The world stage looks completely different to a small country. Large global powers may set the tectonic shifts of geopolitics in motion, but the other players have always had to figure out how to survive in the cracks in between.
In two months, the Trump administration has threatened allies with tariffs and trade wars, dismantled foreign aid and silenced Voice of America. President Trump scolded the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office and withheld military aid and intelligence sharing. America joined Russia, North Korea and Belarus in opposing a resolution in the U.N. General Assembly that demanded Russia immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has treated President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a reliable partner for discussion.
A Trump foreign policy doctrine is becoming clear, at least in outline. Mr. Trump’s America seeks to lead a world in which the great nuclear powers take what they can. They choose their spheres of influence, the size of their territories and the shape of their borders. To other big powers Mr. Trump’s approach may be understood as transactional or realist. But to many of the smaller democracies of Eastern Europe and South and East Asia, which have for decades hitched their fate to an America that they thought would enable them to continue to exist near the border of Russia or China, the Trump doctrine is the foreign policy of betrayal.
Since the fall of Communism, many of the small and medium-size countries in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic States, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, adapted to meet the demanding standards of liberal democracy. Those countries wrote and amended constitutions, democratized political life, built market economies and signed trade agreements. Some even agreed to the installation of American military bases or secret C.I.A. prisons. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, others followed later. This adaptation was imperfect and uneven — consider Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and the eight-year rule of Poland’s nationalist-populist Law and Justice party, which did not end until 2023 — but the overall direction of travel always seemed clear: The small democracies of Eastern Europe would modernize and democratize and, by forging the strongest possible ties with the world’s premier democratic superpower, become more wealthy and secure. (Keeping the differences in mind, much the same can be said in Asia about South Korea and Taiwan.)
This faith in the idea of the West required some degree of diplomatic forgetting of earlier betrayals. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, responded to Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by saying that it was part of a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” In the 1930s, it seemed easy for Mr. Chamberlain to overlook that a totalitarian country was seizing land from a democratic one, but those countries did not forget. Many small nations also carry scars of the betrayal of the meeting in 1945 at Yalta, where the leaders of the great powers decided their fate without consultation, and the redrawn borders tore families apart.
Yalta consigned Eastern Europe to brutal decades behind the Iron Curtain. But in the early 1990s, after the fall of Communism, fledgling democracies chose to again believe that an association with the West — its image freshly burnished and shining — would bring freedom, wealth and stability.
