America alone? The world is moving on without the US — and Trump’s inner circle is rattled

In his second term, President Donald Trump has accused allies and partners of piggybacking on the United States for security and lectured them on the need to take responsibility for their own defence. Now that they are steadily moving in that direction, one of his principal attack dogs has said such efforts are meaningless.

In a post on X, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby rejected the idea of 'middle powers' and said it is a "waste of valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction". He went on to say that "'middle powers' don’t have a coherent basis for alignment".

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After slamming nations for working to secure their interests while Trump joins hands with their adversaries, Colby arrived at the conclusion that "we see an upsurge in desire for engagement with the United States, not a reduction".

"Under President Trump’s leadership, countries not only see the value of American engagement, they can no longer take it for granted. We unquestionably see an incredibly strong and continuing demand signal for US military presence and engagement around the world," Colby further said.

Even Germany's neo-Nazis, whom Trump and his allies have supported to the hilt, have rejected an American presence in their country, while countries across the world are ditching American deployments and weapon systems in pursuit of self-reliance.

What Colby's outbursts signalled, analysts have pointed out, was that Trump had been rattled by the fact that the world was increasingly cutting off the United States from alliances, supply chains, and decision-making. India is joining hands with Japan, Indonesia, and Australia in the Indo-Pacific; Japan is taking the lead in the South China Sea; Europe is going full throttle on rearmament and developing its own missile systems; and Canada is reinventing itself as a transatlantic player by tripling its submarines.

Trump's stormtroopers seems to have realised that their coercive campaigns —threatening Greenland with an invasion, declaring Canada's annexation, running a regime-change operation across Europe, and becoming China's sword arm in the Indo-Pacific— have had the opposite of the intended effect. Whereas they wanted the world to bend and submit to become Trump's —and, by extension or repulsion, Xi Jinping's— serfs, the world instead decided to pursue independence and self-reliance.

World is moving beyond US, thanks to Trump

Colby's original thesis was always simple: withdraw attention and resources from Europe, reorient towards the Indo-Pacific, and compete with China.

While Trump withdrew from Europe, he did not compete with China in the Indo-Pacific. Instead, he concluded that it was a lost cause and admitted defeat. He entered into a 'G-2' arrangement with Xi and elevated China to the status of an equal superpower. He then went to Beijing to bow to Xi's vision for Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, and the world.

At every step of his submission to Xi, Trump expected the world to follow his lead and bow before China. The world refused.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of Japan doubled down on defence spending, declared that she would stand up for Taiwan's self-ruled democracy, and refused to toe Trump's —Xi's— line even as the President of the United States made one angry phone call after another.

Outside defence, countries and blocs are doubling down on bilateral and multilateral trade so that reliance on both the United States and China is minimised. As economist Sir Anton Muscatelli previously told Firstpost, India's trade deals with the United Kingdom and the European Union offset the disruption that Trump has unleashed on the world.

"These trade deals —between India and the UK, the EU, the UAE, and Australia— are really important because they offset the strategic disruption of the new American approach to trade. The Indian approach will hopefully demonstrate to the United States that a free-trade approach is more beneficial to growth and development than protectionism, which is a lose-lose approach," said Muscatelli.

What Colby missed: The US is losing its allies and partners.

To be sure, the world is not isolating the United States. And that is where Colby's reading is wrong again.

While Colby reads continued engagement with the United States as "an upsurge in desire for engagement", what it actually means is that countries are refusing to sever ties in the hope that a sane administration in the future may pursue a course correction.

They also face the hard reality that the United States —despite Trump bending over backwards to put China on a pedestal— remains the world's largest economy and foremost military power, and the world cannot simply isolate or dismiss it.

As China researcher Anushka Saxena told Firstpost, Trump has had a fundamentally flawed understanding of American power. She said that contrary to what he believed, American strength did not rest on coercive tools such as tariffs, export controls, and sanctions, but on alliances and partnerships.

Saxena said the United States' only enduring advantage over China lay in network effects and the diffusion of tacit knowledge. But that is not the case anymore.

“For years, this revolved around tech giants in friendly countries like TSMC and ASML, Japan and South Korea, the Quad, Aukus, Nato partners, and the Swift financial system. China’s indefatigable vulnerability has always been its encirclement by tense neighbourhood relations backed by American security guarantees. Trump is dismantling that encirclement himself,” said Saxena of the Takshashila Institution.

And Trump has worked overtime to ransack these partnerships over the past 18 months and serve a strategic victory in geopolitics to Xi on a platter.

Saxena said that the success of the cards in the American playbook rested on alliances, and that the pursuit of America First has essentially become America Alone, rendering the playbook ineffective. Colby's tirade is essentially a recognition of this loneliness.

“Alliances have provided the kind of architecture that makes American disciplinary actions possible, whether it be chip export controls, joint naval exercises with Quad countries, or rare earth diversification. Even allies felt convinced to take on China because of the promise of US support. Trump’s pursuit of the ‘America First’ policy through tariffs, unilateral pressure, and bowing out of the benefits of network effects has only yielded greater mistrust and instability,” said Saxena.

The loneliness that Colby sees but fails to diagnose correctly may make it only a matter of time before the United States itself is relegated to middle-power status.

“Will the US cease to be the world’s most powerful country? For a while, probably not. But will its strength be strained by unilateralism, siloed bilateralisation of US-China ties, and the souring of partnerships? Definitely,” said Saxena.