Stephen M. Walt
a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.Donald Trump looks up as he sits beside China's President Xi Jinping during a tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing on Nov. 8, 2017.Donald Trump looks up as he sits beside China's President Xi Jinping during a tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing on Nov. 8, 2017. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
April 1, 2025, 4:42 AM
With all the chaos currently engulfing U.S. foreign policy, it’s easy to lose sight of some more fundamental aspects of global politics. We’ve all been distracted by Signalgate, the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, the Trump administration’s increasingly obvious animus toward Europe, a looming trade war, the self-inflicted wound of a deteriorating U.S.-Canada relationship, and the systematic assault on democratic institutions inside the United States. If you’re having trouble keeping up with all this mishigas, you’re not alone.
Let me pull you away from the headlines for a moment and invite you to focus on a big issue with long-term implications: the future of U.S. alliances in Asia. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking a break from using an insecure app to text his colleagues (and a journalist) about attack plans in Yemen and is off trying to reassure U.S. allies in Asia. I wish him luck because the combination of Hegseth’s inexperience and the administration’s policies to date won’t make that easy.
Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Bluesky
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