Trump’s America has stopped apologizing for existing, and it made all the difference

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Strength invites respect. Weakness invites contempt. I learned that lesson in the Marine Corps, and the last eighteen months have proven it again on the world stage.

Barack Obama opened his presidency with what critics rightly called an “apology tour,” telling audiences from Strasbourg to Cairo that America had been arrogant and dismissive of other nations. Joe Biden spent four years compounding this, wandering off from world leaders on camera at the 2021 G7 in Cornwall and needing note-cards just to find his seat. Foreign delegations noticed and adjusted their expectations of who was actually running the meeting.

I have spent more than thirty years reading counterparties across negotiating tables in private equity, private credit, and hedge fund deals. The first rule never changes: The party that needs the deal more loses the upper hand the moment the other side senses it.

Nations behave the same way. An adversary who doesn’t believe you will enforce your position will test it. An ally who believes you will subsidize its defense forever has no reason to pay for its own.

Under President Trump, that dynamic has shifted and shifted hard.

At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, member states agreed to more than double their defense spending target, committing to 5 percent of GDP annually by 2035, with 3.5% dedicated to core military capability.

That did not happen because European finance ministries discovered fiscal discipline on their own. It happened because Trump made continued American backstopping conditional on their compliance.

Last week in Ankara, he returned to collect, pressing what the administration calls “NATO 3.0” — a framework built around Europe shouldering more of its own security. Spain balked at the full target; Trump threatened to make Madrid pay through tariffs instead.

The Justice Department delivered a parallel message to a different set of institutions that have grown accustomed to America asking permission. On June 29, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to International Criminal Court President Judge Tomoko Akane, rejecting any assertion of the court’s jurisdiction over American citizens. The reasoning tracks basic treaty law: the U.S. never ratified the Rome Statute, and a state that never consents to a treaty is not bound by the tribunal it creates.

A cabinet letter cannot repeal the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002 — that statute already forbids U.S. cooperation with International Criminal Court investigations, summonses, and extraditions of American nationals. What is new is the willingness to say so out loud, without hedging. Critics will claim that, by ignoring international courts, we forfeit the standing to invoke the rule of law elsewhere. That argument collapses on its own premise: America never consented to be ruled by the International Criminal Court, and consent is the foundation upon which the rule of law rests.

Do these tough international stances have consequences? I’m glad you asked. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported in June that new foreign direct investment into the United States totaled $232.2 billion in 2025, a jump of nearly 50% from 2024. Layer on the Trump administration’s broader investment framework with Japan, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, and other partners, and combined commitments run past $5 trillion.

Pledges are not deployed dollars, and any investor should track drawdowns rather than press releases. Critics call the approach coercive, and they have a point: The European Union’s own commitment wobbled after Trump’s designs on Greenland surfaced. Strong-arming allies carries real cost. But more importantly, capital does not commit to a country it expects to keep apologizing for its own existence. It commits to a country it expects to keep enforcing its own rules.

Energy tells the same story. The U.S. exported a record 111 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas in 2025, passing Qatar to become the world’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. Europe is now consuming roughly two-thirds of those cargoes as it weans itself from Russian pipeline gas.

Meanwhile, U.S. crude oil production hit a record above 13.6 million barrels a day last summer. Total U.S. energy exports reached a record 31 quadrillion BTU in 2025. A country that supplies its allies’ energy and demands they fund their own defense is not begging for a seat at the table. It is the table.

I coached kids in track and rugby, and the lesson I drilled into every one of them is the same one the Marine Corps drilled into me: You don’t ask the other side for respect — you build the conditions where the other side has no choice but to show respect.

A Justice Department letter that draws a hard line with the Hague, a NATO summit that finally produced a real spending commitment, and a trillion-dollar wave of inbound capital and a country that fuels half of Europe’s winters are not separate stories. These are all the same story, told four different ways. America stopped asking. That’s what sovereignty is supposed to look like.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.

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Barack Obama

Joe Biden

Todd Blanche

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