After declaring Iran’s military “gone,” US President Donald Trump appealed to Britain, France, Japan, and South Korea – as well as China, Iran’s strategic partner – to send minesweepers and naval forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When allies balked, the request turned into a warning: NATO would face “a very bad” future if it refused.
The prevailing wisdom is that Trump faces a credibility problem: having spent years insulting allies, he finds they will not rally when he needs them. That is true, but superficial, as though a structural collapse could be caused by wounded feelings. Something more fundamental is at work.
Consider what the refusals actually say. Germany’s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius put it plainly: “This is not our war; we did not start it.” France, Spain, Italy, and Japan responded similarly. These governments are not simply nursing grudges. They are pointing out that Trump launched a war without consulting them, a war that is already costing them dearly – oil above $100 a barrel, insurance markets frozen, supply chains disrupted, forces exposed to Iranian retaliation – and now demands they bear its military risks as well.
It is as if Trump failed to pay for fire insurance and then filed a claim for a blaze he set, without warning the neighbourhood. Now the neighbours are applying his own logic.
That logic reflects Trump’s critique of the postwar alliance system. The classic critique – familiar from the left, from realists, and from anti-imperialists – held that NATO and the liberal international order never lived up to their advertising. The language of shared values was a fig leaf for American dominance.
In Trump’s telling, however, the US was not the manager of the system but its mark. Weaker states extracted American protection, treasure, and military risk while contributing little in return. The “rules-based order” was not a mechanism for advancing American interests. It was a swindle. The fatal flaw of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was not incompetence but altruism: America spent blood and treasure without extracting anything tangible in return. Trump’s Venezuela strategy represents the lesson learned. Forget democratisation. Take the oil.
This is not cynicism in the conventional sense. A cynic assumes that moral language disguises self-interest. Trump suggests the opposite: America’s sincerity was precisely the problem. The liberal order was not a mask but a delusion that must be discarded, not managed. Some commentators have credited him for a kind of radical candour, openly acknowledging that politics is transactional and shared values were always a polite fiction.
That diagnosis is not entirely wrong. But to say that Trump is shedding hypocrisy is to misidentify what he has discarded. The hypocrite privately pursues self-interest while publicly professing shared values. What Trump has repudiated is more fundamental: the disposition to treat partners fairly because their future cooperation will be required.
Reciprocity of this kind is not a mask for self-interest. It is a long-term strategy for extracting cooperation from parties who cannot simply be commanded. What Trump has discarded was not a disguise but a disposition. The closed Strait of Hormuz is what that discarded disposition looks like: a system that once converted raw military and economic power into organised cooperation among states.
Alliance-building, properly understood, is a form of emergency preparedness. Showing up when the stakes are low, providing benefits before they are urgently needed, and treating partners as partners rather than freeloaders creates a reserve of goodwill that can be drawn upon when a crisis strikes. This logic is not sentimental; it is actuarial. You pay premiums when you do not need coverage, because by the time you need it, the payment window has closed.
The multilateral system Trump has dismantled was not a trap laid by weaker states to fleece a credulous superpower. It was infrastructure – infrastructure that transformed military capacity into coordinated action by converting potential partners into actual ones, and by establishing a shared definition of what constitutes “our” problem.
The US had that infrastructure. Now it doesn’t, because Trump has systematically erased that shared definition, shrinking “our” to “mine,” so that every government now calculates its own interest separately. What took decades to build has been demolished in months. Its ruins lie in the Strait of Hormuz.
Project Syndicate