https://www.aei.org/op-eds/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
By Hal Brands
August 07, 2025
With high tariffs and asymmetric trade deals, President Donald Trump is remaking the global economy. He’s also re-engineering US global leadership. Trump’s gamble is that his strategy will recharge US power and rebalance key relationships. He may simply rupture a democratic community America still badly needs.
Trump’s policies mark the close of a post-1945 era in which Washington bore unequal burdens in support of free-world allies, and the onset of a period in which America extracts benefits more aggressively than ever before.
The losers of Trump’s trade offensive are countries, from Canada to Taiwan, that couldn’t cut deals with Washington, and ended up with vastly elevated tariff rates . But even those that did make bargains might wonder what, exactly, they won.
Trump forced the European Union to accept significantly higher US duties on its products than vice versa. Japan, South Korea, the UK and other partners made unbalanced concessions of their own, including, in some cases, large purchases of American goods or other vaguely defined contributions to the US. If the outcomes, particularly the EU deal, were jarring, that’s because they mark a rupture with the past.
After World War II, the US was a remarkably benign hegemon. It opened its markets to recovering European and East Asian countries before they opened their own markets to American goods. Through alliances and far-flung military deployments, it bore primary responsibility for the common defense.
The US could afford to be generous, given its unchallenged, unprecedented economic power. Protecting friendly countries, even encouraging their resurgence as trade rivals, made strategic sense because it bolstered the overall vibrancy of the non-communist world.
Yet this bargain evolved, as the allies recovered and America’s relative power slowly waned. Throughout the postwar decades, Washington and its friends engaged in repeated, often-painful renegotiations of their relationship.
The details — involving the transatlantic balance of payments in the 1960s, the contours of the international monetary system in the 1970s, or exchange rates and trade in the 1980s — could be endlessly arcane. The fights were often intense : “European leaders want to ‘screw’ us and we want to ‘screw’ them in the economic arena,” President Richard Nixon said.
But periodically redistributing the burdens of democratic security and prosperity was crucial to sustaining US leadership and keeping the democratic allies united against their foes. The general trend was one in which Washington gradually decreased the largesse it had once provided prostrate countries, even as it continued to contribute asymmetrically to the well-being of the free world.
Trump’s trade policies can be seen as a culmination of this process — another renegotiation of the free-world compact. But they are also a rejection of the post-1945 model.
The US is decisively retreating from the fight for open markets, which marked so much of the postwar era. Moreover, Trump has effectively inverted the postwar paradigm, by compelling the allies to accept unequal relationships — and dramatically boost defense spending — to maintain access to the US market and US military protection. Seoul, Brussels and Tokyo reluctantly offered economic tribute to the superpower, because doing otherwise risked jeopardizing security ties they cannot live without.
So, will Trump’s policies renew American leadership? Or do they risk the fall of Washington’s world? As ever with the 47th president, it’s a bit hard to tell.
The charitable view is that the old model of American leadership was shopworn and unsustainable. If the US continues to act as though it still enjoys the primacy, and can show the generosity, of the early post-1945 era, the thinking goes, it will run headlong into disaster as challenges posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea mount.
Asking allies to hike defense outlays and deliver economic subsidies will bruise their feelings. But it will increase overall democratic military spending. It will give the US the benefits — whether tariff revenue or reindustrialization — that revitalize its power and help it remain engaged in faraway regions. An America First economic policy, by this logic, could fortify the free world.
But the dangers are legion. What if tariffs make America poorer, as most economists predict, and less capable of global leadership? Asymmetric trade deals could humiliate and politically destabilize US allies: From France to Japan, expect the nationalist right and the anti-American left to make hay of Trump’s unequal terms.
Perhaps American protectionism will fragment the democratic world at a time when greater economic and strategic unity is imperative to face revisionist threats. If Trump doesn’t holster his tariff weapon, allies might start to view US power as a danger to their security and well-being. Over time, that perception could unravel the entire system of arrangements that brought peace, prosperity and stability to the postwar world.
Superpowers don’t have to be endlessly generous to their allies. But those that act too acquisitively, too consistently, risk squandering international legitimacy and consent. Trump undoubtedly understands the first part of that maxim. We’ll see if he grasps the second.
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