In 1984, months after the Reagan administration’s decision to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Western Europe brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets of Europe’s major cities, a clutch of senior French, German, and Italian officials cornered NATO Secretary-General Peter Carrington outside his Brussels office. Tensions were still running high, and the Americans, they complained, were rude, reckless, and dismissive of allied counsel. Carrington heard them out. Then he shrugged and offered his usual verdict on why American indispensability demanded allied forbearance: “Alas, they are the only Americans we have.”

Today, that forbearance is being severely tested. In less than two years, the second Trump administration has threatened to seize Greenland and leave NATO, withdrawn troops from Germany, meddled in allies’ elections, and levied tariffs on friends—all while lavishing summitry and flattery on Beijing and Moscow. Allies have responded with understandable alarm. “The old relationship we had with the United States,” declared Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, “is over.” A “deep rift” was forming, warned German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” declared European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Ng Eng, Singapore’s defense minister, lamented that the United States had gone from a partner to a “landlord seeking rent.”

In the United States, a growing consensus holds that the alliances are unlikely to recover. Former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Greg Meeks has questioned “whether or not our friends and allies will ever trust the United States again.” The scholar Robert Kagan, in a eulogy for an era in which U.S. allies stuck with Washington, declared that “those days are now over and will not soon return.”

This pessimism is understandable—but significantly overstated. The grievance in allied capitals, while heartfelt, is not a lasting guide to what comes next. Dire as the moment appears, the United States’ alliances will survive the Trump shock for reasons the headlines miss. First, the alliance system has weathered now forgotten shocks at least as serious as these, and the present ones owe more to presidential personality than to durable new politics. Second, the threats that gave rise to the alliances have not faded but intensified and converged, as allied perceptions of China and Russia align as never before. Third, powerful gravitational forces continue to pull allies together economically, technologically, and militarily, overcoming efforts to “de-risk” from Washington, while professional bureaucracies quietly advance cooperation far from the glare of politics.

Allowed to harden into conventional wisdom, pessimism risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, as policymakers, convinced the alliances cannot be saved, stop doing the work to ensure they endure. But together, these uniting forces will carry the alliances through the Trump moment and set them up—should allied capitals seize the opportunity—for the transformation required to meet the challenge of a China, backed by a newly aggressive Russia, that can outscale every other country on the metrics of power that matter most. The current anxieties, however inadvertently, may even strengthen the alliance system: as they have in the past, tensions can spur reforms that create tomorrow’s capability. Allies could be transformed from dependents into co-creators of power, pooling capacity into what we have previously called “allied scale.” The Trump administration has called on allies to do more so that the United States can do less; in fact, in the future, both the allies and the United States will need to do more, creating two-way flows of capacity and interdependence that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It is true that as French President Emmanuel Macron and other allied leaders have argued, “there is no going back.” That does not, however, mean the end of the alliance system. It means reforging the alliance system for a new era.

The damage that U.S. President Donald Trump has done to U.S. alliances so far in his second term exceeds that done in the entire four years of his first term. That is in part because the internationalist staff that imposed guardrails the last time is gone. But the growing concern over the future of American alliances is not just about Trump. It is driven by a belief that longer-standing corrosive forces compounded by Trumpian attacks on trust are eroding the system to the point that it will be beyond salvation.

The first set of corrosive forces is within the United States. As senior Biden administration officials Phil Gordon and Mara Karlin observed in these pages, a generation of failed interventions, economic challenges, and inward-looking politics have left Americans more reluctant to underwrite global order than at any time since before World War II. Trump, the argument goes, is as much a symptom as a cause. The first Trump term might have seemed an aberration, but the second marks a pattern—suggesting that the pendulum might not swing back.

The second set of corrosive forces is within allied capitals. Gutted American credibility, in this account, is prompting allies to adjust their strategic orientation in ways that will prove irreversible. Trump’s treatment of alliance commitments in Europe and Asia as conditional and transactional changes their essential character even without major troop withdrawals or the use of force against allies. Already, European governments are elevating “strategic autonomy” and pursuing defense independence from the United States, with France and the United Kingdom even proposing a new nuclear umbrella for Europe. Asian allies, too, are revisiting a founding bargain of the U.S. alliance system—extended nuclear deterrence—and considering acquiring their own nuclear capabilities. And both sets of allies are forming new middle-power coalitions to reduce reliance on Washington, from recent European arrangements with India to the trade agreements Japan is pursuing with Latin America. All are searching for ways to de-risk from the United States. The skeptics worry that no matter how pro-alliance the next American leader might be, such hedging will persist: Why would allies stake decades of military planning—bases, procurement, force structure—or pursue economic and industrial integration with Washington if the alliance is itself called into question every four to eight years?

The answer to that question is more complex than it seems and should lead away from despair. Allied collapse remains far less likely than allied endurance and evolution for reasons observers often miss. Because alliances surprised strategists by surviving the Soviet collapse, they came to be seen as products of the softer elements of international politics: sentiment, institutions, trust, shared values, nostalgia—precisely the elements the Trump administration has battered most. But they were forged and have always been sustained by hard material realities. Far from vanishing, those material realities are pulling harder than before.

THE GOLDEN AGE THAT WASN’T

The current pessimism juxtaposes today’s challenges against an alliance golden age that never existed. The real history of U.S. alliances is one of recurring crises: allies expelling American troops, presidents blindsiding partners, capitals erupting in protest, and in every era, confident predictions of a coming collapse.

Although many foreign policy elites think this time is different, American and European publics do not agree. According to Chicago Council on Global Affairs polling data, which runs as far back as 1974, the share of Americans who believe Washington should make major decisions together with allies rather than go it alone now stands at a 50-year high. Throughout the Trump era, from 2016 to today, the belief that maintaining existing alliances is “very effective” for advancing U.S. aims increased from 32 percent to 55 percent, reaching ten-year highs among both Democrats and Republicans. Across the Atlantic, polling from the European Council on Foreign Relations has shown alarming dissatisfaction with the United States. But what is most striking is that a clear majority of citizens in 13 of the 15 European countries polled, and a plurality in the remaining two, believe that the relationship will “get better again” once Trump leaves office. Fewer than a third believe the damage will last after he leaves office. European publics, it would seem, think that Trump is an aberration and not a true representative of the United States.

Their faith that “this too shall pass” carries some significant historical weight. In the security domain, today’s challenges are real—threats to seize Greenland, to abandon Ukraine, to quit NATO, to pull forces from Germany, to tie Taiwanese arms sales to Beijing’s preferences. But the alliances have weathered worse.

Even under Trump, the United States has not credibly threatened financial calamity against an ally, as it did to the United Kingdom, in........

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