As they watched Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky evicted from the White House last week after an unprecedented live televised quarrel with President Donald Trump and his Vice President JD Vance, some of America's closest allies began to swiftly reappraise decades of foreign and defence policy.
A mineral deal between Washington and Ukraine appears to remain theoretically on the table, particularly after a written apology from Mr Zelensky was read out by Mr Trump in his March 4 address to both houses of Congress. European leaders are still scrambling to gauge to what extent they can fill the gap to keep the Kyiv government fighting while racing to build up their own defences.
Speaking late on Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the world had become more "brutal" and peace in Europe no longer guaranteed, announcing talks to use France's independent nuclear deterrent to better protect the continent.
Much more broadly, US long-term partners who have barely questioned their closeness to Washington and dependence in the areas like weapons systems -- nations such as Britain, Japan and Germany -- are now tearing up such assumptions almost overnight.
"We may be in the same situation tomorrow," an MP from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party told Nikkei, referring to Ukraine's abrupt loss of US strategic support. "That's why Japan cannot ignore Ukraine, and why it needs to strengthen its defence capability."
Those discussions got underway in earnest on Thursday at a European Union summit, with nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban perhaps predictably throwing grit into the works by suggesting he might veto key decisions.
Ukraine is desperate for air defences, but so is the rest of Europe, and it does not yet build its own anti-aircraft missiles, or enough artillery shells and drones.
"The West seems to be reorganising itself and the security architecture it created in the most painful way possible," former RAF Air Marshal Edward Stringer said on X.
But just how much more painful it might get is hard to say.
On Thursday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen vocalised publicly the worry many European officials have voiced more privately for months: that a swift end to the war in Ukraine might see Russia rearm quickly and either attack that country again or another NATO nation.
PESSIMISM IN UKRAINE
Britain has pointedly not joined European criticism of the US president. The UK is in the final stages of a strategic defence review that had been expected to simply endorse Britain's long-running partnership with Washington to use US Trident missiles for Britain's nuclear deterrent.
If the trends of the last week continue for much longer, the wisdom of that may be questioned even by traditionally pro-US opposition Conservative MPs. For all that, however, most nations still hope to avoid overly upsetting the Trump administration.
In fact, the main foreign policy development touted in his March 4 speech was the imposition of previously-trailed tariffs on multiple nations including China, Canada and Mexico -- as well as renewed determination to take control of Danish territory Greenland for the US "one way or the other", as well as the Panama Canal.
Britain and France are still talking up the prospect of a European force to stabilise and protect Ukraine if and when a peace deal is signed. The London summit appeared successful in restoring a battered Zelensky's spirits and teasing out a written apology to Mr Trump from Ukrainian leader.
Within Ukraine, however, one analyst described the mood as "pessimistic".
The fact European nations have kept twinning criticism of the Trump administration with what sometimes feels awkwardly like demands for the US to deliver "backstop" security guarantees is clearly infuriating Mr Trump and those around him.
Overall, most US allies now expect a long-term trend towards greater US isolationism.
The greatest driver of that has arguably been Vice President Vance, and that appears to have often been deliberate.
His speech to the Munich Security Conference last month had already raised some hackles, as did his needling of Mr Zelensky at the White House and criticism of the UK during Prime Minister Keir Starmer's visit that same week.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TAIWAN
As vice president, Mr Vance has a strong chance of being the Republican candidate at the next US election in 2028, as Mr Trump cannot seek a third term under the US Constitution.
With the Democrats still in disarray, Mr Vance might well emerge the victor. Should he serve two terms in office, that could see him dominating US foreign policy for well over a decade -- he has already made more of a splash in the last few weeks than most vice presidents have ever managed.
At the swearing-in of Mr Trump's pick as Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Mr Vance made it clear he would be particularly reluctant to deploy US troops long-term to protect allies in future.
More broadly, under Mr Trump the US looks set to pull funding from some long-term areas of defence, including army troop formations that would fight in Europe, in favour of ships for the Pacific, unmanned systems, a renewed focus on US border security and a missile defence shield now dubbed "Golden Dome" that would protect against foreign ballistic missiles.
In the longer term, the focus on border and missile defence -- coupled with Mr Trump's hope of expanding US control to Greenland and the Panama Canal -- all appear to speak to a US refocusing on its immediate homeland defence and much less on protecting allies.
For all the short-term focus on Ukraine, in the longer run it is what is happening in Asia that may be both more dangerous and important.
"If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we are ready to fight until the end," China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
It described the US blaming China for the fentanyl drug crisis as a "flimsy excuse" and warned of "legitimate and necessary" countermeasures. US law enforcement say most fentanyl is made in Mexico but from Chinese ingredients.
In more normal times, comments such as those might have received a lot more media coverage.
Taiwan, increasingly threatened by a Chinese military that US intelligence says has been ordered by President Xi Jinping to be ready to invade by 2027, seems particularly in the firing line.
At his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this week, incoming US Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby warned of a "dramatic deterioration of the military balance" with China. He suggested that Taiwan -- which currently spends about three percent of gross domestic product on defence -- should be spending at least ten percent.
In the past, Mr Colby -- who has for years advocated pulling US resources from Europe to confront a rising China -- called for Taiwan to be given security guarantees.
He said he had now shifted that approach because of the worsening strategic situation, implying that if Taiwan could not defend itself, the island might have to be abandoned.
"I've always said that Taiwan is very important to the United States, but it's not an existential interest," he said, saying the real priority was stopping China dominating the entire wider region.
Successive US administrations have long maintained what they termed "strategic ambiguity" over whether they would fight for Taiwan, with Mr Trump's predecessor Joe Biden by far the most assertive in recent history that the US would fight for the island.
Getting a similar certainty from the Trump administration appears a lot less likely -- indeed, the president himself has explicitly ruled out revealing his hand.
On Monday, Mr Trump met with CC Wei, CEO of the world's largest manufacturer of high-tech chips, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, to celebrate the movement of some manufacturing and potentially research to Arizona.
Mr Trump said the move would "diversify to a very safe location" in a way that would have "a big impact if something should happen" with Taiwan.
That will not have allayed worries on the island or elsewhere that "something" might be coming, either under the current unpredictable administration or an even more isolationist successor. Reuters
Peter Apps is a columnist with Reuters.