Does America want its friends back?
After three months of insulting, tariffing and even threatening to annex some of its best allies, the Trump administration suddenly needs some help.
The US President has now escalated a full-on trade clash with China that he doesn’t seem to know how to win. So the administration is rushing to work out how to build leverage against Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is in no mood to cede to Trump’s bullying.
But there’s one thing that might work. It would bring to bear America’s strength and global power and could perhaps build pressure on Beijing to act on consistent US complaints about market access, theft of intellectual property, industrial espionage and other issues. There’s only one problem: This approach would conflict with Trump’s “America first” mantra.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed out on Fox Business this week that US allies such as Japan, South Korea and India would soon be in trade talks with Washington, as would Vietnam.
“Everyone is coming to the table, and basically China is surrounded,” he said. Bessent added that a topic of talks should be a joint goal: “How do we get China to rebalance? That is the big win here.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Friday why American allies would help it counter China when Trump was treating friends and foes alike. She replied: “You’ll have to talk to our allies who are reaching out to us. The phones are ringing off of the hooks. They have made it very clear they need the United States of America, they need our markets, they need our consumer base.”
But everything that Trump has done since he arrived back in the Oval Office has been designed to destroy groups of like-minded democracies. Several times this week, he dissed the European Union. “I always say it was formed to really do damage to the United States in trade,” he said.
He’s not the only Europe hater. Vice President JD Vance revealed his distaste for the continent at the Munich Security forum and also in a group chat of officials about air strikes in Yemen.
Trump’s spite in the Western hemisphere is also an issue.
A unified North American trading powerhouse has long been seen as a potential bulwark against China. But Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over Canada and has targeted Mexico with some of his toughest tariffs. New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has warned that his country’s traditional relationship with Washington is over.
Still, the idea of building an allied front to try to modify China’s trade practices is such a good idea, it’s a wonder no one thought of it before.
They did. And Trump shut it down.
On the first day of his first term in 2017, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a group of 12 nations including allies like Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Australia, as well as Japan that did not include China. The president also shut down a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that would have linked the world’s two largest markets.
The question now is whether Trump has so alienated America’s friends that they won’t take his calls.