Made By America, Unmaking America

Donald Trump did not engineer the decline of American soft power, though he would probably trademark it if he could. Instead, he is one of its clearest consequences and biggest brands. Long before he entered the White House, faith in the American model was already eroding at home and abroad. Trump emerged from this decline and has spent his presidency accelerating it.

After failing to secure a Nobel Peace Prize last year, Trump petulantly wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store complaining that he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of peace”. Combined with the removal and abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, an oil embargo on Cuba and a disastrous Operation Epic Fury in Iran, his rhetoric reflected a broader coercive transformation in America’s global posture as its soft power declined. 

Political scientist Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability of nations to shape international behaviour through attraction rather than force. In the 1990s, American soft power was unmatched. Following the Soviet Union’s demise, the US emerged as the unipolar nation in the global order. Liberal democracy and free market capitalism were the inevitable future.

Despite what American hubris would suggest, that image has steadily become more of a façade over the last two decades.

The first major blow came after 9/11. Initially, the US received overwhelming international support. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history as the West stood up to global terrorism. But the 2003 invasion of Iraq rapidly transformed perceptions of Washington. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction, alongside the abuses at Abu Ghraib, shattered the moral legitimacy America claimed to represent. Data from the Pew Research Center in 2004 showed how favourable views of the US collapsed across both the Muslim World and Europe, with the majority in every country surveyed believing that the US had lied about WMDs to justify the war.

Domestically, the Iraq war destroyed trust in government. Retrospective 2023 research from Pew disclosed that the majority of Americans believed the war was “not worth fighting” and that the US had failed in its overall objectives. Trump later weaponised this feeling. His attacks on “forever wars” and establishment incompetence resonated because large parts of the electorate already believed the war had been a failure and driven by elites.

The 2008 financial crash deepened anti-elite resentment. For decades, Washington promoted liberal capitalism and globalisation as the universal route to prosperity. Then the system imploded through greed. The financial crash wiped out 8.7 million jobs and destroyed nearly $20 trillion in household wealth, while Wall Street wallowed in huge bailouts. 

The crisis confirmed that the system protected elites while ordinary citizens absorbed the consequences. Economically insecure manufacturing communities hollowed out by deindustrialisation and Chinese import competition became fertile ground for Trumpian populism. Studies from economist David Autor and others linked areas hardest hit by manufacturing decline directly to rising support for Trump.

Trump’s political movement therefore emerged from a country already exhausted by economic insecurity and declining faith in institutions. He did not invent distrust in globalisation and hostility toward elites. He inherited and weaponised it. Yet, Trump’s presidency has intensified the very decline that produced him.

Soft power depends heavily on predictability and trust. For decades, allies assumed American foreign policy would remain broadly consistent even as administrations changed. Under Trump, that assumption has weakened dramatically. His confrontational approach toward NATO allies, hostility toward multilateral institutions and transactional view of diplomacy has proven the US can no longer be a reliable partner.

Polling reflects this. International confidence in Trump remains consistently low across much of Europe and North America. Global approval of American leadership fell sharply during his presidency, while China increasingly positioned itself as the steadier and more disciplined power. A 2025 Pew Research Center global survey found that across 24 countries, only 34% of respondents had confidence in Trump to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” while 62% had little or no confidence.

This is the geopolitical consequence of Trumpism. Soft power is not simply about whether people admire America. It is about whether rivals increasingly appear more competent than Washington. After Iraq, the financial crash and years of domestic political chaos, China has been able to present itself as comparatively predictable, with its global approval ratings surpassing the US in 2025.

Trump has inadvertently strengthened that argument. He projects polarisation and fragmentation. Rather than presenting the US as a cohesive democratic model, America appears trapped in a permanent political crisis since Trumpism emerged. 

The irony is that Trump presents himself as the solution to American decline while embodying its underlying causes. His presidency is not an aberration from weakening soft power but one of its clearest expressions. Foreign policy failures of previous administrations and the financial collapse of 2008 all helped produce the political conditions that made Trump possible and Trumpism systemic. Now Trump is accelerating the same erosion of trust, legitimacy and democratic credibility that first elevated him. He is both a symptom of a nation in decline and an agent of it.

Image: Flickr/Trump White House (Tia Dufour)

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