US allies are sitting out Trump’s trade war with China

Tariff moves by President Trump are alienating some allies.

America needs its allies and partners for what is shaping up as a protracted contest for geopolitical primacy now that President Trump has unleashed a trade war against China. They are in no rush to take sides.

Some 70 countries currently negotiating tariff relief with the U.S. should “approach China as a group” together with Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week. Other U.S. officials suggested joint efforts to starve China of modern technologies and trade opportunities.

The problem is, many European and Asian partners aren’t sure to what extent they are still allied with Washington. Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” order, after all, slapped them with sky-high tariffs that made no distinction between long-term adversaries and faithful allies.

The shock from this attack, partially reversed only as a result of a U.S. market rout, with additional exceptions quietly adopted on Friday, has added to months of concerns about how much Trump’s America can be relied upon in an increasingly brutal world. That is especially so now that Trump has linked trade concessions to security cooperation.

Trump had outraged European leaders even before the new tariffs, with his embrace of Russia and arm-twisting of Ukraine, his claims on Greenland and Canada, and his description of the European Union as an organization designed to “screw us.” Even after the partial suspension, these tariffs on the EU amount to $59 billion a year, said French President Emmanuel Macron. That is just below the $66.5 billion in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine over more than three years of war.

“Friends and allies and foes are being treated the same, with no respect, and everything has become a zero-sum game,” said Jeppe Kofod, a former foreign minister of Denmark, which is refusing Trump’s demands to surrender Greenland. “It’s crazy time.”

Instead of hewing closer to Washington’s line, voices are growing in Europe for a reversal of the EU’s China policy, which has increasingly aligned itself with American moves to deny China modern technologies and investment opportunities.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, spoke with Chinese Premier Li Qiang shortly after Trump’s tariffs were imposed, and an EU-China summit is being planned for July. Meanwhile, the EU and China last week agreed to restart talks to settle a dispute over Chinese electric-vehicle imports, which the bloc hit with tariffs a few months ago.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, ahead of his visit to Beijing on Friday, called for Europe to review its relationship with China as it adapts to the new reality. His statement provoked a rebuke from Bessent, who warned that cooperating with Beijing would be “cutting your own throat.”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a different reaction as he welcomed Sánchez. Europe and China, he said, must “jointly safeguard economic globalization and the international trade environment, and jointly resist unilateral and bullying actions.”

While Europe hopes China could help blunt an expansionist Russia, Asia-Pacific partners including Japan, South Korea and Australia worry first about Beijing’s intentions to dominate the region. Dependent on America for their security, these countries are also more reluctant to openly criticize the Trump administration.

But they, too, are adjusting to a situation where American friendship can no longer be taken for granted.

“Now is actually the worst time to be a U.S. ally, because Trump and his people think that the allies have been ripping them off more than the adversaries,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of international relations at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “The U.S. will get away with this in the short term, countries will have to concede. But in the medium and longer term, it’s alienating itself from its partner countries. Trump is giving China a golden opportunity.”

Even for countries such as Australia, so close to the U.S. culturally and politically, the bond is becoming more transactional.

“The relationship between America and its allies has been disrupted by America,” said Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who led his country during Trump’s first term. “But while we may not share values in the way we did because of Mr. Trump’s stated change, we will continue to share interests. So it’s too early to call an end to the American alliance system.”

Stock prices in Australia last week reflect the turmoil that U.S. tariffs caused in global markets.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns that Trump is alienating American allies. “They need the United States of America and our business model and our markets to survive, and the president is using that leverage to our advantage,” she said.

Government officials in Asia and beyond fear that the new U.S.-China trade war has the potential to escalate and make a direct military confrontation between the two superpowers more likely.

“With the China-U.S. competition, the economic links had been a stabilizer in an increasingly fraught relationship,” said Robert Ward, Japan chair at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There was an understanding that these two countries had a symbiotic relationship. That is now upended.”

Not everyone is convinced that the U.S., especially if it continues dismantling its own network of alliances, will ultimately gain the upper hand. By backing down on his initial tariffs, Trump has already shown that he is susceptible to market movements, and there will be more domestic pressure ahead of midterm elections next year, said Ettore Sequi, a former Italian ambassador to Beijing.

“Being an autocracy, China, however, can ask the Chinese to make sacrifices for a sufficiently long period of time, something that democracies can’t,” he said. “There is an asymmetry of time here.”

Most countries today have China, not the U.S., as their biggest trade partner. The value of Australia’s exports to the U.S., for example, is only 15% of its exports to China. That connecting tissue will be hard, if not impossible, to unravel to please a U.S. administration that changes its policies almost daily. “The U.S. is building walls and China is building bridges,” said Shen Shiwei, founder of the China Briefing newsletter and a fellow at the Zhejiang Normal University.

Trump has questioned the value of alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and defense treaties in Asia. These allies, however, are crucial for the projection of American power—not just through offering their territory for bases, but also through cooperation on issues such as technology transfers that prevent China from gaining the military edge.

Thousands of soldiers from Europe, Canada and Australia were killed or maimed in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past quarter-century, and Washington’s casual refusal to take that debt into account would inevitably contribute to allies’ calculations on whether to join the U.S. in future conflicts.

“America is defecting from a system that has worked pretty well for everybody, and particularly well for U.S. allies,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former American diplomat. “And I think that as a result they cease being U.S. allies, and that means that all the things that we were getting from them because they were part of the system, we won’t get anymore.”

Shipping containers in Shenzhen, China. Most countries have China as their biggest trade partner.

Unlike Washington, China isn’t asking countries to choose their camp. “No country is stupid. They are always hedging. The idea that countries have to pick sides between China and the U.S. is totally wrong, it will never happen,” said retired People’s Liberation Army senior colonel Zhou Bo, a senior fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “People nowadays are picking sides by issues, not by countries.”

European relations with China were poisoned over the past three years by Beijing’s support for Russia, which wouldn’t have been able to prosecute its war on Ukraine without Chinese diplomatic and economic backing. While that assistance continues, on the diplomatic front something unthinkable happened in recent months: Russia and the U.S. voted against a United Nations resolution on Ukraine, while China abstained and criticized Washington for excluding Europe from peace negotiations.

As the post-World War II rules-based order morphs into empires with spheres of influence, Europe must balance against both Russia and America—and only China could provide that counterweight, said Bernard Guetta, a French member of the European Parliament. Even a full-blown political alliance between Europe and Beijing could emerge over time if the U.S. doesn’t change its course, he said.

“A Chinese question exists now because the new U.S. administration not only hasn’t made a single friendly gesture toward the EU, but has only made unpleasant and unsettling ones,” said Guetta, a critic of the Chinese Communist Party. “This doesn’t mean that we suddenly have to praise the Chinese regime. But there are historical precedents—Roosevelt and Churchill once relied on Stalin, and that doesn’t mean that they converted to Communism.”

Other European politicians are more cautious, saying the deterioration in China-Europe relations was primarily caused not by American pressure but by Beijing’s behavior, which isn’t getting any better.

“Tension with the U.S. doesn’t mean that we must immediately lean on China,” said Nicolas Zippelius, a German parliament member from CDU, the dominant party in the incoming government. The preferred solution should be to diversify trade with like-minded countries such as Japan or Persian Gulf states, he said.

“This is going to be very tough,” he conceded.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com