I don't agree with this. I feel that many of our allies considered us to be a pillar of stability that they could count on to be fairly predictable. That illusion is now shattered and they see that a US President can undo decades of normality on a midnight whim straight from his phone. That has caused recalculations throughout the world, and not in our favor. They will all consider the implications of future US Presidents behaving in this fashion and adjust accordingly.
There is no upside to the way Trump handled our alliances. While he got some NATO members to pay more of their dues, he has also weakened NATO considerably at a time when it could have grown dramatically in strength. Adding Sweden and Finland, and having Poland rapidly becoming a regional powerhouse, we could have leveraged our alliances to further weaken Russia while she blundered. Generational opportunities have been squandered. And this is my biggest beef with Trump: he had multiple opportunities to grow American strength, and was even on the path to doing so, but his aggressive incompetence sank his ambitions and weakened our country.
