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America’s friends are freaking out.

“Trump’s lukewarm support for NATO has led some European allies to question if the US would come to their aid if Russia were to attack them,” the Guardian reports. “In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, governments are assessing shifting US priorities and in some cases seeking alternative sources of leadership and partnership in the belief that America has stepped back,” CNN assesses. “Why is Trump criticizing key allies to U.S. security?” a PBS News Hour segment wonders, incredulity implied. “Canadians have had enough,” the New York Times concludes after Trump berated the country’s prime minister on social media and pledged to hit it with yet more tariffs. The onslaught has veteran diplomats, foreign-policy gurus, and members of both parties bemoaning that Donald Trump is irreversibly squandering America’s long-standing partnerships and emboldening its foes. As one veteran of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations put it, “This is how the liberal international order dies.”

Except all those stories are from Trump’s first term. And what happened after? Trump lost the 2020 election, and U.S. alliances rebounded. Under the Biden administration, Western nations rallied to Ukraine’s defense, and NATO expanded. South Korea and Japan shelved decades of historical enmity to present China with a united front. The U.S., U.K., and Australia signed a maritime security pact known as AUKUS. The so-called Quad alliance of Australia, India, the U.S., and Japan knitted closer together.

Trump is now back in the White House, his presence once again conjuring nearly identical fears of imminent alliance collapse. “The American Age Is Over,” an Atlantic headline put it last month, and not without some justification. The story appeared as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was traveling to Strasbourg, France, to explain why he wants to make Canada an “associate member” of the European Union, a clear effort to seek new partnerships as the U.S. goes rogue. “We are pursuing resilience so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity, or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law,” Carney said—not-so-subtle references to Trump’s efforts to swamp Canada with tariffs and bully it into becoming the 51st U.S. state. Other global leaders have similarly looked to forge more reliable friendships elsewhere, and the reason for their concerns was on display at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month. “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump told the delegates regarding the U.S. intervention in Venezuela that ousted the South American nation’s leader this year and effectively seized much of its oil reserves, a stark summation of America’s rapacious new global identity.

So is this time any different? Will Trump’s bellicose and chaotic second term turn the U.S. into a global pariah, rearranging global alliances in a lasting way? Or will the inevitable end of his presidency (only 835 days to go!) once again uncork a surge of goodwill among American friends? Some think the experience of Trump’s first term makes the pessimistic case for the future of American alliances look shortsighted. And amid the doomsaying, streaks of contrarian optimism are starting to emerge. The most well-thought-out example is a Foreign Affairs essay published in August by Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, who served on the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

The way Campbell and Doshi see things, America’s alliances have already survived far worse than Trump. Since World War II, the challenges have included diplomatic crises, financial........

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