BRUSSELS — America’s allies in Europe and Asia thought they had learned to digest and compensate for the instinctive unpredictability of President Trump. But the bitter resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the abrupt announcement of plans to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan are being viewed as watershed moments for Washington’s relations with the world.
Many countries were already trying to recalibrate their relations with Mr. Trump, who views traditional allies as competitors. From South Korea to Japan, France to Germany and other countries in the NATO alliance, senior officials have been talking aloud about how to do more on their own and ways to be less reliant on a Washington focused on “America First.”
But they also had faith in Mr. Mattis, who presented himself as a man of continuity and of traditional alliances, and who worked to strengthen them considerably regardless of the views held in the White House. He was also regarded by traditional allies as their most sympathetic and effective conduit to Mr. Trump, and as the “adult” of last resort able to restrain, balance or ignore the whims of an unpredictable president.
This is “a morning of alarm in Europe,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden, said on Twitter on Friday. He added that Mr. Mattis was seen as the last “strong bond across the Atlantic in the Trump Administration,” since “all the others are fragile at best or broken at worst.”
For François Heisbourg, a former French defense official, it was a watershed moment of an American president under fire, in open opposition to his intelligence and military structures, acting with utter disregard for traditional American allies in his sudden decisions to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.
“Until now, you could talk about hedging, and all allies were doing it fairly prudently,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “But now everyone will have to work on the assumption that the alliance system is no longer there. The organizations are there, the treaties are there, the troops and equipment are still there, but the high priest of that church is gone.”
Mr. Trump is often scornful of America’s decades-old network of multilateral alliances, seeing them as a costly burden. They were created after the catastrophes of World War II, both in Europe and in Asia, and aimed at supporting fragile, battered democracies and deterring the ideological and imperial ambitions of both Communist powers, Russia and China.
These alliances cost the American taxpayer real money, of course, but the payments were not altruistic — they prevented the United States from having to engage in yet another global conflict, another world war. And they created increasingly wealthy markets for American products, both industrial and agricultural.
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