For a brief moment, the title We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together was considered for this commentary but this outlet has avoided Taylor Swift references as much as possible for twenty plus years, it seems like a good idea to continue that practice. However, that sentiment among America's former allies is something American citizens need to thoroughly contemplate. And it is absolutely appropriate to reference American allies in the past tense. All of them.
The signs of America's lost alliances can be loosely grouped into four categories -- immediate hot war cooperation, long term military procurement strategy, toleration of financial and technology monopolies and culture. The events in these categories and their financial interactions and magnifications are complex and likely to be missed in the near term (the next year or two) but they will result in changes that will undermine the financial stability and future prospects of Americans in perpetuity. America has enough existential issues as it is. A looming fiscal catastrophe. Supplies of fresh water and hydroelectric power jeopardized by forty years of drought (actually, not drought but normal weather) in the West. Rising tides in coastal regions triggered by global warming. All issues that have been totally neglected as America instead focuses on a war of choice and dozens of ripple effects that will topple the economic hierarchy that put America at the top for the past half century.
Immediate Hot War Cooperation
In the Soviet era of post-WWII history, there was zero ambiguity among American allies about the motivation behind any requested collective action. Those motivations might have been unjustified paranoia in hindsight but, at the time, they were clearly understood and believed. That coherence became fuzzy for maybe fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union but became more clear as Putin became more active in antagonizing neighbors in the 2000s.
American leaders benefited from and arguably abused that coherent sense of urgency, knowing that, for the most part, any time the United States chose to exert military force, American allies would eventually come around to support it. At a minimum, American allies might not lend their own forces to a conflict but they would always allow American forces operating out of bases in their territory to stage operations from those bases. At a BARE minimum, those allies would always allow American forces to fly over their airspace for staging missions or actual attacks.
That assumed level of cooperation can no longer be assumed. Spain has denied access to its airspace for any American military craft involved with the war in Iran. Italy has prohibited the use of an American air base on Sicily for use in missions related to Iran. Spain has banned any use of its bases or airspace for flights related to Iran. France has been accused by Trump in social media posts of banning use of its airspace but the French government denies any such outright ban has been enacted, saying military flights must obtain prior diplomatic clearance per French policy since the beginning of the war. Switzerland of course has a long history of neutrality so it's no surprise flyover requests have mostly been declined.
If the United States no longer gets the benefit of the doubt to fly its own missions over "allied" countries, it seems likely those "allies" also have concerns about sharing other intelligence with US security and military organizations and Israeli counterparts as well. Such reservations would seem particularly dangerous in an environment after attacking a nation that is arguably among the top three sponsors of terrorism in the world. Yet this prospect seems completely foreign to the Trump Administration, which frankly makes former allies even MORE fearful about sharing information.
This problem cannot be understated. The risks posed by terrorism to American citizens have been drastically increased by the arrogance and disrespect demonstrated by the American government to those that might have information to share and might have previously been willing to share it.
Long Term Military Procurement Strategy
America's former allies have begun unshackling themselves from tight integration strategies with American designed weapons systems and resulting dependencies on American defense contractors. This strategic shift has been driven by many factors. The war in Ukraine was an eye opener for many reasons:
- It showed how fickle the US could be in supplying missile defense systems and missiles themselves to its own "allies" while under actual attack.
- It demonstrated how long manufacturing intervals could be for the weapons American finally decided to sell.
- It demonstrated how newer, cheaper drone weapons could run circles around sixty year old military tactics used by the Russians.
Beyond the war in Ukraine, American posturing over tariff wars, threats against Greenland, threats against Canada and now a war in Iran that has crippled twenty percent of the world's oil and fifty percent of the world's LNG supply have shown America to be be completely irrational. It is no longer sound for any nation to willingly maintain dependence on a country stupid enough to be doing the things America is doing that actually cripple America's ability to manufacture the weapons it sells to other countries. Depending on America to sell you Tomahawk missiles or F-35 fighters when America has lost access to the semiconductors or special purpose steel varieties required to make those products seems insane, if not geopolitically suicidal.
Over the past few months, predating the war in Iran, this unraveling of the American monopoly on high-dollar weapons system design and manufacturing has been accelerating.
Canada has frozen the purchase of 72 of a total of 88 F-35 fighters, in part because it seems increasingly clear the F-35's capabilities may be overkill for defense needs in Canada but also due to Canada's unwillingness to provide business to an neighbor that has behaved so poorly to Canada.
Switzerland is also reviewing its $625 billion purchase program for F-35 planes.
In September 2025, Spain "indefinitely suspended" its plan to purchase F-35 planes in favor of investing in a European-made fighter plane. Spain committed to meeting its two percent GDP target for military spending but stated it is working to ensure eighty five percent of that spending stays in the European Union rather than enriching American contractors.
And if these concerns by former allies seem overblown, on April 1, 2026, Trump was quoted in a British paper musing that America may exit the NATO alliance because of the refusal of NATO allies to join the war in Iran. Frankly, it would be irrational for these countries to ignore the current reality and continue the current dynamic.
The fragmenting of military weapons system design strategies will hurt America more than any of its former allies. American defense contractors benefited the most from monolithic design and purchasing programs. American defense contractors have grown accustomed to "cost plus" contracts and have become extremely inefficient in the process of producing designs that are both too complicated and ill-suited for a modern war pitting a dinosaur $13 billion dollar aircraft carrier against a few hundred drones costing $20,000 each. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs scattered across every congressional district in the country that will be decimated when the rest of the world cooperates on new weapons system designs and leaves American firms completely out of the procurement.
Toleration of Financial and Technology Monopolies
The pattern of jettisoning American dominance is not limited to weapons systems. Foreign governments are now systematically doing what the American government has refused to do to enforce anti-trust laws and break up abusive monopolies.
For the past fifty years, credit card payment services have been dominated worldwide by the American firms Visa and Mastercard. (Note this issue revolves around the PAYMENT function, not the actual CREDIT and long term BORROWING function served by issuing banks. That's a totally different problem.) Visa and Mastercard quickly gained dominance as the credit card industry exploded in the 1970s in America and that dominance spread to foreign countries as well, if only because America led other countries in the concept of revolving credit cards so it was easiest for other countries to go with established players as the product concept spread to other economies.
While these monopolies were accepted, they were still unpopular. As newer digital payment processes became popular with smart phones and web commerce, newer companies created transaction models that were more flexible and easier to implement while the established firms were much slower to innovate. Many countries that never saw widespread adoption of revolving credit cards instead jumped straight into digital payment technologies and had the foresight to impose standards that avoided proprietary technologies and allowed actual competition, negating the ability of any firm to dominate. In Brazil, the central bank operates a digital platform supporting 150 million users without the high interest revolving credit card terms or sky-high transaction fees that get funneled into rebate programs, etc.
This should have been the financial landscape in the United States. At some point, it probably WILL be the landscape in the US after another financial collapse triggers more credit contraction and more people just abandon traditional credit cards. Long term, American firms will likely lose any dominance they had in this sector and other countries will work to keep American firms out, if not to avoid the financial abuse and dependency but to avoid American government access to private data of customers in other countries.
A similar revolution is underway in operating systems and "office productivity" software, for identical reasons. Foreign governments are increasingly fearful that the US government is forcing American software firms like Microsoft, Apple and Google to support "back doors" into their products that allow undetected access to customer data by the US government. Or, in some cases, the US government exerts undue force on American corporations to turn over customer data, regardless of where that customer lives in the world. These aren't "fears." They have happened.
In response, foreign governments have enacted regulations to ensure they stop feeding the monster by continuing to use suspect products. In 2024, the province of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany required all 30,000 of its desktop systems to migrate away from Microsoft Office 365 and Windows to LibreOffice and some flavor of Linux. In 2025, Denmark implemented a nearly identical rule. By late 2025, officials in Austria, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy confirmed identical rules affecting nearly 800,000 machines and users. These movements to dump American software are also extending to video conferencing services such as Teams and Zoom, for identical reasons. European governments have zero confidence American firms are honoring European law regarding privacy protections and have zero interest in funneling millions of dollars in licensing revenue towards American firms who are not honoring their demands.
As this mindset takes hold across all continents, prior assumptions about the financial payoff of tech startups in America will vanish, further contracting the financial benefits of America's technology industries going forward, further shrinking economic opportunity within the United States.
And finally, there is the collapse of the mother of all monopolies. The monopoly that benefits Americans the most and is understood by virtually NO Americans. The American monetary monopoly on the world, made possible by a fifty year old pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia that established the era of the so-called "petro dollar."
The purchasing power of the American dollar and the US government's ability to borrow at essentially subsidized rates for DECADES has been driven by a deal struck after the first OPEC embargo in 1973. In order to assure a steady supply of oil from the Middle East to a very energy-inefficient American economy, the US agreed to sell weapons and planes to Saudi Arabia and enter a pact for the defense of Saudi Arabia in exchange for the Saudis selling oil to America and requiring all oil sold by Saudi Arabia to ANYONE to be physically purchased in US dollars.
When a party agrees to REQUIRE all purchases of its products to be denominated in US dollars and its sells tens of billions of dollars of that product every day, that has the effect of drastically increasing the demand for US dollars. This increases their value relative to other currencies in the international economy. When that product demand is steady, day after day, month after month, this increases certainty in the value of those US dollars over long periods, making them more desirable to use in other transactions, including lending money to sovereign governments, including the United States.
The United States and its citizens have benefited far more than any other nation from this petro dollar arrangement. It lowered US government borrowing costs, disguising the true extent of the folly America's out-of-control government spending. That attracted more foreign investment in US government securities and corporate securities. That influx of investment expanded the US government's leverage during financial crises and led the rest of the world to follow the lead of the US during such crises, cuz after all, WE HAVE TRILLIONS OF YOUR MONEY. And since 1974, America has used that leverage for the most part to maintain stability and contain the damage of several crises as well. (Not avoid them, just stop them from getting worse.)
As of April 1, 2026, this last bit of monetary monopolistic control over the world is being abandoned by a corrupt President who couldn't explain the mechanism or its benefits if his life depended on it. Trump has essentially announced he is willing to walk away from his war in Iran with Iran in control of all ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The largest single consumer of oil from the Middle East is China so it is highly likely they will demand all future oil contracts be settled in yuan rather than US dollars. That will shift demand for dollars into demand for yuan. A reduction in demand for dollars will immediately reduce the purchasing power of dollars, raising prices for EVERYTHING for all Americans. Lower demand for dollars will also weaken demand to invest in US treasuries, requiring higher interest rates to be paid on new debt to attract other lenders, causing the cost of servicing America's $39 trillion dollar cumulative debt to skyrocket.
America - The World's Apex Predator Asshole
There is no other way to put it. Since Trump took office the first time in 2017, the predominate impression America has created with people around the world is that of a big, dumb, arrogant ASSHOLE. This isn't an accidental, side-effect dynamic. It isn't the dynamic generated by eighty years of responsibility trying to lead the world after World War II and mostly trying to do the right thing. It isn't the dynamic generated by at least trying to do the right thing while deluded by obsolete geopolitical theories that trapped America and the world in pre-WWII patterns of thought that simply regenerated old struggles within new borders. It isn't the dynamic generated by eighty years of all the above that took place while America rigged every outcome to disproportionately benefit the American economy and reinforce American power as part of the "fee" charged for leading the free world.
No, the effect being seen now is one that results from the a-hole dynamic appearing to be the primary motivation behind American decisions. Decisions aimed at flexing American military and financial power by purposely engaging in actions with no obvious benefit to anyone including American citizens that knowingly harm our allies. Simply because we can. Simply because the American President requires constant affirmation that he has sole power to make any decision to settle any score for any slight he identifies or imagines anywhere in the world.
America's former allies are GONE. They are not watching current events, spotting America a world sized mulligan and holding their breath waiting for regime change in America. Regardless of who or what gains power next in America, its former allies have realized they should never have allowed America to dominate finance, technology and economics in general to the degree it has since World War II. No people, no culture, no form of government can amass that much financial power and technological prowess without being corrupted to the core. Once the blinders are removed and the corruption is seen in the daylight for what it is, there's no putting the blinders back on.
WTH
