Not only is the emperor wearing no clothes, but he is standing alone in front of a world that is laughing at him.
President Donald Trump addressed top political leaders from around the world at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21. During the speech, Trump revisited his old, grievance-filled hits, such as “Sleepy Joe Biden” and the 2020 election being stolen. He was tilting at windmills, both literally and figuratively. He also appeared confused, mixing up Greenland with Iceland on more than one occasion.
But perhaps the most damaging part of his speech was the way Trump spoke of our North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. The casualties of his words and recent actions may be irreparable in the world’s eyes.
America needs allies to stay safe, but Trump’s narcissistic foreign policy tactics will never admit that. Trump’s foreign policy views are based on what he wants or what he thinks might benefit him, and rather than true isolationism, he treats security guarantees as protection rackets rather than as mutual interests.
This vision of solitary strength appeals to those who see alliances as burdens, foreign entanglements as traps, and international cooperation as weakness. But this thinking fundamentally misunderstands how power works in the modern world and ignores the hard experiences of history.
Alliances are not charity. They are investments in American security that return dividends far exceeding their costs. Consider the global network of military bases that enables American strength. From Ramstein in Germany to Japan, Qatar to Australia, these installations exist because host nations permit them.
Without allied cooperation, the United States would lose its ability to respond rapidly to threats, collect critical intelligence, and maintain credible deterrence against adversaries.
The intelligence sharing among Five Eyes partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, provides capabilities no single nation could replicate alone. This cooperation depends on decades of trust. Treating allies as transactional partners erodes that trust and the unique access it provides.
Maintaining the United States' technological advantage also depends on allied cooperation. The most advanced semiconductors powering everything from smartphones to weapons systems come from Taiwan and South Korea. Leading-edge research happens in partnerships spanning allied universities and laboratories. Supply chains for critical technologies stretch across friendly nations. Alienating these partners doesn't make America more independent; it makes the country more vulnerable to disruption and weakness.
Trump seems incapable of recognizing the ultimate, and non-quantifiable sacrifice that our NATO partners made. When the United States invoked NATO Article 5 after Sept. 11, allied nations answered. They fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq, with over 1,000 non-American NATO troops giving their lives in that conflict.
Denmark, which has sovereignty over Greenland, suffered 43 fatalities in the war in Afghanistan, the highest loss per capita within the coalition forces.
It is particularly repulsive when Trump said, “The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO. I want to tell you that. And when you think about it, nobody can dispute it. We give so much, and we get so little in return. And I've been a critic of NATO for many years. And yet I've done more to help NATO than any other president by far than any other person.”
Trump is no student of history because if he were, he would understand that it can provide a strong warning. In the 1930s, democratic nations failed to maintain their alliances and stand together against rising authoritarianism. The result was the most destructive war in human history. The postwar alliance system was built on that painful lesson: collective security prevents conflicts that cost far more than alliance maintenance ever could.
America standing alone isn't a strength; it's strategic suicide. In a dangerous world, allies fortify American power, extend its reach, share its obligations, and provide the partnerships necessary for addressing threats no nation can face successfully in isolation. The choice isn't between independence and entanglement; it's between security through cooperation and vulnerability through isolation.
So, the big cheese stands alone, and Americans are less safe because of it.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.