Trump no longer leads the free world. So the West must confront a vexing question

Only a fortnight ago, after Donald Trump signalled his imperial ambitions for a US takeover of Gaza, I wrote that we were in the throes of a historical moment every bit as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1989, we were talking about the end of history, the triumph of liberal democracy, whereas in 2025 we are confronting the end of America as we have known it since the end of World War II.

Now, Berlin Walls seem to be falling on a weekly basis. This time, the demolition job started in Munich, with a speech from US Vice President J.D. Vance to the city’s annual security conference, which hurled a wrecking ball at the trans-Atlantic alliance, the cornerstone of Western European defence and NATO since the 1940s.

Illustration by Joe Benke

Days later, in another stunning diplomatic paradigm shift, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met a Russian delegation in Saudi Arabia, headed by the wily veteran Kremlin diplomat Sergey Lavrov. This springtime in Saudi moment not only brought Vladimir Putin in from the geopolitical cold, after he was frozen out following his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but had the atmospherics of a doe-eyed new wedlock. Rubio spoke of how ending the Ukraine war would “unlock the door” to “incredible opportunities” for a new partnership with Russia. Lavrov, arguably the most hard-nosed negotiator on the diplomatic circuit, also played his part by sounding like a contestant on Married at First Sight. “We not only listened, but also heard each other,” he purred.

To sweeten the honeymoon, Team Trump appears to have offered Russia the one-sided bargain of Ukrainian territory, no NATO membership for Kyiv, and no US or European soldiers to enforce a security guarantee. Putin must have been doing cartwheels in the Kremlin. Maybe there is already an AI-generated meme portraying his celebratory gyrations.

Donald Trump is not a warmonger. Rather, it is the craven nature of his peacemaking, and the emboldening effect it could have on a homicidal tyrant such as Putin, that is so destabilising.

The Rendezvous in Riyadh and MAGA in Munich are both part of the same epochal shift. In a city that became a seedbed for fascism in the 1930s, Vance aligned the “new sheriff in town” with European hard- and far-right populist parities that have been on the rise in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Britain. In a city where British prime minister Neville Chamberlain committed a humiliating act of appeasement by signing the Munich agreement with Nazi Germany, Vance offered not a word of criticism for Putin, Europe’s most dangerous modern-day aggressor. Instead, he argued the chief threat to Europe came not from Russia or China but from within through a combination of immigrants, elitists and online censorship.

In less than 20 minutes, the 40-year-old vice president sought to undo an 80-year alliance forged on the beaches of Normandy, cemented in the postwar reconstruction of Europe, and honoured by every US president aside from Trump. Confirmation came when the Trump administration indicated the Europeans would not be involved in the Ukraine peace talks. Nor would Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, be guaranteed a seat at the table. By week’s end, Trump was calling Zelensky a “dictator” and claiming, unfathomably, that Ukraine had started the war.

The US president’s attack sounded less like the words of an ally and more like those of an adversary. In a rant on his Truth Social platform, he parroted script-lines from Russian state TV. Talk about seven days that shook the world.

What made his vice president’s Munich speech all the more seismic was that it came on the eve of this weekend’s German elections. Vance even met the Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) leader, Alice Weidel, in what seemed like a deliberate attempt to further destabilise the embattled German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who needs a miracle to cling onto power. Not only was the AfD meeting an attack on the European centre-left, however, but also traditional European conservatism.

Since first appearing on the scene, with the unexpected success of his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has performed the occasionally useful role of making sense of Trumpism. Back then, this Yale graduate and fervent Never Trumper – who once conjectured whether the New York tycoon might become “America’s Hitler” – wrote eloquently about the blue-collar alienation and economic dislocation that propelled Trump to the White House. His Munich speech was not so intelligent or polished, but it was clarifying nonetheless. It explained the extent to which “America First” is a revolutionary project aimed at upending politics by turbocharging a global populist movement embracing far-right parties.

Vance’s speech also reminded us that a common mistake when characterising Trumpism is to describe it as isolationist. When it comes to the domestic politics of America’s longstanding allies, it is deliberately and defiantly interventionist.

Entering 2025, there were three elections on the calendar where centre-left governments were trying to hold on to power in the face of revitalised conservative parties that have shifted rightwards. The first is in Germany, where the Trump administration has staged a dramatic intervention. Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already announced he will step down after a nine-year stint as leader, will also go to the polls. There again, Trump has intervened, by speaking of Canada becoming America’s 51st state and launching a brief trade war with Trudeau.

The third election is here in Australia. It seems naive – given what we have seen in Germany and Canada – to think Trump administration officials will allow it to pass off without exerting some form of influence. Maybe we got a preview last year when Elon Musk clashed with Anthony Albanese, and called his government “fascist” for considering laws targeting misinformation spread on social media. In his Munich speech, Vance complained of how the Biden administration had “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation”. In a sign of the power of the alliance between “Trump bros”, like Vance, and “Tech bros”, like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the Albanese government has decided to go slow on plans to penalise tech giants such as Meta if they refuse to pay local media outlets for news articles.

At a time when Albanese is trying to stave off US tariffs, the Trump administration clearly has the power to wound him, and thus reinforce the opposition’s narrative of a prime ministerial weakling. However, a Trumpian intrusion could also damage Peter Dutton, who is already facing criticisms for being a Trump impersonator. Perhaps mindful of being too closely associated with Trumpism, Dutton sought to distance himself from the US president this week by stating he was “just wrong” to call Zelensky a dictator: words that stood in contrast to Albanese’s diplomatic reticence.

At a time of such pivotal history, Australia’s negotiations with the Trump administration over steel and aluminium tariffs suddenly feel small, but they raise the same mega question being asked right now in Europe. It is not just whether Trump’s America is a reliable ally, but rather whether Washington is any longer an ally at all. Privately, some EU diplomats already regard the US president as a foe.

Europeans are now feeling the same sense of foreboding that has shaped Australian diplomacy since the fall of Singapore in 1942: the fear of abandonment. Capturing this sense of unease, and reporting himself from Munich, the widely respected chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, wrote this week: “Europe must now start the painful process of ‘de-risking’ its relationship with the US, looking for areas of dangerous dependence on America and stripping them out of the system.” The dynamics of Europe and the Indo-Pacific are not directly analogous because of the presence within the new administration of so many China hawks who do not admire Xi Jinping in the same way the president idolises Putin. However, in the age of Trump, will Australia have to conduct a similar exercise in de-risking?

An irony of Vance’s Munich speech is that he began it by paying lip service to shared values, what should be the basis of any alliance. But the question being asked in European capitals this week is what now are their shared values with Trump’s “America First” agenda? Though no senior politician in either major party will say so publicly, is that now the debate Australia has to have? After all, the US president is no longer the leader of the free world. It is even questionable whether America is still part of the West.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.