Is Trump’s America First strategy starting to backfire as his allies tire?

The United States appears increasingly isolated when it comes to its global geopolitical and trade relationships as its allies reassess their ties to the world’s largest economy and consider going it alone.

“preliminary agreement“with Canada and rapprochement with the United Kingdomas well as the European Union’s agreements with India And South American countries.

These agreements and negotiations come after a year of US President Donald Trump’s “America First” trade and foreign policy during his second term, which saw the White House hit friend and foe alike with punitive trade tariffs, and even territorial threatswhile asserting its economic and geopolitical domination.

But this strategy could backfire, especially as America’s friends and partners seek to diversify their trade policies, largely to protect themselves from Trump’s unpredictability.

“Given what is happening with the United States and its foreign policy, as explained in the recently released report National Security Strategy … THE ‘medium powers“have to find their own agency and find different approaches,” Damian Ma, director of Carnegie China, a research center based in East Asia, told CNBC on Thursday.

“Countries are going to align on the basis of particular, map-specific interests, rather than on an overall values-based alignment,” he said, noting that while it was not a return to a divided Cold War mentality between opposing power blocs, it was rather a “recalibration” of national interests.

“No one knows where this recalibration and this new balance will end, but we see countries finally starting to act. The UK and Canada will not be the only ones,” he said, predicting a “flood of countries recalibrating their approach” to superpowers like China and the United States.

China and Canada agreed to reduce trade barriers in early January, prompting a furious response of Trump, while British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was in Beijing restore links with President Xi Jinping, with both sides agreeing to reduce barriers to trade and travel.

The EU has also been very busy, make progress in its trade agreement with Mercosur, as well as last week’s signing of a long-awaited free trade agreement with India.

The meetings came after Trump’s tirade against his allies during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he insulted and criticized various leadersincluding French President Emmanuel Macron and Carney.

Jimena Blanco, chief analyst at risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft, told CNBC there has been a measurable deterioration in how the United States communicates with its allies.

“Our data measuring verbal tensions between countries shows a deterioration in U.S. relations with some key allies over the last year,” she told CNBC on Thursday.

“The largest spikes were with Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Japan, Ireland, New Zealand and France, reflecting the impact of tense public exchanges between U.S. officials and their allied counterparts.”

But Blanco noted that U.S. allies have tended to respond to Washington’s policy changes by diversifying their economic exposure, rather than reversing their integration into the global trading system.

“The EU, Canada, Japan, Australia and the UK cannot afford to disengage from the United States, but are instead expanding trade with large emerging markets as well as with each other,” Blanco added, with emerging markets being the “big winners” from this diversification.