You’ve heard it before, in some cases from me: There’s something inherently absurd about the notion that the US is less creditworthy than nations which depend on America to guarantee their territorial sovereignty.

Relatedly, it’s nonsensical on some level to suggest the issuer of the world’s reserve currency — the “lingua franca of the global economy,” as one academic put it recently — is a worse credit than countries which issue minor hard currencies or glorified commodity currencies, even if those countries exhibit more in the way of political and social stability than the US at any given moment.

However, Donald Trump’s thrown a spanner in the works by, among other things, flagrantly abusing the “exorbitant privilege” and exacerbating (beyond measure) America’s institutional credibility crisis. Through so-called “weaponized interdependence” on the foreign relations front and the degradation of the rule of law at home, Trump’s prompted truly existential questions about the dollar and Treasurys.

On Thursday, Trump took to TruthSocial to berate Jerome Powell for not cutting rates this week. The broadside would scarcely be worth mentioning if it simply constituted another anti-Powell screed of the sort we’re all accustomed to, but it was more than that.

After calling Powell a national security threat (it, um, takes one to know one), Trump proceeded to explain that the constellation of triple-AAA sovereign credits owe their top ratings to the US.

“Most of these countries are… thought of as elegant, solid and prime only because the US allows them to be,” Trump said, adding that for all the hoopla and derision, the tariffs he’s charging “still allow most of them to have a significant trade surplus” with America.

I gotta tell you: He’s not wrong. He’s not exactly right either, but when Trump says, as he did Thursday, that the US should be paying lower interest rates than countries which may or may not be capable of preserving their territorial sovereignty absent Article 5 (which is just a de facto commitment on the part of the Pentagon to summarily annihilate anyone crazy enough to preemptively attack a friend of America’s in the Global North), it’d be disingenuous to say he doesn’t have a point.

Seen through that lens, Trump’s habitual affronts to the system seem that much more misguided. If he succeeds in alienating US allies and/or forces them to rearm and diversify away from America both economically and for the purposes of defense, he’ll create a universe of non-beholden, better-managed states capable of providing for their own security.

In some (a lot of) ways, that’d be a positive development for the US and for the world. But it’d be a negative for the dollar and for relative US borrowing costs. If Trump thinks the US pays too much to borrow now compared to some of America’s vassal states, just wait until those erstwhile dependents lay claim to larger armies, forge new alliances and create new democratic blocs that don’t depend on American guarantees.

“I hope they all appreciate what our great Country has done for them,” Trump went on Thursday, oblivious as usual to the irony, which can be summed up with the rejoinder everyone wants to voice, but only Mark Carney will say out loud: “If you’re going to do something for me but you’re going to hold it over my head later, do me a favor — don’t do it at all.”