With allies exhausted, is President Trump’s America First strategy starting to backfire?

The United States appears increasingly isolated in global geopolitical and trade relations as its allies reassess their relationships with the world’s largest economies and consider going it alone.

In the new year, many countries and power blocs are pushing aside a more hostile and volatile United States to rebuild relationships, closer trade ties, and trade alliances. These include “preliminary agreements” with China and Canada, rapprochement with the United Kingdom, and European Union agreements with India and South American countries.

These agreements and negotiations come a year after President Donald Trump’s second term in an “America First” trade and foreign policy, in which the White House has threatened retaliatory tariffs and even territorial threats against friends and foes alike as it asserts its economic and geopolitical dominance.

But this strategy could backfire, especially as America’s friends and partners seek to diversify their trade policies, in no small part to protect themselves from President Trump’s unpredictability.

“Given what is happening with the United States and its foreign policy as articulated in the recently released National Security Strategy, the ‘middle powers’ need to find their own agency and find different approaches,” Damian Ma, director of the East Asia-based research center Carnegie China, told CNBC on Thursday.

“Countries will be aligning themselves based on specific a la carte interests rather than aligning on comprehensive values,” he said, noting that this is not a return to Cold War-era thinking divided by rival power blocs, but rather a “realignment” of national interests.

“No one knows where that recalibration and new balance will end, but we finally see countries starting to move. It’s not just Britain and Canada,” he said, predicting “a rush of countries recalibrating their approaches” to superpowers such as China and the United States.

This realignment has certainly accelerated recently, as a flurry of diplomatic and trade deals have been in the works since the new year, none of which involve the United States or President Trump.

China has been particularly busy, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and Prime Minister Starmer all visiting Beijing this month.

China and Canada agreed to lower trade barriers in early January, prompting an angry reaction from President Trump, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was in Beijing to reset relations with President Xi Jinping, and the two countries agreed to lower trade and travel barriers.

The EU has also been busy, making progress on its trade deal with Mercosur and signing a long-awaited free trade agreement with India last week.

These meetings were held in the wake of President Trump’s fierce attacks on allies during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he insulted and criticized various leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and President Carney.

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

“Our data measuring verbal tensions between countries shows that relations between the United States and some of its key allies have deteriorated over the past year,” he told CNBC on Thursday.

“The sharpest spikes were recorded in Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Japan, Ireland, New Zealand, and France, reflecting the impact of tense public exchanges between U.S. officials and those of allied nations.”

But Blanco noted that U.S. allies tend to respond to Washington’s policy shifts by diversifying their economic exposures rather than reversing their integration into the global trading system.

“The EU, Canada, Japan, Australia and the UK cannot sever ties with the US, but instead are increasing trade with and with large emerging markets,” Blanco said, adding that emerging markets are the “key winners” of this diversification.

Analysts liken the country’s rocky relationship with the United States during this period to rocky ground rather than grounds for divorce, and say America’s allies have little choice but to try to keep the United States on their side while exploring other avenues of trade and cooperation.

“Europe is too dependent on the United States, not only for security, but also technologically and economically, to prefer a divorced life as it is today,” Ivan Krastev, director of the Center for Liberal Strategy in Sofia, Bulgaria, said in a Goldman Sachs report.

“For Europe, there is a lot of talk about finding new allies, but working with other countries is not a quick and easy process,” he said, adding, “Europe will instead focus on showing the United States that Europe matters.”

Verisk Maplecroft senior analyst Joseph Parks agreed Thursday on CNBC that the U.S. is too big to be isolated and ultimately “too important from a technology, trade, currency and security perspective.”

Nevertheless, key allies will seek to rebalance global relationships in strategic areas in the long term, he said.

“The nature of globalization is going to change. The fragmentation of trade is going to create new and different groups that are going to try to make the economy more resilient,” he told CNBC on Thursday, adding that “geopolitical agility” is becoming increasingly important for businesses to navigate more uncertainty.

“Recent changes have accelerated the shift from ‘just-in-time’ to ‘just-in-time’ to strengthen supply chains, with companies turning to ‘near-shoring’ and ‘friend-shoring’ to source materials from trusted allies,” he said.

In the meantime, Parks said governments will consider “expanding trade agreements to build strategic flexibility and reduce market and supply chain dependence on specific countries.”