Washington's Allies Still Haven't Grasped That the Old Order Is Gone

Washington's closest allies have spent the past year hoping that the U.S. retreat from its postwar commitments is a passing phase that ends with the next election, writes Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, in Foreign Affairs. That reading is a mistake, he argues: the order the United States built and led for eighty years has not merely eroded, it has been deliberately abandoned by Washington itself, and no future administration is likely to fully restore it. European leaders who pledged higher defense spending at July's NATO summit largely did so hoping Trump would stay bound to the alliance regardless — a bet Leonard calls a category error, since the shift predates any single president and reflects a broader loss of American appetite for underwriting global order. Treating the past year as an aberration, he writes, leaves allies unprepared for a world in which they must generate their own security, trade rules and deterrence rather than borrow America's. Leonard sketches what durable autonomy would actually require: pooled European capabilities, new coalitions among middle powers, and a mental shift from lobbying Washington to planning around it. The essay lands as European capitals are still calibrating how much to hedge against a partner that no longer behaves like one.