Name: Our allies can no longer trust us. So now what?
Uploaded: 2026-03-13T16:30:09.000Z
Duration: 34 min 23 s
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This post World War II US led world order, whatever you want to call it, right.

Adverbs of manner

If it does erode, do you think we'll miss it when it's gone?

When you have a bunch of strong countries that are working together, other countries are less likely to attack all of them.

And then internally, countries that are in an alliance are not likely to want to fight each other because they're in an alliance, and

they reap benefits of not getting attacked by states outside of that alliance.

My guest today is my friend and Vox colleague, Zach Beacham.

He covers ideology, particularly the political right, both here and abroad, and

just sort of reports on the state of democracy around the world.

So that's an interesting and pretty capacious beat.

Why write about the right wing and, and democracy and ideologies more generally?

Is that just a long standing interest of yours or you just sort of accidentally fell into it as a journalist?

Yes, I would say long standing, but it's kind of a circuitous route.

I've always been interested in the global fate of democracy and sort of the pro political philosophy.

I think, like a lot of people, things really started to change for me around 2015.

You know, it's a confluence of things, right?

It was the extremely negative reaction to the European refugee crisis.

It was one of the really early things that set me on this path because it set alarm bells ringing that people weren't willing to tolerate the kind of liberal multiculturalism that seems dominant at that point in time, that it would create frictions in political systems.

And he combined that with the Brexit vote at first, and

then Trump, of course, and it was just sort of.

I mean, the world transforms between 20 in 2015 and 2016.

Do you feel like you've been right more often than wrong?

Like, do you feel like you've had a pretty good sense the last decade or so of where things were, were heading?

Has it gone the way you thought it would?

Are we taken several detours that you really didn't see coming this year to predictions and we can test those.

I think that if you're a professional gambler and you win 55% of the time, is that good?

I think the, the thing I feel most proud of recently is a piece I wrote this was also early last year, very early in the first Trump administration or in the second Trump administration, when I made the case that they were failing, that they were not achieving their political goals.

And that was very controversial at the time.

They thought I was whitewashing the scope of what the Trump administration was doing, failing to appreciate how much they changed American government.

But the benchmark that I used was not, are they changing things, or are they getting away with breaking laws?

But rather, were they successfully implementing changes that could durably affect the political competitiveness of the American system.

The opposition's ability to compete fairly and compromising the rule of law, making it difficult for there to be opposition activity in between elections.

Because those were the things I'd been trained to look at in other countries where democracy had started to decline.

Like the archetypal case that everyone cites is Hungary, which was one of the first American reporters to write a long piece on how authoritarianism in Hungary works.

And so, like, looking at countries like that had helped, had given me a sense of what to look for when you want to see effective control being exercised by a leader over a democratic system.

And I just didn't see the Trump administration doing that.

They were not doing a very good job following the playbook, especially in the wake of the massive public backlash against the shootings in Minneapolis.

Many more people have come around to my view than were, you know, when I wrote the piece last year.

That to me, is a really was a really clear example of, like, when what I'm doing is working.

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I'm not going to say it's the biggest story in international politics at the moment because there's so much shit happening at the moment.

But certainly one of the biggest stories in international politics at the moment is the state of the U.S.

led world order and whether or not it is going to continue to survive under Trump.

Go back to the first Trump term, I think, to understand some of the stuff at the time, right.

I wrote and some other people wrote, that what Trump was doing, the way that he was trying to weaponize America's trade relations and alliances to try to extract benefits from American allies, most notably at that point by like treating defense spending by NATO allies as a kind of tribute payments to the United States, like they weren't paying their fair share.

It's like a misunderstanding of how NATO works.

But a thing that you heard primarily behind closed doors was that one term of this is something that Europe and other American allies could manage because it would be like, well, the United States, you know, they did a thing, it wasn't great, but

it's still the United States, you know, they're the leader of the free world.

They, they can make mistakes sometimes and we can recover from that.

But a second Trump term, this is what people said during the first, would indicate that this is what America wants at this point, that at least one of its major parties was captured by a faction that was hostile to the global order and hostile to the foundations of the US Led alliance system.

And that other countries would need to recalibrate their approaches if Trump were to win again.

I mean, not immediately, but a few years later.

And now what we're seeing is not, I don't want to quite say it's the inevitable outgrowth of what he'd done.

If you look at the way that European politicians behave, I'm focusing on Europe.

This also applies to Japan, South Korea, Canada, where I now live especially.

They're like, desperate for things to go back to the way that they were.

They really, really wanted Trump to come in and then have Marco Rubio, who is a known quantity as Secretary of State, and

things just be normal or as close to as normal as they could expect.

You know, maybe Trump would say some weird stuff, but

his actual deployment of forces and his foreign policies would be pretty consistent with the broad spectrum of different things that have happened under different US Presidents.

I mean, during the first term, there was a tweet of where Trump said, I promise not to do this.

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Our allies can no longer trust us. So now what?

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