By Avery J. Fahrman
It has long been understood that empires (and republics), along with the militaries that sustain them, are no less mortal than we are; great powers rise and fall, seeming unconquerable one moment and fading into memory the next. Since the end of World War II, the United States has served as the global hegemon (even ascending, in the view of many experts, to ‘hyperpower’ status), and over the course of its nearly century-long reign has steadily tightened its grip on ‘strategic regions’ around the world: it has maintained a constant presence in the Middle East, has served as a dedicated partner in the Indo-Pacific, and has stood as a historic ally in Europe. Since the election of President Donald Trump, however, the omnipresence of the U.S. military and its commitment to strategic allies have come into question as White House rhetoric signals a reversal on defense agreements once thought to be ironclad . The question remains whether this is a permanent retreat or merely a temporary condition brought on by an administration sticking to an ‘America First’ campaign promise.
This retrenchment has been most apparent in Europe, and arguably the most confusing for allies who have spent nearly 80 years treating the presence of American troops as a fixed condition, rather than a bargaining chip. In July, Trump played with the idea of cutting the roughly 80,000 U.S. troops stationed across the continent by a third, a threat aimed at NATO members he considers delinquent on defense spending. Weeks earlier, the Pentagon pulled roughly 4,000 soldiers out of a planned rotation from Germany into Poland, a significant move that unnerved an ally bordering both Russia and an active war zone. Then, in an unexpected change of circumstances, Trump reversed course and made promises to send 5,000 additional troops to Poland instead, a reversal that left even his own administration officials confused. An anonymous official in the Department of Defense put it bluntly: ‘We just spent the better part of two weeks reacting to the first announcement. We don’t know what this means either’.
Despite the chaos of this past summer, the administration has produced at least one concrete result. In June 2025, NATO members agreed to a new target of at least 5 percent of GDP being spent on defense by 2035, a figure that would be unthinkable, let alone mandatory, before Trump’s first term . Whether that pledge outlives the current administration in the White House and the pressure that produced it is still an open question.
Anxiety in the Indo-Pacific
The same pattern seen in Europe, with arguably higher stakes, is playing out across the Pacific. In August, echoing his Polish-rotation decision, Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea, giving only hours of notice before the drills were set to begin; he cited the drills’ cost and claimed North Korea had grown ‘unthreatening’ as reason for the abrupt decision. Officials in South Korea were reportedly furious with the decision in private even as they kept up appearances and normal relations with the U.S. in public, a reaction that was compounded by an earlier decision to strip the peninsula of missile defense interceptors (that would later be installed in the Middle East). The optics have not been helped by the more recent decision by the Navy to pull its last aircraft carrier out of the region entirely, which leaves the Indo-Pacific without a carrier presence for the first time in years, or by data showing naval transits in the Taiwan Strait down by roughly half compared to Trump’s first term.
Taiwan itself has not been spared from the precarious state of U.S. security guarantees and rhetoric from Washington. After a summit with Xi Jinping, Trump suggested he might use a pending 14-billion-dollar arms package to the island as a ‘negotiating chip’ in broader trade talks with Beijing. Later, when pressed on whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily, he said Washington was ‘not looking to fight a war 9,500 miles away’. That remark strikes directly at the strategic ambiguity that has deterred a Chinese invasion for decades. Deterrence only works if Beijing believes intervention is likely, and the president has now said, on the record, that it might not be. It is not surprising, then, that a June 2026 Pew Research survey found favorable views of the United States dropping by double digits in South Korea and Indonesia, with approval in the Philippines, a treaty ally, sitting at its lowest point since Pew began asking the question in 2002. Japan and South Korea are responding by raising their own defense budgets and, more quietly, revisiting the question of building nuclear weapons of their own.
Contradictions in the Middle East
The Middle East complicates any story about decline and has been the only region partly exempt from Trump’s military rollbacks. In June 2025, American B-2 bombers struck Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites in a mission the Pentagon dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, and the administration has continued to insist that the strikes ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear program, despite multiple independent assessments giving a far murkier picture of how much capability actually survived. Whatever results the strikes may have yielded, they did not demonstrate the actions of a nation in retreat from the world stage; instead, quite the opposite. A unilateral and high-risk use of force thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland is a move only a country still confident in its own reach would ever attempt. Yet in the same months that missiles rained over Tehran, Trump has called for the withdrawal of American forces from neighboring countries, Syria and Iraq. This would be a complete reversal of a military strategy that has anchored U.S. counterterrorism operations in the region since the fall of ISIS in 2019. When looked at together, the two moves suggest something more specific than decline. The administration is willing to use an overwhelming amount of force in flashy displays of strength, but is unwilling to fund the slow, expensive, and mostly unglamorous presence that has actually cemented American influence in decades past.
The Case for Reallocation, Not Retreat
The more conservative spectrum of foreign policy advocates has argued for years that Washington extended itself too far after the Cold War. They do not see an empire in decline, but instead one finally shedding the commitments it could no longer afford. Defense Priorities, a D.C.-based think tank, has called the recent drawdown in Syria ‘a success worth scaling,’ and argues that fewer troops in unstable regions make the country (and its soldiers) safer, not weaker. In Europe, despite the feathers it may have ruffled in Brussels, an adherence to a 5 percent spending of GDP on defense for NATO member-states would have been unthinkable a decade ago. That is not the story of American decline but is instead a testament to the continued influence of Washington over the alliance . And while the administration has backed away from Seoul and Damascus, it has also played with the idea of annexing Greenland and retaking control of the Panama Canal. These factors signal less of a retreat than a reallocation of priorities.
Whether that reallocation may lead to a leaner, stronger America or a foreign policy blunder studied for years to come may not be answerable for another decade, once historians have proper distance to measure its effects. However, what is measurable at this very moment is trust, and by that metric the picture is quite grim. Allied nations and their populations are souring on Washington, with approval ratings sitting at all-time lows across the West. Governments from Warsaw to Seoul are quietly, yet quickly, building the capabilities to ensure their own security in the event Russian tanks rumble across the Polish border, or Chinese fighters appear over the skies of Taipei, and the United States doesn’t step in. Washington may not know the cost of this bet for a decade, and its allies are not willing to wait and see.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
