President Donald Trump insists his tariffs on U.S. imports of foreign goods will bolster the economy. With his 90-day pause on higher-rate tariffs and his shift to 10% standard-rate tariffs on Wednesday, Trump appears to have realized his policies were doing far more harm than good. He is right to change tack.

Still, apart from Trump’s now-125%-rate tariffs on China, which are justified in confronting America’s keystone nemesis, Trump’s tariff policies are causing significant damage to U.S. alliances. This is particularly problematic regarding the effect on U.S.-led alliances focused on China.

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Until now, the United States has generally successfully counterbalanced China’s power by offering a better deal to wealthy nations than China. The U.S. deal has centered on relatively free trade bound to relatively predictable governance and the rule of law. In contrast, China’s offer centers on access to a vast marketplace alongside selective, if significant, foreign investments.

China’s problem is that everyone knows it will spy, steal, and break its word if that action seems favorable to Beijing at any one moment. Put simply, where America has traditionally been a predictable source of mutually beneficial long-term prosperity, China has been a source of short-term prosperity that predominantly favors China, is unreliable, and undermines other nations’ sovereign power.

Trump’s tariffs have fundamentally altered this dynamic. As I noted last week, China now appears to U.S. allies from Australia to the United Kingdom not as a difficult trading partner and ideological adversary, but as an economic escape hatch. Facing tens of billions of dollars in lost exports to the U.S., U.S. allies are now desperate for any markets to provide an alternate destination for their products. Trump’s new 90-day pause and interim 10% tariff baseline will only somewhat alleviate these concerns. And while China was engaged in its own frenzied effort to boost exports even before the introduction of U.S. tariffs, Chinese President Xi Jinping is unlikely to miss the priceless opportunity Trump has given him.

After all, if Xi even marginally increases his imports of goods from Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, he will have the prospect of fraying the American alliance structure. True, leaders of these nations will be cautious about moving too close to China too quickly in such a scenario. They know that Xi is not a man to be trusted. But these leaders are also ultimately accountable to the electorates that gave them power in the first place. And if, as is likely, Trump’s tariffs cause a global economic downturn, those voters are going to be focused on bread-and-butter economic problems far more than they are on broader security concerns, such as Chinese military agendas toward Taiwan and the Philippines, China’s terrible human rights record, Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, and Trump administration efforts to bolster actions against Chinese challenges.

This is a big problem for the Trump administration.

Since Trump entered office in January, his administration has rightly bolstered U.S. efforts to corral Chinese aggression. It has articulated the need to refocus U.S. military resources on China’s threat, abandoning the dangerous pretense that the U.S. military can do everything, everywhere, and still stand ready to defeat China in a war over Taiwan. The administration’s policy choice to prioritize China’s threat reflects an understanding of Beijing’s unique status in having both the ambition and the capacity to seize global hegemony from Washington.

Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, seeks to overturn the U.S.-led order that has dominated international politics since 1945. Xi wants a new order in which the political calculations of all sovereign nations must defer to the Chinese Communist Party’s desires. To secure his brave new world, Xi intends to dominate key economic supply chains and coerce all those seeking to use trade routes running through the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Xi wants to ensure that nations must buy first and greatly from China, quickly share their best technology with China, and obey Chinese policymakers if they are to receive Xi’s blessing to trade on the international market. This is why China has militarized and claimed sovereignty over the near entirety of the South China Sea. It is why China has sought to oversupply global markets with state-subsidized goods. Xi wants to be able to tell nations from Vietnam to Germany that if they want to grow their economies, they do his bidding.

The problem is that Xi wants to make China richer and more powerful at everyone else’s expense. Chinese Communist global hegemony would mean a loss of freedom and prosperity for everyone except the Communist Party elites. It would mean surrendering innovative technologies in return for economic scraps from Xi’s table. It would mean free people being forced to do what a communist autocracy wants them to do. Political prostitutes for the Chinese Communists, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, might be OK with this, but very few others would benefit.

That brings us back to U.S. allies.

The Trump administration’s challenge is that any practical efforts to restrain Chinese Communist hegemony require the support of the allies that Trump has now alienated. How many allies will now want to risk Chinese economic retaliation by supporting new U.S. initiatives focused on China? How many allied populations will want their leaders to take risks for America when the leader of America is making them suffer economically while proclaiming how those same leaders are now “kissing my ass”? How many allies will trust Trump on matters of grave consequence when all he appears able to offer is an uncertain respite such as that entailed by his Wednesday tariff announcement? To trust America today is to trust in the better angels of Trump’s Truth Social account.

In turn, motivated by their electorates and loss of faith in American reliability, foreign allied leaders will likely judge that it is in their favor to do the minimum necessary to preserve their alliance with Washington rather than take bolder action to support the U.S. strategic interest of stopping China’s destructive rise.

This concern isn’t just about the nuts and bolts of economic self-interest. With the ramshackle form of these tariffs — coming in at full speed, burning up the market and retirement accounts for a week, and then reverting to a lesser form — Trump has shown himself to be an unpredictable and unreliable friend. That might change in the future, but today, at least, Trump’s America does not seem like a good bet to wager on. Trump has altered the risk-reward calculation that goes with American friendship.

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This is not to say that Trump should ignore protectionism where it is excessive. His tariffs on China are positive. And where American interests are plainly being treated unfairly by allies, as with the European Union’s extortionist protectionism against U.S. technology companies, Trump has a responsibility to respond. But he should do so predictably and proportionately.

Because predictability and proportionality are what set the U.S. apart from China. Few things are certain when it comes to the Trump administration, but one is manifestly certain: If the administration wishes to succeed in its righteous effort to hold back Communist China’s evil empire, the U.S. will need allies at its side.