American allies are finally hedging against American risk

At this turbulent crossroads of 2026, the global order is undergoing a major paradigm shift. This is signalled most vividly by a wave of Western leaders visiting Beijing.

From British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s historic mission last week – the first visit by a UK prime minister in eight years – to the high-profile arrivals of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo last month, a clear pattern of strategic recalibration has emerged. These moves represent a definitive rupture in traditional transatlantic alignment. These are not merely trade missions; they are declarations of strategic necessity.

Edward Luce recently wrote in the Financial Times about the reality of America’s descent into madness under President Donald Trump. This madness comes in the form of an internal collapse of constitutional order and civil restraint. With Trump rebranding the nation as his own, on the ashes of the rule of law and civility, the country appears to be arranging its own funeral even as it prepares for its 250th anniversary.

This systemic internal combustion has also rendered US foreign policy extremely unpredictable.

Faced with Washington’s predatory trade stances and territorial ambitions, such as its hostile manoeuvring over Greenland, traditional allies like Canada, Britain and the Nordic states have been forced to act as a pragmatic vanguard, seeking survival strategies outside a crumbling unipolar framework. They are no longer willing to tether their national interests to a terrible landlord who views the law as optional.

To understand this rupture, we must look to the evolution of American strategic thought. Political scholar Robert Kagan once argued in Of Paradise and Power that Americans were from Mars and Europeans from Venus – the former relying on raw power, the latter on a Kantian paradise of rules and laws. At the time, this was a critique of a Europe that lived parasitically under the American security umbrella.

South China Morning Post