Countries are building new diplomatic, military and trading alliances to protect themselves from a United States that looks increasingly unpredictable under Donald Trump. The shift is gathering pace as world leaders meet for the annual UN gathering, with António Guterres attending his final UN general assembly this week.
That timing matters because Trump may soon face the kind of political damage that turns a president into a lame duck after November’s midterms, yet many observers think he could respond by leaning harder into disruptive foreign policy. If the Democrat-controlled Congress delivers a battering, legislative gridlock would likely bite more in domestic politics than abroad, leaving room for more of the same on the world stage.
The people doing the hedging are not waiting for certainty. Former US allies and other middle powers are moving into a complex web of deals designed to work as protective shields against what they see as an unpredictable and predatory US president. John Bew called it “a sub-threshold international order,” a phrase that captures how these arrangements sit below the level of formal grand alliance but still reshape the way states try to protect themselves.
Mark Carney said in January at Davos that the middle powers are reorganising, and that is visible in the way alliances outside the US are now thriving and deepening. Mark Leonard put the logic more bluntly: the old mindset asked how to plug in to American grand strategy; the new one asks how to hedge and how to make sure countries can defend themselves if America is not there.
That is why the recent Brics summit in Delhi mattered even beyond the declaration that came out of it. The same pull is showing up in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, where cooperation among states that do not rely on Washington is becoming less of a side current and more of a parallel system. The trend is most obvious among former US allies, who fear being trapped by one American decision or abandoned by the next.
The contradiction at the heart of this moment is that Trump could be weakened by the midterms and still become more disruptive after them. His critics see irrelevance ahead; his foreign-policy opponents see more volatility. In practice, that leaves middle powers treating the coming months not as a pause but as the point at which the new order hardens, with the next deals likely to matter more than the next speech.
The old alliance system was built on faith that the US would stay central. The one now taking shape is built on a colder calculation: if America cannot be counted on, countries will count on one another instead.
