World leaders price American promises at two-year expiry after midterm rout

The morning after Americans flipped both houses of Congress to the Democrats, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz offered the read-out from Berlin: 'Quite frankly, Trump has largely governed without Congress for the past two years. Why should that change now?'

Merz was speaking hours after the vote, and his point traveled further than the compliment it pretended to be. The midterm results — a sharp rejection of a presidency that started a war with Iran, presided over rising gas and food prices, and unsettled allies from Seoul to Ottawa — did not so much restore trust in America as expose the machinery underneath it. Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group framed the question allied capitals are actually asking: 'For the country's allies, the question isn't whether America is back. It's back to what — and for how long?'

The Associated Press interviewed people around the world in the days after the vote, and the answers form a pattern. Joe Reeve, a 29-year-old London startup founder married to a Ukrainian, said: 'What everybody's learned is that America's system does allow for these wild swings. We all know, now, that America has an ability to rotate on a dime and spit in our faces.' Kim So-jung, an office worker in Yongin, South Korea, said one election 'does not restore anything' — 'We have to see what they actually do.' In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Aditya Surya put the test more precisely: whether the Democrats can reverse the tariffs.

Some 77 million Americans voted Trump into his second term; a majority of those who turned out two years later voted to check him. Foreign observers have noticed that both things are true simultaneously and that there is no mechanism guaranteeing which one prevails in 2028. Jen Gerson, editor of ReadtheLine.ca, said the President's hold on power over two terms 'is — and ought to remain — a warning sign to Canada and to all of America's allies.'

Trump himself showed no sign of retreating. The Friday after the vote he promoted Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration policy, to chief of staff. The same week, the administration pressed the Justice Department to prosecute Democrats it calls 'extortionist' — a governing style indistinguishable from the one the electorate just repudiated, now with a lame-duck's calendar.

For governments in Berlin, Tokyo and Abu Dhabi currently negotiating with Washington — on trade, on Ukraine, on Iran — the arithmetic is straightforward. Any American commitment now carries a two-year expiry date, and every agreement reached before the next election can be reopened by the one after it. Merz has already priced this in. The others are quietly doing the same: allies hedging is not ingratitude, it is the rational response to a partner that rotates on a dime.