Follow this authorMax Boot's opinions

For decades, while there were sharp disagreements over specific foreign interventions such as the Vietnam and Iraq wars, there was an underlying, bipartisan consensus in U.S. politics that internationalism was in America’s interest. Between 1942 and 2016, right-wing isolationists had been almost entirely sidelined in U.S. politics, notwithstanding a brief outbreak of “Come home, America” isolationism on the left in the 1970s.

That has now changed, with Trump showing that it is hardly harmful — and may, in fact, be helpful — for a leading Republican politician to rail against U.S. allies and U.S. commitments overseas. Trump has single-handedly revived the phrase “America First,” which had been in well-deserved obloquy since Dec. 7, 1941. There are, alas, plenty of ambitious opportunists, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who are all too willing to abandon whatever Reaganite foreign policy principles they might once have possessed to pursue the political rewards of neo-isolationist positions like opposing aid to Ukraine.

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So U.S. allies will have to make contingency plans on the assumption that America may no longer be there for them in the future. Indeed, that is already occurring: Canada and the European members of NATO raised their defense spending by 11 percent in 2023, and Japan is raising its defense spending by 16.5 percent this year. But this may be only the start of a long-term shift away from the United States, with countries from Germany to South Korea debating whether they can still count on the U.S. nuclear umbrella or whether they need to acquire their own nukes.

While it’s not necessary for U.S. allies to go nuclear quite yet, it is vitally important that they do more to strengthen their multilateral defense ties to be less dependent on the whims of Washington. In the cases of Japan and South Korea, that means continuing to enhance their nascent military and intelligence ties in the face of growing threats from China and North Korea. In the case of Europe, that means not only continuing to raise defense spending — the target should be the Cold War standard of 3 to 5 percent of GDP, not the current goal of 2 percent — but also deepening cooperation on both defense production and military operations.

The European Union took an important step forward in March by unveiling its first defense industrial strategy, but much more needs to be done. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted in 2022, “European armed forces suffer major redundancies, with 29 different types of destroyers, 17 types of main battle tanks, and 20 types of fighter planes, as compared to four, one, and six, respectively, for the United States.” European countries have always been too jealous of........

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