The Rogue Superpower: How America’s Allies Are Quietly Turning Away

Executive summary

For nearly three quarters of a century, the American-led order appeared to confound classical balance-of-power expectations.

The world’s most powerful state did not face a tight counter-hegemonic coalition of major powers. Instead, the United States presided over an expansive network of allies who viewed Washington as indispensable to their security, prosperity, and political autonomy. That equilibrium is now eroding.

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency, coupled with his increasingly erratic and predatory foreign policy, has begun to transform the United States from a protective hegemon into a perceived source of danger for many of its closest partners.

What is emerging is not a dramatic overnight realignment but a subtler, cumulative process of hedging, distancing, and nascent balancing. Middle powers and even long-standing treaty allies are quietly reducing their dependence on the United States, diversifying security and economic relationships, and exploring “third path” arrangements that blunt Washington’s leverage.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call for middle powers to “combine to create a third path with impact” captures the new mood: allies no longer assume the United States is a benign guarantor of the system, but rather a large and unpredictable player that must itself be managed.

This article situates these developments in the framework of balance-of-threat theory, which emphasizes that states align not against raw power alone but against perceived threats—defined by capability, proximity, offensive posture, and intentions. It argues that Trump’s trade coercion, rhetorical contempt for allies, conditional security guarantees, and flirtation with territorial revisionism—epitomized by the Greenland episode—have sharply altered perceptions of U.S. intentions.

The result is a gradual shift from enthusiastic bandwagoning with U.S. leadership toward cautious balancing and soft resistance, particularly among democratic middle powers that can no longer reconcile their interests and values with the behavior of a “rogue” America.

FAF analysis concludes that this incipient balancing is neither inevitable nor irreversible. But preventing its consolidation would require a profound reorientation of U.S. statecraft: away from transactional coercion and toward renewed restraint, reliability, and respect for the sovereignty and agency of allies.

Absent such a course correction, the “unipolar moment” will give way to a more fragmented landscape in which the United States is not merely one pole among several, but a problem to be contained.

Introduction

Balance-of-power theory, one of the oldest analytical lenses in international relations, rests on a simple intuition: states confronted by a dominant power will seek to restore equilibrium, either by building up their own capabilities or by forming coalitions to offset the hegemon.

Underpinning this logic is a basic security imperative. No state wishes to live in a world where it is at the mercy of another’s unconstrained power.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States fit this framework imperfectly. During the Cold War, it was one pole in a bipolar system, constrained by Soviet power and the risk of nuclear escalation.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, however, the United States emerged as the unrivaled global superpower, enjoying what observers dubbed a “unipolar moment.”

Yet, contrary to the predictions of traditional balance-of-power theorists, other major states did not coalesce into an anti-American bloc. They mostly endorsed, or at least tolerated, U.S. primacy.

The puzzle was not that the United States was powerful, but that it was widely seen as relatively benign. It was separated from Eurasia by oceans, it lacked overt territorial ambitions toward its allies, and it wrapped its influence in multilateral institutions and liberal rhetoric.

Even when Washington erred—as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq—its partners criticized, complained, and occasionally obstructed, but they did not fundamentally seek to replace or contain U.S. leadership.

That pattern is changing. Trump’s second term has turbocharged trends that began during his first tenure and were only partially checked thereafter. Instead of a sometimes overbearing but broadly predictable hegemon, allies now confront an America that brandishes tariffs against friends, treats mutual-defense commitments as extortion tools, flirts with annexationist language regarding allied territories, and openly derides leaders whose cooperation it once cultivated.

The question is no longer whether the United States is the most powerful state; it clearly remains so.

The question, rather, is whether its allies now perceive it as a threat against which they must hedge, balance, or, at minimum, build options for strategic autonomy.

To understand this shift, it is necessary to revisit the distinction between balancing against power and balancing against threat.

From Power Balancing to Threat Balancing: The Evolution of Alliance Logic

Classical realists conceived the balance of power as an almost mechanical response to the emergence of a potential hegemon. When one state amassed disproportionate capabilities, others would join forces to prevent its domination of the system.

This picture was inspired by the recurring coalitions that frustrated would‑be hegemons such as Napoleonic France or Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany.

Yet the post–World War II order quickly revealed that power, taken alone, could not explain alliance behavior.

During the Cold War, the United States possessed greater aggregate capabilities than the Soviet Union, yet it was the USSR that faced a more extensive balancing coalition of NATO states and Asian partners such as Japan and South Korea.

Conversely, many decolonizing and nonaligned states perceived the United States itself as threatening and drifted toward Moscow or remained aloof. The nature of perceived threats differed across geography and political context.

Balance-of-threat theory emerged to clarify this discrepancy. It holds that states balance primarily against threats, which are a function of four variables: aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive military capabilities, and perceived intentions.

A relatively weak but predatory neighbor can be more alarming than a faraway superpower with limited interest in territorial conquest.

A state that signals restraint and respect for sovereignty may attract allies despite its overwhelming power, whereas a revisionist state bent on reshaping borders will invite counter-coalitions even if its material base is smaller.

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union scored poorly on each dimension.

It was proximate to Western and Central Europe as well as to key Asian theaters; it maintained vast land armies configured for offensive operations; and its leaders embraced an ideology that cast world politics as a struggle between irreconcilable systems. Western powers thus had little difficulty framing Moscow as the principal threat, even when contesting specific U.S. policies.

The United States, by contrast, was distant from Eurasian heartlands, maintained expeditionary forces rather than occupation armies, and couched its influence in the language of collective defense, open markets, and democratic solidarity.

To be sure, these claims were often incomplete or compromised. Washington overthrew governments, intervened in distant conflicts, and occasionally imposed economic pressure on reluctant partners. But relative to the Soviet model of coercion, the American approach felt less predatory and more mutually advantageous.

After 1991, with the Soviet threat gone, balance-of-threat logic helped explain why there was no immediate hard balancing against U.S. primacy. America’s former rivals were either weakened (Russia), integrated and pacified (Germany and Japan), or preoccupied with domestic reform (China in the 1990s).

U.S. allies continued to shelter under the American security umbrella because it remained, on balance, a good bargain: Washington bore outsized defense burdens, provided nuclear and conventional guarantees, and offered privileged access to its market.

Although there were growing misgivings about U.S. adventurism—most notably in Iraq—no broad coalition emerged to constrain American dominance.

Even rising powers such as China, while wary of encirclement, prioritized economic engagement with the United States and the liberal trade order it anchored.

Their hedging was real but incremental. They sought to limit U.S. interference in their immediate neighborhoods, not to overturn the entire system.

The unipolar order persisted not because U.S. power was irresistible, but because U.S. threat levels, as perceived by many states, remained tolerable.

From Benign Protector to Perceived Predator: America’s Alarming Transformation

The story of how this perception shifted centers less on structural changes in the distribution of power than on alterations in the style and substance of American statecraft.

The United States today is not vastly stronger than it was twenty or thirty years ago; if anything, its relative share of global GDP and military spending has declined modestly. What has changed most visibly is the way U.S. leaders wield their power, particularly under Trump.

During his first term, Trump attacked multilateral trade arrangements, disparaged NATO as “obsolete,” repeatedly questioned whether allies would defend the United States and whether the United States should defend them, and weaponized tariffs against partners as diverse as Canada, the European Union, and India.

Allies initially treated this as a disorienting but possibly transient aberration, to be weathered in the hope that institutional inertia and bureaucratic continuity would buffer the damage.

The return of Trump to the White House, this time with a clearer sense of his leverage over the Republican Party and fewer restraining voices in his inner circle, has altered that calculus.

Trump has used tariff threats and actual duties as instruments of political punishment, tying them to issues ranging from defense procurement to migration policy.

He has coupled this economic coercion with performative affronts to allied sovereignty, most notoriously in his push to “take” or otherwise assert control over Greenland, coupled with threats of punitive trade measures and reduced security cooperation if Denmark and its partners refuse to acquiesce.

In parallel, the administration has intermittently questioned the automaticity of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, suggesting that U.S. defense commitments may become explicitly conditional on increased allied military spending and preferred procurement from American arms manufacturers.

In Afghanistan and other landscapes, Trump has belittled allied contributions, falsely claiming that partners “stayed a little back” from front-line combat while relying on U.S. sacrifice.

Such rhetoric undermines the narrative of shared risk and mutual obligation upon which alliances rest.

The administration’s domestic and international legal stance further corrodes perceptions of U.S. intentions.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the significance of international law and the norm of sovereignty, signaling that strong states can seize what they desire if they possess sufficient power and will.

The United States has launched or threatened military force in multiple landscape on dubious legal grounds and has increasingly treated sanctions, visa restrictions, and asset freezes as discretionary tools of political retribution, sometimes targeting not only adversaries but also longstanding partners who deviate from Washington’s line.

This backdrop explains why Carney’s Davos speech landed with such resonance. He described a world in which the old rules-based order is not simply fraying but “is not returning,” and in which middle powers can no longer assume that their interests will be protected under an arrangement ultimately policed by the United States. His call for countries “in between” the great powers to coordinate their positions and resources—rather than jostle individually for favor—amounted to a polite yet unmistakable signal that Canada now sees value in collective hedging against the United States itself, even as it continues to cooperate with Washington on many fronts.

Similar patterns are visible elsewhere. European debates about “strategic autonomy,” once an abstract aspiration, are increasingly framed in concrete terms of reducing vulnerability to U.S. secondary sanctions, building independent defense industrial capacity, and diversifying energy and technology partnerships.

Asian allies, from South Korea to Australia, intensify their own defense buildups and cultivate deeper ties with regional partners, in part to insure themselves against the possibility of a capricious or absent America in a crisis.

The present status of the U.S.-led order, then, is one of uneasy continuity under mounting strain.

Formal alliances and institutions remain in place, and no state has launched an outright campaign to expel the United States from its strategic perches. Yet beneath the surface, threat perceptions are shifting, and with them, the incentives to quietly rebalance away from dependence on a power that increasingly resembles a source of risk rather than a provider of reassurance.

Key Developments: Warning Signs of Emerging Resistance

Several recent developments offer concrete evidence of this subtle but significant adjustment. While none, taken in isolation, amounts to a full-fledged anti-American coalition, together they reveal a pattern consistent with balance-of-threat dynamics.

First, Trump’s use of tariffs and trade threats as coercive tools against allies has eroded the perception that economic interdependence with the United States is an unalloyed benefit.

For Canada, Mexico, and key European economies, the specter of sudden punitive tariffs tied to unrelated political disputes—such as migration control or territorial issues like Greenland—has transformed the U.S. market from a stable anchor into a potential weapon. Governments and firms respond by diversifying export destinations, building redundancy in supply chains, and exploring alternative financial arrangements that reduce exposure to U.S.-dominated payment systems.

Second, the Greenland episode has crystallized anxiety over U.S. territorial intentions. While previous presidents occasionally floated strategic acquisitions, Trump’s repeated public insistence on securing control over Greenland, his conflation of Greenland with Iceland, and his readiness to wield trade and security tools against Denmark and European partners in pursuit of this objective have raised questions about whether Washington still accepts the post–1945 norms of territorial integrity and consensual sovereignty.

Even right-wing parties in Europe that once admired Trump’s anti-immigration stance have recoiled from what they view as crude neo-imperialism, fracturing transatlantic ideological solidarity.

Third, the administration’s recalibrated defense strategy, which rhetorically softens its stance toward China while highlighting threats such as migration and narcotics in the Western Hemisphere, has introduced fresh uncertainty about U.S. strategic priorities.

Allies in Europe and East Asia worry that Washington’s gaze may drift toward domestic political crusades and hemisphere-specific issues, leaving them with less reliable backing in confrontations with regional adversaries.

When a superpower appears more focused on punitive measures against friends and symbolic shows of toughness than on coherent deterrence of shared threats, its leadership credentials suffer.

Fourth, middle-power diplomacy has taken on a more autonomous cast. Carney’s references to middle powers forming flexible networks and “new strategic partnerships” outside the traditional hub-and-spokes architecture of U.S.-centered alliances indicate a willingness to think about alignment in more fluid and pluralistic terms.

Canada’s outreach to Beijing, European attempts to coordinate positions on sanctions and trade without deference to Washington, and discussions of non-U.S.–centric defense configurations all signal exploratory steps toward partial balancing.

Finally, public opinion within allied democracies has grown more skeptical of the United States.

Trump’s personalized insults—such as declaring that “Canada lives because of the United States” and admonishing Carney from the Davos stage—reinforce narratives that Washington treats allies less as partners than as dependents to be humiliated into compliance. Erosion of trust at the societal level constrains local leaders’ room for maneuver: it becomes politically costlier to align closely with an America perceived as capricious, bullying, or contemptuous.

Over time, such shifts in public sentiment can solidify into new strategic orientations.

Latest Facts and Concerns

Recent months have intensified these trends. Trump’s Davos appearance, framed domestically as a triumph of “America First” diplomacy, was widely interpreted abroad as confirmation of the administration’s coercive instincts.

In parallel with his public rebuke of Carney, Trump reiterated his insistence on reshaping Greenland’s status, raised the possibility of new tariffs on European goods if EU states obstruct his plans, and hinted that NATO commitments might be revisited if allies refuse to meet his demands.

Markets reacted with volatility, reflecting not only concern about the immediate economic fallout but also deeper anxieties about the reliability of U.S. policy.

European leaders, already divided on many issues, scrambled to formulate a common response that would protect their economic interests while avoiding a direct confrontation with Washington.

Behind the scenes, discussions about accelerating alternative payment and trade mechanisms, such as euro-denominated energy contracts and non-dollar clearing systems, gained new urgency.

Simultaneously, Trump’s posture toward NATO has become more openly transactional.

Public remarks questioning whether NATO allies would “be there” for the United States, combined with misleading claims that European forces have chronically shirked risk on the battlefield, have stirred resentment among leaders whose troops fought and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan and other conflicts.

Talk of conditioning U.S. support on specific industrial or fiscal concessions—such as greater purchases of U.S. weapons—has further politicized what once were treated as quasi-sacred security guarantees.

In Asia, U.S. efforts to maintain military “overmatch” with China continue, but the framing has shifted.

Official rhetoric increasingly depicts China less as an ideological rival and more as a transactional economic competitor, with emphasis on supply chains, rare earth minerals, and market access.

Allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia welcome continued U.S. military engagement but note the growing gap between Washington’s economic agenda and their own interdependence with China.

This divergence complicates the formation of a neat anti-China bloc and encourages regional actors to diversify both security and economic ties to avoid entrapment or abandonment.

The overarching concern is that, taken together, these developments may tip the psychological balance. The United States remains militarily formidable and economically indispensable, but its behavior increasingly signals an inclination to use that power not as a shield for allies but as a cudgel to extract concessions.

Once this perception hardens, it is difficult to reverse: allies begin to plan for a world in which they must protect themselves not only from revisionist adversaries, but also from the whims of an unstable hegemon.

Threat Cascade: How Fear of America Fuels Global Realignment

Balance-of-threat theory offers a disciplined way to parse these dynamics.

The key argument is that it is not sheer power that prompts balancing, but perceived threat—an amalgam of capabilities, proximity, offensive posture, and intentions. Trump’s foreign policy has, perhaps unwittingly, altered each of these variables as seen from allied capitals.

In terms of capabilities, very little has changed.

The United States still fields an unmatched combination of global power-projection forces, technological advantages, and economic weight. What has shifted is the sense that these capabilities may now be directed at allies themselves, not merely at common adversaries.

When tariffs, sanctions, and even hints of military leverage are wielded against friendly states for narrow, short-term political gain, those capabilities acquire a more threatening cast.

Geographic proximity remains constant, but its meaning evolves.

For European allies, the physical presence of U.S. troops and bases on their soil was long seen as a reassuring tripwire, binding Washington irrevocably to their defense.

Under a president who repeatedly questions alliance commitments and treats basing rights as bargaining chips, that same presence can appear more ambiguous: a potential source of entanglement without guaranteed protection.

In extreme scenarios, allies may even worry that U.S. forces stationed nearby could be used to coerce them into compliance on issues unrelated to collective defense. Offensive posture encompasses not just force structure but also the willingness to use coercive tools beyond the military realm.

Here, the Trump administration’s approach has been transformative. Tariffs, visa bans, asset freezes, extraterritorial sanctions, and threats to downgrade intelligence sharing have all been used or brandished against allies that cross Washington on matters from technology procurement to UN voting patterns.

Such behavior blurs the line between punishment of adversaries and discipline of friends, heightening the sense of vulnerability among states that once believed their alliance credentials would shield them from overt economic or diplomatic coercion.

Intentions—the most elusive and decisive component—are where the shift is starkest.

Trump’s public rhetoric, his personalized grudges, his celebration of domination and humiliation in international interactions, and his willingness to subordinate long-term strategic relationships to short-term political landscape all combine to project a vision of the United States as a state less constrained by stable norms and more driven by the leader’s impulses.

The Greenland controversy illustrates this vividly: talk of “taking” another country’s territory, backed by threats of economic punishment, evokes an imperial logic that many allies assumed was obsolete in transatlantic relations.

The causal chain, then, runs as follows.

As allies revise their assessment of U.S. intentions—away from fundamentally benign, toward opportunistic and predatory—they reassess the risks of deep dependence.

This reassessment triggers hedging behaviors: diversifying economic partners, upgrading independent military capabilities, forming new coalitions among middle powers, and constructing institutional arrangements that can, in the long term, support greater autonomy from U.S. tutelage.

These steps are initially modest and reversible, precisely because allies still gain important benefits from the existing order. But as they accumulate, they begin to change the structural environment in which U.S. decisions are made.

At the same time, U.S. domestic politics reinforce these external perceptions.

Trump’s contempt for legal constraints at home, his attacks on independent institutions, and his mobilization of coercive domestic agencies to serve political ends suggest to foreign observers that the United States is not merely experiencing a transient policy fluctuation, but a deeper erosion of constitutional and normative checks.

If a president can behave with near-impunity toward domestic opponents, allies reasonably infer that there are few internal brakes on his treatment of foreign partners.

Domestic illiberalism and external unpredictability thus become mutually reinforcing signals of threat.

In this sense, current developments confirm rather than disprove balance-of-threat theory.

During the unipolar moment, U.S. power was not balanced because it was not widely perceived as a threat.

As U.S. behavior changes, that perception shifts, and balancing—albeit tentative and incomplete—begins to emerge.

Roads to Reckoning: Three Paths Ahead for a Fractured World

Looking forward, three broad pathways present themselves, each with distinct implications for global order and for the fate of U.S. alliances.

The first is a deepening of the current trajectory, in which the United States doubles down on coercive unilateralism.

In this scenario, Trump or like-minded successors interpret allied hedging not as a warning sign but as disloyalty, prompting further punitive measures.

Tariffs become routine instruments of discipline, security guarantees grow more conditional and transactional, and Washington increasingly treats alliances as protection rackets rather than mutual commitments.

Over time, middle powers consolidate alternative networks, pursue greater self-reliance, and cautiously align with other great powers—China in some domains, the European Union in others—to dilute U.S. leverage.

The result is a more fragmented and contested order, in which crises are harder to manage and trust is in chronic short supply.

The second pathway is a partial corrective, in which U.S. elites—prompted by business backlash, strategic thinkers, and perhaps electoral incentives—reassert the value of alliances and the dangers of treating allies as targets.

Even without a complete repudiation of Trump’s policies, a rebalancing of priorities could occur: trade disputes would be handled through institutions rather than unilateral punishment; security guarantees would be reaffirmed as core interests rather than bargaining chips; and rhetorical respect for allied sovereignty would be restored.

Under such conditions, the nascent balancing behavior of allies might plateau, leaving the United States still preeminent but more constrained and attentive to allied sensitivities.

The third, more ambitious pathway involves a reimagining of the order itself, led by a coalition of middle powers and like-minded great powers determined to reduce dependency on any single hegemon.

This would entail building new trade and payment architectures less centered on the U.S. dollar, investing heavily in indigenous defense and technological capacities, and strengthening regional institutions capable of collective action without Washington’s direction.

The aim would not be to exclude the United States but to ensure that its participation becomes a choice, not a necessity.

Such a transformation would take years, if not decades, but current shocks may supply the political impetus to begin.

For allies, the immediate task is triage: limiting damage in the short run while incrementally building the foundations of greater autonomy.

This means calmly resisting the most egregious forms of U.S. pressure, coordinating responses among themselves to avoid divide‑and‑rule tactics, and articulating clear red lines beyond which alignment with Washington would become untenable.

It also requires investing in public narratives that explain to their own citizens why long-cherished partnerships with the United States must be recalibrated rather than taken for granted.

For the United States, the imperative is more profound. If it wishes to halt and reverse the drift toward balancing, it must rediscover the strategic wisdom of restraint, reliability, and reciprocity.

That means abandoning the fantasy that bullying allies enhances U.S. security or prosperity. It means recognizing that the privileges of primacy—access, influence, and deference—rest on consent, not fear. And it means acknowledging that domestic constitutional decay and international recklessness are not separate issues but two faces of the same threat perception that now animates allied hedging.

Conclusion

The emerging reaction to Trump’s foreign policy is not yet a full-scale balancing coalition against the United States.

It is, however, a clear warning that the long era in which allies automatically looked to Washington as their indispensable protector is ending.

Balance-of-threat theory helps clarify why: alliances endure when power is wrapped in predictable intentions, respect for sovereignty, and a shared sense of purpose.

They fray when that power is used capriciously, vindictively, and in open disregard for partners’ dignity and security.

What is unfolding today is a subtle but momentous shift.

Canada’s prime minister stood at Davos and urges middle powers to “combine to create a third path,” implicitly acknowledging that the old reliance on U.S. leadership is no longer sufficient.

European and Asian allies quietly diversify their options, weigh the risks of overdependence, and wonder whether the benefits of association still outweigh the mounting costs.

Publics across democracies reassess their view of an America that once seemed a pillar of stability but now often behaves like a volatile actor to be managed.

History suggests that when great powers come to be seen as threats by those they wish to lead, balancing sooner or later follows. Whether today’s hedging hardens into durable counter‑alignments will depend on choices made in Washington as much as in allied capitals.

If the United States can once again align its power with broadly benign intentions, the current wave of balancing may remain shallow.

If it persists in treating alliances as fields for predation rather than platforms for common action, then the balance-of-threat will, indeed, strike again—this time with the United States cast, not as the wary balancer, but as the object of the world’s defensive calculations