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https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/what-if-trump-is-painfully-right-stephen-nagy-for-inside-policy/
What if Trump is painfully right?: Stephen Nagy for Inside Policy
Trump’s methods offend, but his diagnosis of freeloading allies and a failing international order may be uncomfortably closer to reality.
February 2, 2026 in Foreign Affairs, Inside Policy, Foreign Policy, Latest News, Indo-Pacific, North America, Stephen Nagy Reading Time: 5 mins read
By Stephen Nagy, February 2, 2026
Few allies and partners of the United States want Donald Trump to be right. His methods are cruel, his rhetoric exhausting, his personalization of diplomacy genuinely dangerous. When Prime Minister Mark Carney received a standing ovation in Davos for defending multilateralism after flying to Beijing to sign agreements with Xi Jinping, the global commentariat cheered precisely because it represented everything Trump is not – elegant, principled, institutionally minded.
But wanting Trump to be wrong is not the same as him being wrong. And the uncomfortable possibility Canadian policymakers and other allies and partners of the US must now confront is that beneath the bluster, the threats, and the performative chaos, Trump may have identified something true about the world that Carney’s vision obscures.
The core of Trump’s worldview is brutally simple. For Trump, the postwar international order became a mechanism for transferring American wealth and security to partners who offered little in return. Allies enjoyed protection while underspending on defence. Trading partners accessed American consumers while protecting domestic industries. China exploited every opening the liberal order provided to become a strategic rival funded by Western investment and technology transfer. This is not a sophisticated argument. It lacks nuance, ignores American benefits from the system, and treats complex relationships as simple ledgers. But the sophisticated arguments that dismissed these concerns for decades produced the present situation – where America’s principal strategic competitor grew powerful enough to threaten the order itself while allies remained dependent and underinvested. The experts were subtle and the experts were wrong.
Michael Beckley and Hal Brands made a version of this case in Foreign Affairs, arguing that assumptions about convergence and integration were always more aspirational than analytical. China did not liberalize. The Global South did not adopt Western norms. Russia did not become a satisfied partner. The institutions Carney celebrates were designed for a world that never fully arrived. Trump lacks the vocabulary to articulate this, but his instincts point toward the same conclusion. The system stopped working, and pretending otherwise benefits everyone except Americans asked to sustain it. When he demands that allies pay more, contribute more, and align more closely with American strategic priorities, he is not abandoning alliances. He is insisting they function as alliances rather than as charity.
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