How the Dealmaker Wasted American Credibility: The Balance Sheet of a Transactional Presidency

MAGA was not resurrected in November 2024. The faithful were deluded. That’s not the movement that just got hammered in the midterms but the promise itself of Making America Great Again. Perhaps Donald Trump never meant it. Perhaps it was all a lie. Perhaps he was singularly incapable of delivering on the slogan. Trump had campaigned on restoring American strength. After nearly two years of his second term, the ledger exposes a presidency that has spent US leverage cheaply, burned American arsenals for undefined ends, and taught friends that Washington’s commitments last as long as they are convenient. Nay, as long as Trump finds them convenient, that is, serving his own interests.

None of that was ever meant to make America great again. It has instead made the liberal order America built harder to defend, and the US itself poorer and weaker.

Let’s begin with Europe. Days after his and the GOP’s midterm defeat, Trump welcomed Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s envoy, to the White House while Jared Kushner is drafting a grand security architecture for the continent that would include Russia. The premise is that Europe lacks rules. It does not. The Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris, the 1999 OSCE charter and the Budapest Memorandum already forbid the changing of borders by force and affirm every state’s right to choose its alliances. Yet Russia broke every one of those rules and chose to do so. Putin explained his motive in a 2021 essay denying Ukraine’s separate nationhood—that is a far better guide to the war, its motives and character, than the NATO grievance recited by Trumpistas.

History makes us wary. Helsinki in 1975 gave Moscow what it had long craved, the recognition of the frontiers left by 1945, in return for the very principles it now tramples. Munich in 1938 showed what follows when great powers settle a small state’s fate in its absence, and Yalta showed it again. A negotiation with the aggressor, in which Ukraine, kept alive largely by Western arms and money, is cast as the obstacle and Europe as a nuisance, will not end the war. It only ratifies the logic of conquest. And Trump has arguably been the territorial aggressor’s most powerful legitimiser, if not downright enabler, as POTUS.

Iran shows the same carelessness with US might. Since the war began on February 28, nearly four-fifths of the THAAD inventory and roughly half of the Patriot interceptors have reportedly been used up. Analysts reckon that restoring the most advanced stocks could take between one and four years. Ukraine depends on the same Patriots to defend itself. Meanwhile, the regime in Tehran still stands. Expenditure without a strategy is not power.

America’s allies have drawn their conclusions. When Houthi missiles hit Saudi oil facilities and Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman reportedly telephoned Trump twice to request strikes on the Houthis and was refused. American help stayed limited to intelligence sharing while Britain flew defensive missions. When an ally of 70 decades is left to improvise its defence, every other capital takes note. In the end, it is the US that looks petty and cowardly.

Where Asia is concerned, Trump sold his tariffs as the instrument that would tame Beijing. Although the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs in February, Trump wasted little time in finding alternative legislation. That has been a pattern. But the truce now extended to January leaves Chinese goods facing tariffs of about 36.5 per cent, while the underlying disputes over technology, rare earths and purchases are merely postponed. Trump has reportedly hinted to Xi Jinping that arms sales for Taiwan could be used as leverage. That’s again an American president betraying an old dependent—and it’s surely foolish to show the adversary one’s hand.

On North Korea, denuclearisation was missing from the September summit’s fact sheet even as Pyongyang declared its nuclear status permanent. So much for making the world a safer place.

The sharpest and currently hottest illustration of how Trump has failed America is the chip saga. In December 2025, he permitted Nvidia’s H200 sales to China in return for a 25 per cent share of the proceeds, within a day of the Justice Department announcing a bust of a $160 million chip-smuggling network. Jensen Huang had lobbied hard for that opening, arguing against tighter limits on advanced chip exports to China. Then came the disclosures. On Sunday, November 8, Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife, days after the New York Times reported his close relationship with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive and suspected Chinese spy. US intelligence officials reportedly concluded she had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, and Megaspeed, which has denied involvement in chip smuggling, faces scrutiny over precisely that. A classified memo prepared under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s supervision had reportedly warned senior officials—and Trump himself was briefed on the suspicions and the relationship a year ago. Yet it remains unclear why the administration did not act on the information. And it’s not surprising that the blame is being laid at Trump’s door since the president supposedly knew but did nothing. He calls Huang an honourable man and says he would certainly take him to Asia. Nvidia’s board may have opened its investigation and the company can say it has no evidence that company secrets or national security were compromised. Of course, these are all allegations only, not findings. Besides, Huang himself is not accused of spying. Nevertheless, the lapse of judgment is the White House’s—it relaxed controls on the most strategic technology of the age while its own intelligence services were documenting the risk.

The postwar order was built by Americans from the ruins of the European continent, and from the knowledge of what unchecked aggression and the camps had wrought. It rested on credibility, the belief that American power would defend the rules and not bargain them away. Trump is fast spending that credibility and the world is poorer for it. In time, so will America be.