The prevailing view is that Trump faces a trust problem: after spending years insulting allies, he has discovered that they won’t come to his aid when he needs them. This is true but superficial, as if structural collapse could be caused by hurt feelings. There are more fundamental causes at work here.
Consider what these refusals really mean. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius put it bluntly: “This is not our war; we didn’t start it.” France, Spain, Italy and Japan have responded similarly. These governments are not just nursing grudges. They point out that Trump started a war without consulting them, a war that is already costing them dearly – oil above $100 a barrel, frozen insurance markets, disrupted supply chains, troops exposed to Iranian retaliation – and now demands that they bear the war risks as well.
It’s like Trump not paying for fire insurance and then filing a claim for damages from a fire he himself set without alerting his neighbors. Now the neighbors are applying his same logic.
“Shared values” turned out to be an illusion
This logic reflects Trump’s criticism of the postwar alliance system. The classic critique – familiar to leftists, realists and anti-imperialists – was that NATO and the liberal international order never lived up to their promises. Talk of shared values was just a cover for American domination.
However, according to Trump, the US was not the steward of this system but its victim. Weaker states extracted American protection, wealth, and military risk from it, while contributing little in return. “Rules-based order” was not a mechanism for advancing American interests. It was a fraud. The fatal flaw of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was not incompetence but altruism: America wasted blood and money without getting anything tangible in return. Trump’s strategy toward Venezuela reflects a lesson learned. Forget democratization. Take the oil.
This is not cynicism in the traditional sense. A cynic assumes that moral rhetoric masks self-interest. Trump, on the other hand, assumes the opposite: that it was America’s sincerity that was the problem. The liberal order was not a mask but an illusion to be gotten rid of, not managed. Some commentators have noted his radical candor, openly acknowledging that politics was a transaction and that shared values had always been a polite fiction.
This diagnosis is not entirely wrong. But to say that Trump is getting rid of hypocrisy is to misidentify what he has given up. A hypocrite privately pursues his own interests while publicly professing shared values. What Trump has given up is much more fundamental: the tendency to treat partners fairly because their cooperation will be required in the future.
Mutuality of this kind is not a mask for personal gain. It is a long-term strategy for getting cooperation from parties that cannot simply be commandeered. What Trump gave up was not a mask, but an inclination. The closed Strait of Hormuz is what that rejected inclination looks like: a system that once turned raw military and economic power into organized cooperation between states.
Alliance-building, if properly understood, is a form of emergency preparedness. Showing up where the stakes are low, providing benefits before they become urgently needed, and treating partners as partners rather than spongers creates a reservoir of goodwill that can be drawn upon when crisis strikes. This logic isn’t sentimental; it’s actuarial. You pay your premiums when you don’t need insurance because by the time you do, the window for payment is already closed.
When the UK offered to send ships after the immediate danger had passed, Trump countered that he needed them before he won, not after. He’s right. But he couldn’t get them then because he had long since emptied the account from which such commitments are covered. When the crisis hit, he instinctively turned to the language of alliance commitments, the very vocabulary he has criticized for years. Even Trump understands at some level that raw military might is no substitute for organized cooperation.
The boomerang of Trump’s logic
The lesson learned by allies has even more serious implications. The alliance system worked in part because it created norms that restricted all parties, including potential “stowaways.” Once a hegemon openly adopts a purely exploitative logic, it gives everyone else the right to reason the same way. When Pistorius says “we didn’t start it,” he’s not betraying Trump. He’s learned from him. Allies have not abandoned the logic of mutual support; they have accepted Trump’s proposed alternative to it.
This makes Trump’s attitude toward Russia all the more revealing. While he berated France and Germany for not sending warships, Trump was asked about reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin was providing Iran with intelligence on U.S. troops. “I think he’s probably helping them a little bit, yeah, probably, and he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right?” – Trump replied. “It’s like, hey, that’s what they’re doing and that’s what we’re doing, to be honest”. Russia is helping Iran target American soldiers, and Trump calls it fair – a predictable tit-for-tat response – in the logic of self-interest.
The hidden architecture of Trump’s worldview is revealed here. Allies are bound by unconditional obligations – show up, obey, pay – while adversaries are exempt from the very logic of reciprocity that Trump denies to friends. Putin gets understanding; French President Emmanuel Macron gets threats. The ally is a sucker. The adversary, in some perverse sense, is a role model.
The multilateral system that Trump destroyed was not a trap set by weaker states to fool a gullible superpower. It was an infrastructure – an infrastructure that turned military capabilities into coordinated action, turning potential partners into real ones and establishing a common definition of what constituted “our” problem.
The US had that infrastructure. Now it doesn’t have it, because Trump has systematically erased that common definition, narrowing “our” to “my” so that each government now calculates its interests separately. What took decades to build was destroyed in a matter of months. Its ruins lie in the Strait of Hormuz.
Stephen Holmes
Stephen Holmes is Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and the Richard Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and is co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light That Went Out: Payback (Penguin Books, 2019).
© Project Syndicate, 2026.
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