Smith had hosted Tucker Carlson in Western Canada months earlier and enjoyed warm ties across the American right. But at a policy summit in Toronto last fall, when I asked her how she would feel about Trump intervening in Alberta’s fragile domestic politics, her MAGA enthusiasm evaporated. “Admiring Trump from afar is one thing,” she said. “But sovereignty is sovereignty, and borders are borders.”
That moment captured a miscalculation that has come to define Trump’s second term. A decade ago, Trump launched his political career as a nationalist crusader, demanding harder borders and a more muscular assertion of American sovereignty. He cheered the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, crowning himself “Mr. Brexit” as the vote approached its 10-year anniversary. But in office again, Trump has underestimated the power of patriotic sentiment in countries other than his own, a serial error that has undermined his trade wars, military adventures and relationships with the global right.
The trouble began even before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with a campaign of bullying against Canada. The belittling taunts and tariff threats he aimed at then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not frighten America’s neighbor into submission. Instead, they inspired a patriotic backlash that helped elevate Mark Carney to the prime minister’s office, a leader who preaches middle-power resistance to American economic domination. The cost-of-living crisis in the United States has worsened as retaliatory tariffs have raised prices on Canadian goods, and Trump’s bonds with conservative allies in Ottawa have frayed.
In Ukraine, Trump’s push for a flimsy peace deal proved equally self-defeating. He dressed down President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and reached for a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, an insult to Ukrainian sovereignty so stark that Zelenskyy faced no political consequences at home for rejecting the terms. Even at a low ebb in the war, Ukrainian national pride trumped American pressure. The episode left Trump’s administration without a viable off-ramp in the conflict and emboldened European leaders to chart their own course on military aid.
A Pattern of Overreach
Attempts to meddle with judicial decisions in Brazil, commandeer British and Spanish airfields and dictate military strategy to Israel have gone no better. In each case, Trump’s team assumed that economic leverage or personal rapport with foreign leaders would override local political dynamics. Instead, sovereignty and national pride proved more durable than the president’s transactional style of diplomacy. Dispatching Vice President JD Vance to campaign in Hungary’s election did not save Viktor Orbán from a landslide defeat, a stinging rebuke from a country once seen as a model for the global right.
The pattern has weakened the Republican Party’s standing abroad and battered Trump’s bonds with the conservative movements he once inspired. Leaders who once echoed his nationalist rhetoric now find themselves defending their own borders against American pressure. The president’s trade wars have aggravated the cost-of-living crisis at home, while his military adventures have yielded few strategic gains. For a politician who built his brand on the idea that nationalism was a winning force, Trump’s second term has revealed a blind spot: the belief that only American sovereignty matters.
