to the (tender) mercies of

idiom

: without any protection from (someone or something one cannot control)

As the army retreated, the people were left to the mercies of the advancing enemy.

Examples of to the (tender) mercies of in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

In the process, water becomes a commodity subject to the mercies of the global marketplace, rather than a basic human right. —Christopher Vourlias, Variety, 12 Mar. 2025

Thus did Trump celebrate his willingness to squander the deterrence that has kept the peace for decades, and instead to abandon allies to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin, who just bombed a children’s hospital in Ukraine. —Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 12 July 2024

But that doesn’t mean that its long-term prospects for democracy are hopeless, or that the United States should leave the country to the tender mercies of warring factions and Chinese intervention. —Timothy McLaughlin, The Atlantic, 4 Apr. 2024

The only times when protests succeed are when police forces abandon highly unpopular politicians to the mercies of the irate mob (the 2013 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine and the 1989 Romanian Revolution come to mind). —Brynn Tannehill, The New Republic, 28 July 2023

Just have a look at surging crime in every American city that has consigned itself to the tender mercies of the progressive prosecutors and defund-the-police activists typical of one-party Democratic governance. —Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 22 Oct. 2022

The last intifada, from 2000 to roughly 2005, exhausted the Palestinian civilian population and, in the end, left them to the mercies of the settlers and the soldiers. —David Shulman, The New York Review of Books, 3 June 2021