Americans. Much of the country has come to see its commitments to free trade, collective security, and global institutions not as sources of American primacy but as a raw deal—a way for the world to free-ride on American power.
President Donald Trump isn’t the cause of that sentiment. It hardened in the late 2000s, as a financial crisis at home met the spectacle of a rising China—one climbing through the very trade rules Washington had built to its own advantage. The suspicion that America had written an order others were winning under took root across both parties, and never left. Trump tapped it, rode it, and inflamed it, recognizing Americans’ changing views of the national interest and America’s role in the world.
The U.S. has always been unpredictable—lurching between administrations, isolationist one decade and interventionist the next, going quiet on the world’s crises and then acting on them with little warning. As Winston Churchill never quite said, you can count on the Americans to do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted the alternatives. Erratic, but ultimately dependable.
Not anymore. Under Trump, the world’s superpower has become something it has rarely been before: an unreliable actor on the global stage. The U.S. today doesn’t just keep allies guessing about its next move—it makes them doubt whether it will honor its last commitment. Countries sign deals and watch Washington rewrite the terms. Intelligence-sharing is suspended overnight. Foreign aid is cut off. America’s unreliability has become the driver of geopolitical instability, the thing every foreign ministry now has to plan around.
Washington is dismantling its own order just as America’s role has grown more important to the rest of the world. Europe, Britain, Canada, Japan, and other U.S. allies spent decades under-investing in their own security, and now depend on Washington for both their security and their prosperity, just as Americans want their government to do less, not more, on the international stage. Jolted awake by Trump’s second term, they have belatedly begun to hedge: Europe is rearming and has closed trade agreements with India and the South American bloc Mercosur; Canada is diversifying its trade; the Gulf states are building ties that don’t run through D.C.
Not all of it will last. Some of the sharpest disruptions—the score-settling, the deals undone by a social media post, the threats against allies’ sovereignty, the regime-change operations—are particular to this President: the places where his personal interest diverges from the national interest, and he pursues the former at the latter’s expense. They do serious damage, but they will recede after he leaves office. Trust can be rebuilt, if from a lower baseline.
But there is no going back. The “rupture” of the old order, as Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada described it at Davos, will outlast Trump. Protectionism, unilateralism, and skepticism of democracy promotion and foreign aid now command support across both parties and among a generation of voters. The next President, Republican or Democrat, will inherit an electorate that wants less engagement with the world.
For the U.S., it isn’t so much a rupture as a return. Trump will pass; the inward turn won’t. At 250, this is just who America is now.
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