It happens the way all betrayals do: slowly, then all at once. When you see the president of the United States turn an icy shoulder to a country like Canada—a neighbor who has buried American soldiers, traded groceries and electricity, and built its economy on the same continent—you feel a strange pang in your chest. Then you see South Korea, a nation whose young people fought alongside Americans and whose cities are still divided by the scars of a war never really finished, dismissed as a source of frustration. And Oman, a quiet, patient country whose rulers have spent decades hosting secret talks between enemies, too modest to take credit for peace, suddenly overlooked and undervalued. For a moment, the mind rebels: this cannot be real. But then you remember the last ten years. You remember the riots, the shutdowns, the panic, the outrage, the endless scrolling and the endless naming of enemies. You remember how many bridges were burned simply because fire was the only thing that felt honest. And you understand that this president—this hostility toward friends, this warmth toward menaces—did not come from nowhere. It came from a world that grew tired, frightened, and convinced that loyalty was a trick and kindness was a trap. That does not excuse it. But it explains it, and in explaining it, we begin to see ourselves more clearly.
Consider the allies we have lost, not all at once, but through a thousand small cuts delivered live on television. Canada has been treated less like a partner and more like an inconvenience, its dairy tariffs mocked, its maple syrup turned into a punchline, its prime minister belittled as hostile. Yet Canadians have long been the quiet friend who shows up at midnight with a shovel. They let American airspace hold their planes in crisis. They send troops to the same dangerous places without demanding the spotlight. South Korea is no different—it is a country that rose from rubble, built tanks and semiconductors, yet still keeps its young soldiers ready to fight alongside Americans for a peninsula that could explode at any minute. It hosts military bases, sends cash to American war memorials, and sends K-pop stars to entertain troops. And Oman, a nation so modest that many Americans cannot place it on a map, has quietly served as a backchannel between Washington and Tehran, between the White House and the Houthis, always with the patience of a pharmacist and the secrecy of a confessor. To treat such friends with hostility is not simply a strategic error; it is a human failure. It is like pushing away the person who has been driving you to chemotherapy because they ask you to turn down the radio. In a decade of upheaval, we have learned to confuse honesty with attack. We have forgotten that a true friend may annoy you, disagree with you, and still be the one you call when the world falls apart.
The paradox becomes fuller when you watch the president’s affection for an adversary like North Korea. Here is a nation that has imprisoned American students, tested missiles with names that sound like the end of the world, and starved its own citizens for the sake of a state that treats its people like furniture. Yet the president spoke of “love” letters, of beautiful beaches, of a “very good relationship.” There is a psychological pattern at work, and it is painfully familiar to anyone who has watched a friend fall in love with an elegant abuser. The flattery feels good because it asks nothing of you. The enemy offers the president something allies cannot: unconditional applause, a stage, an absence of awkward questions. When the president meets allies, there are trade disputes, human rights critiques, demands for burden-sharing, the clamor of opposition leaders and free press. When he meets an adversary, he is the strongman-with-strongman, two statues at a summit, and the image itself feels like victory. The familiarity of this dynamic is what makes the shock wear off. In a decade marked by extremes, we have all become weaker to validation. We unfriend people who question us and cling to those who simply say “yes.” When the national leader does the same with dictatorships, it looks monstrous at first, but then the monstrous becomes mundane. We begin to shrug. We begin to say, “That’s just the way things are now.” And that is exactly how the abandonment of old friends becomes a norm, and the embrace of old enemies becomes a habit.
The decade of upheaval did this to us. Think of what we have survived: the Great Recession that hollowed out tens of millions of households, the political protests that turned into tear gas outside and riots inside, the pandemic that made every human face a potential weapon, the lies and the misinformation that made it impossible to agree on the color of the sky, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that ended not with peace but with a desperate airport scene and American troops leaving a country to collapse. After a decade like that, trust is not a virtue; it is a vulnerability. Alliances require a long memory and a longer patience. They require you to believe that shared history matters more than this week’s grievance. But people exhausted by crisis cannot afford long memories. They want shortcuts. They want enemies they can point to, and saviors they can follow. When a president says, “They are taking advantage of us,” referring to Canada or South Korea, it gives the exhausted voter a simple answer to a complicated world. When he says, “I understand Kim,” it gives the same voter the feeling that the boogeyman is not so scary after all. The human heart does not respond to nuance when it is in survival mode. It responds to “us and them” until it is too tired to remember who was really on “our” side. That is what happened in multiple countries, and it is what brought us to a moment where the president’s hostility to allies no longer changes our lunch plans. We have been marinading in chaos for so long that betrayal tastes like comfort.
But make no mistake: this has consequences that are not abstract. There are South Korean soldiers whose fathers died for an alliance that their children feel is being mocked by the American president. There are Canadian border-town families who pray the border does not become a wall, who have watched their grandparents cross freely and now hear threats of tariffs and annexation jokes that are not really jokes. There are Omani diplomats who have spent years building the kind of trust that cannot be faked, and who now wonder why Washington cares more about hugging its enemy than honoring its friend. North Korea’s people—the ones who cannot speak freely—have watched their leaders welcome an American president six times while refusing to allow basic food into the hands of children. There are American families of prisoners still held in North Korea, or of young Americans whose remains were still coming home in boxes, and they know the difference between a photo op and a promise kept. The emotional damage is just as real as the strategic damage. In a friendship, when one person constantly praises the bully and mocks the friend who showed up with food, the friend starts to withdraw. That is what is happening now. Canada is diversifying its trade, South Korea is hedging its partnerships, Oman is quietly strengthening its other friendships. Not out of rage, but out of self-preservation. And the tragedy is that the ordinary people in those countries still like American people. But they no longer trust American leadership. The gap between the American people and the American presidency has grown so wide that even our oldest friends are not sure who we are anymore.
Perhaps the only honest way forward is to remind ourselves why allies were ever important in the first place. They are not burdens; they are life rafts. In a decade of upheaval, the message has become cynical: hold no loyalty, fear everyone, treat friends like fools. But the human heart cannot survive without friendship, and nations are no different. There is still time to look at Oman, Canada, South Korea and say, “We have been through too much together to let this ruin us.” That will require swallowing pride, apologizing, and re-learning the old discipline of being bored by peace and diplomacy instead of thrilled by summits and strongmen. It will require remembering that the most love we feel in life is often the quietest—the neighbor who listens, the friend who disagrees, the ally who stays even when we are not charming. For a generation raised on crisis, that sounds boring. But after a decade of upheaval, boring is beautiful. The president who turns away from friends and toward enemies may still shock some people, but the rest of us know better. We know the difference between a hand that holds a knife and a hand that holds a lantern. We know that the true measure of leadership is not how many enemies can be befriended, but how few friends can be lost along the way. And though the past ten years have pushed us toward despair, the human spirit was built to return to the people who loved us all along—not because it is safe, but because in the end, it is the only thing that makes the upheaval worth surviving.
