Does the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 majority ruling on February 20—invalidating Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” under IEEPA—finally curb his long-standing, self-serving, deal-by-deal approach to allies and adversaries alike?
This seems to be a difficult question to answer, given that soon after the Supreme Court verdict, Trump reimposed some tariffs, though they were more limited and conditional.
Be that as it may, the growing consensus among the strategic pundits is that tariffs are likely to persist throughout the Trump Administration in one form or another.
Therefore, in all likelihood, the adversarial Court judgment will not refine what experts say about Trump’s theory of “model ally”, even though it could throw into question the individual trade deals that major allies and partners like the UK, Japan, South Korea, and even India have secured with the US.
In 2025, senior officials of the Trump Administration reportedly said that countries such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Israel, Poland, Germany, and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) could be “model allies”.
Though the criteria for being America’s model allies have not been officially defined, in a recent scholarly work, Dr. Peter K. Lee and Ms. Esther Dunay of the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies have identified three of them.
It may be noted that, while the term “ally” has expanded to mean anyone who provides support in a general sense, it is fundamentally rooted in security, international law, and military strategy.
Lee and Dunay argue that though the previous Administrations had a broad list of indicators such as fair trade ties, adherence to democratic values, cooperation against Russia and China, and increased contributions to regional public goods to compete against China’s rising influence for being model allies of the US, for President Trump, three criteria have been the new benchmarks.
Criterion 1 (one) is the variable defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). Trump has always called for the allies to spend sufficiently on their own defense.
In fact, he succeeded in extracting a commitment from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members to raise their core defense spending from the long-unfulfilled 2 (two) percent of GDP to 5 (five) percent, including 3.5 percent in core spending plus an additional 1.5 percent in security-related spending.
As Eurasian Times had previously discussed, the 5 percent benchmark is the “new global standard” for non-European allies as well, according to the 24-page National Defense Strategy (NDS) of the United States, released on January 23. It urges Indo-Pacific allies, especially the ROK and Japan, “to increase defense spending.”
In fact, for Taiwan, President Trump and Assistant Secretary of War for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs John Noh have argued that Taipei should be increasing defense spending to 10 percent of GDP, not 3.5 percent.
Criterion 2 (two) for being a model ally of the Trump-led America is the size of arms purchases from the US and investments in the US defense industrial base.
Giving the example of the Indo-Pacific region, Lee and Dunay point out how the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) and 2026 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) Trump’s National Security Strategy talk of defending the First Island Chain (FIC) “with critical but limited U.S. support,” and “greater military investment from ourselves and from allies and partners.”
They say that all the three allies in the region (Japan, ROK or South Korea and Australia) have consistently been among the top importers of US major arms and “overwhelmingly sourced their arms from the United States in the period from 2020 to 2024: Japan (97%), South Korea (86%), and Australia (81%)”.
Similarly, Australia and the ROK have committed to nuclear-powered submarines in partnership with the United States. As EurAsian Times reported earlier, under the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) partnership, Washington has already received just over $4.6 billion from Australia to boost submarine production and support improvements to the US submarine industrial base.
The ROK (South Korea) has agreed to security-adjacent investments, such as the $150 billion investment in the US for naval and commercial shipbuilding. Japan’s $550 billion package, including energy imports, critical minerals, and shipbuilding, and Australia’s $3 billion joint critical minerals initiative with the United States to support defense manufacturing, are also to be seen in this manner.
Though Lee and Dunay have confined their study primarily to the Indo-Pacific, one may extend this phenomenon to Europe as well. According to a recent study by the European Union for Security Studies, Europe continues to be a major purchaser of US weapons, based on data on Foreign Military Sales (FMS), which account for the vast majority of US military sales.
In 2025, FMS notifications to the US Congress amounted to USD 104.2 billion, of which Europe accounted for USD 38.6 billion, making it the largest purchaser of US defence products that year (37% of total FMS). And if the European Union members (out of Europe as a whole) are taken into account, they spent USD 31.2 billion on FMS, accounting for 28% of the total that year (around €100 billion, or USD 109 billion).
Ironically, though Trump has been keen to acquire Denmark’s autonomous territory of Greenland, that country was the largest purchaser of US weapons through FMS, followed by Taiwan and Israel!
Criterion 3 (three) for becoming Trump’s model ally is taking greater responsibility for regional deterrence along the FIC, according to Lee and Dunay. The idea here is to build credible deterrence by denial to prevent China from achieving regional hegemony.
This also implies that allies and partners will allow the US military greater access to their ports and other facilities.
As it is, the United States already maintains a significant forward presence in the region, with 28,500 personnel based in the ROK, 55,000 in Japan, and 2,500 on rotational presence in Australia.
How many countries in the world really fulfill the above three criteria to be model allies of the Trump-led America in a strict sense of the term? Very few, though Lee and Dunay assert that South Korea satisfies all three in the Indo-Pacific region. Most will fail the criterion of defense spending of 5 (five) percent of the GDP. They may have committed to doing so, but have not done so as of now.
These three criteria of becoming model allies do not seem to be affected by the adversarial Supreme Court judgment, though there may be a sign of relief for the allies like Canada, Japan, and European nations on the issue of trade deficits; Trump’s theory often treated trade deficits with allies as a “national security threat” justifying tariffs under IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act,) is no longer valid.
In other words, the US Supreme Court does not seem to have helped these traditional US allies become model allies as long as they do not hike their defense budgets, buy enough American arms, or invest substantially in American defense industries.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
