Donald Trump’s declaration of “Liberation Day” on Wednesday, announcing sweeping new trade tariffs, carried a message not just for rivals, he said, but also for “friends.” The United States now sets the international trade rules, and you have to play by them if you want to avoid the new surcharges.
In the eyes of longtime U.S. allies, the abrupt unilateral move was the latest sign of Mr. Trump’s open disdain for their interests – not just on trade and tariffs, but NATO defense and Ukraine too, and indeed the territorial future of the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland.
Yet unsettling though the dramatic change in U.S. policy has been, they can take at least some comfort from an extraordinary political shift at home.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s disdainful and insulting attitude toward longtime allies such as Canada and Denmark has a silver lining: They are finding a renewed sense of common purpose and national pride.
As U.S. pressure has grown, in Canada and Mexico, and in nearly all Europe’s democracies, partisan divisions and grassroots mistrust of government have given way to a renewed sense of common purpose, national belonging, and national pride.
This has been partly expressed in anger at the Trump administration, and at America itself. This is a trend that has been spreading since Canadian fans first booed the Star Spangled Banner at a mid-February hockey game against a U.S. team.
Nowhere in Europe, for example, does more than half the population have a positive attitude toward the United States, a YouGov poll found last month.
In some countries on the continent, such as Denmark and Sweden, spontaneous Facebook campaigns to boycott American goods have met with success. Around 70% of Swedes say they have refused to buy an American product, or considered doing so, as a political protest.
Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix/AP
Denmark’s largest grocery group has started indicating on its price tags whether an item is being sold by a European firm.
But there has also been growing popular support for their own governments’ attempts to finesse, repel, or try to future-proof their countries against the dramatic shift in U.S. tone and policy.
In Canada, new Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose Liberal Party had seemed to be heading for a thumping electoral defeat, has seen his tough stand against U.S. tariffs propel him into a solid lead ahead of this month’s vote.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum notched up an 82% approval rating in a poll last week.
In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s poll ratings have rebounded. So have French President Emmanuel Macron’s.
A recent poll across the 27-member European Union found a record 74% of respondents saying their countries benefited from EU membership, the highest level since the question was first posed 40 years ago.
And a series of surveys have found support even among traditional critics of European initiatives to strengthen military defenses, in readiness for a withdrawal of Washington’s support.
On the remote, strategically important island of Greenland, the roughly 57,000 inhabitants also seem to have united in response to Mr. Trump’s insistence that the U.S. will, “one way or another,” take ownership of it.
A recent poll found 85% opposed becoming part of the United States.
When Vice President JD Vance visited last week, ignoring calls by Greenland’s politicians to hold off since its parties were still forming a government after recent elections, the head of the new coalition declared: “We don’t belong to anyone else. We decide our own future.”
None of this alters the hard-power equation as allied leaders look for a way to respond to Washington’s tough new approach.
While they still hope to persuade Mr. Trump to retreat from his tariffs by convincing him that an all-out trade war would harm the U.S. economy, they know their own economies are likely to feel greater pain.
On security, even if they manage to ratchet up defense spending, they are aware it will be years before they can take the role that the U.S. military has played within the transatlantic NATO alliance over the past 75 years.
Still, they’ll feel buoyed by the shift in political mood at home: the sense among many voters, across party lines, that they share an interest in finding a way to avoid, minimize, or weather the effects of the Trump administration’s policies.
To the extent voters are angry, the familiar urge to turn against their own governments has, at least for the time being, been redirected towards those in power in Washington.
European sales of Tesla, owned by Mr. Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk, have fallen by nearly one-half. In Germany, where Mr. Musk endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany in the recent national election, Tesla sales are 70% down this year.
The governments of America’s major allies would still clearly prefer to avoid transforming anger, or the instinct for retaliation, into policy.
Their preference, if at all possible, is to avoid tit-for-tat tariffs and any major reduction in their several trillion dollars of annual trade with America. But if it comes to a fight, governments like Mark Carney’s in Canada will feel they can count on national solidarity.
Canadians are “all on the same page,” Mr. Carney said Wednesday evening in an address to the nation. “We won’t back down. … Nothing is off the table to defend our workers and our country.”
