President Donald Trump is moving at breakneck speed to reorder America’s relationships with the world. His actions may work in the short run but pose risks to our nation’s security in the long term. Our country is the primary actor in the international system we created after World War II. Key to the system is its hub and spoke design with the United States as the hub that helps coordinate the actions of countries around the world. South Korea and Japan are a good example of the system’s value, since neither country would work with the other without American mediation, and our efforts to counter China are vastly more effective with the help of these allies.

Our strong position in the international system isn’t cost-free, and the United States spends a significant amount of money on overseas military bases and support for international allies. Attacks on these expenditures are common but underestimate the value of these alliances to the American people. Our alliances have helped create the longest period of peace between great powers in the history of the world. Since 1945, the United States has lost nearly 100,000 of our sons and daughters in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But there was no repeat of the world wars that defined the 20th century, and few examples of countries attacking one another, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine being a notable exception. America’s alliances and our military presence around the world serve as guard rails preventing humanity’s worst impulses from manifesting as conflicts that would risk the lives and prosperity of Americans.

Trump’s policies, including his widespread use of tariffs, undermine this system by encouraging countries to form security and trade relationships that don’t include the United States. Countries will come to believe they can no longer rely on their good relationships with the United States to provide them access to markets and security guarantees. Even our closest friends will work hard to replace American markets and find alternatives when they need great power assistance or expertise. This wouldn’t matter if the United States was the world’s only great power, but China is a willing partner for nations looking to diversify their international relationships.

Trump can leverage American power to get much of what he wants in the short run, but in the long term the use of coercion encourages countries to counter rather than welcome American influence in the world. If our aggressive policies cause us to lose friends, even if we win in the short term on individual issues, our international position will become weaker while creating new problems. The president’s plan to displace millions of Palestinians from Gaza presents an insurmountable moral problem, but like his comments about the Panama Canal and Greenland, it also creates practical problems that threaten the security of Americans.

The United States has invested billions of dollars to support Egypt and Jordan because we understood their collapse would lead to something dangerous, and encouraging Palestinian migration to these countries makes a collapse more likely. Palestinians are distinct from Egyptians and Jordanians. In the way that Bulgarians and Swedes are both European but are culturally and historically separate, so too are the Arab nationalities of the Middle East unique. In Jordan, there is already a high degree of animosity toward the millions of Palestinians living in the country as refugees.

The addition of a million more might cause the country’s pro-American government to collapse and be replaced by chaos or a fundamentalist regime. This would facilitate international terrorism and threaten the lives of Americans. Egypt too is a bulwark against fundamentalism in the region, and its government is also subject to collapse were it to face an influx of a million refugees.

Even more dangerous to the future is the anger these governments will face from their citizens if they abandon the idea of a future Palestinian state. The ungoverned spaces that might come to pass if these friendly regimes fall would create a crisis that would likely necessitate a military intervention to contain the fallout.

America’s interest in the Middle East is the maintenance of stability coupled with slow but steady progress toward enduring solutions. The stability created by our careful choices and measured pace is what prevents U.S. forces from playing a more direct role in the region. President Trump’s plan to control Gaza upends the careful balance underpinning the region’s stability.

It replaces our slow work with a quick fix almost certain to fail. If the United States pursues this by bullying Egypt and Jordan, we’ll alienate two of our best friends in the region and encourage both to find new security partners, even as China waits to take our place. Even if we succeed at coercing Egypt and Jordan into accepting the Palestinian abandonment of Gaza, we may cause the governments of both countries to collapse, creating a massive zone of instability in the heart of the Middle East. If that instability breeds terrorism, which is likely, America will need to use military power to control the situation, forcing a huge expenditure of American resources to fill the vacuum we created.

It’s wrong to think that the situation in the Middle East couldn’t be made worse by the exercise of misplaced American power. Not long ago, we learned this lesson well in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Colin Pascal (colinjpascal@outlook.com) is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Military Intelligence officer. He spent most of his 20-year military career filling strategic intelligence assignments, including as the chief of Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence for Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria, and served as an assistant army attaché at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. He lives in Annapolis and is a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C.