Daly: Abusing Our Allies to ‘Own’ America (and Conservatism)

Trump’s needless erosion of longtime alliances is bad for the country.

One of the frustrations of writing from a conservative perspective in the Trump era is having to sometimes remind yourself that the conservative positions you’ve long maintained — which were previously understood (and largely shared) by your fellow righties — have since been forgotten by a significant number of people who still think of themselves as conservatives. In some cases, they may have never truly explored those positions in the first place.

As I wrote in my last column, this really shouldn’t be surprising. Though the views I subscribe to broadly defined the mainstream conservative movement for close to 60 years, they’ve largely gone undefended over the last decade — at least by those with large public platforms. Few Republican leaders seem interested in them now, and the self-described conservatives who funnel outrage to millions every week (on cable news, popular podcasts, and social-media) are mostly focused on Trump sycophancy, culture-war battles, and otherwise owning the libs.

Gone are the days of Charles Krauthammer as a revered thought-leader on the American Right. Now, smug, know-nothing whataboutists like Jesse Watters rule the roost.

Philosophical foundations, including those that have led to sustained periods of great success and prosperity, can only last so long on muscle-memory. Without gatekeepers and others willing to debate and persuade potential converts on conservative ideas, people were bound to forget them, and fall for the allure of personality-based populism — the success of which is measured not by conservation, enduring success, or the betterment of society… but rather grievance, attitude, and tribal solidarity.

Case in point, our national debt recently flew past the $40 trillion mark. The United States is now spending more on interest payments (to service that debt) than on national defense. Our major entitlement programs are just a few years away from insolvency. Our cost of living is through the roof. Executive abuses and federal corruption have become normalized. And seemingly every week, we’re learning more about the poor planning and mismanagement behind the ongoing Iran War (along with the U.S. vulnerabilities it has exposed).

These are serious, substantive issues. And yet a big focus of our president and his loyal defenders, at least at the moment, is finding more ways to further demonize and screw up our relationship with Canada — one of our closest, safest, and mutually beneficial allies.

No, I’m not talking about the dopey “Lake America” trolling (though the Right’s jubilation over that juvenile nonsense goes to my larger point). I’m referring to the latest round of Trump’s trade war. Despite the economic damage it has caused to our country, much of the effort being deemed illegal, and all of it amounting to an assault on the longtime conservative tenet of free trade, Trump’s appetite for punishing our allies (often at America’s expense) appears as strong as ever.

As we learned a few months ago from our president’s 2025 financial disclosure, Trump, unlike an overwhelming majority of Americans, has personally made a lot of money off his tariffs. But his mistreatment of our allies clearly runs much deeper than a warped view of international trade.

In a recent Q&A, a subscriber to this website asked if Trump’s latest abuse of Canada stemmed from his “failed excursion into Iran,” and the emotional need to “bully” someone who he could do so with “relative impunity.” While I think there may be something to that, the problem (as Ukraine, South Korea, Greenland, Denmark, and other countries can attest to) is much broader.

While Trump treats anti-America dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un with fawning praise and respect, he takes the opposite tact with many of America’s friends and free-world partners, casting them as leeches and ingrates who only take advantage of the United States’ outsized role in the world order.

I recently spoke about this to Bobby Miller, a commentator and foreign policy scholar from Georgetown University.

“President Trump… has a tendency to do this with a lot of our allies,” Miller told me during the interview. “And while this sort of bravado might sound appealing, superficially appealing — you know, ‘We’re the boss’ sort of machismo; ‘We’re telling our allies how to behave, and they better be supplicants of ours…’ I think the fundamental problem, something that President Trump misunderstands, is that one of the keys to American hegemony — one of the reasons why we have achieved so much... is that we don't treat allies like supplicants. We treat them as equals.”

This is one of those positions that I think most conservatives (and probably most Americans) not only used to understand, but also understood the purpose of. It’s more than a matter of honor (though honor is very important too).

Miller was kind enough to lay it out. “There’s something called mutually beneficial exchanges… There doesn’t need to be this adversarial relationship with our allies, where we’re extracting something. We both can benefit.” He also described how “allies allow us to project power into areas of the world where we aren’t always physically present.”

Miller says that the president’s needless disparagement and punishment of our allies has many of them questioning American resolve — a trend he believes started under Obama, and has only gotten worse under Trump. When allies start to view the U.S. as unreliable (or potentially even hostile), Miller argued, their strategic plan changes. They begin to hedge their bets, either by building more amicable relationships with bad actors on the world stage (including sworn enemies of the United States), or by seeking strategic independence.

That latter may sound good to some, ceded Miller, but he believes that view is short-sighted. He says that if U.S. allies go their own way, their strategic autonomy may well run contrary to U.S. interests.

“Having this vast alliance network,” he added, “has been of immense benefit to the United States… A lot of Americans have taken this world order for granted, and how beneficial the post-1945 arrangement has been for the United States.”

He’s right. And if the Trump era has proven anything, it’s that millions of Americans have taken all kinds of things for granted. Our next president, if he or she has any sense at all, will invest a lot of time in rebuilding our strategic alliances.