In little more than a year, it undermined the set of institutions that gave its own character to the liberal international order, created in the second post-World War II era and of which the USA was the guarantor and main beneficiary.
Megalomaniac, he disorganized the trade system with tariffs and weakened the World Bank; paralyzed the Security Council, the core of the United Nations; abandoned the Paris Agreement, making already difficult efforts to mitigate the climate crisis even more difficult. It weakened the , pillar of the European security system; destroyed NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), replacing fruitful commercial cooperation with the eo with a threat to the sovereignty of neighbors. He invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its dictator, resuming a practice of armed intervention in the neighborhood that was thought to be confined to the past. It strangles, by extreme a cruel economic blockade in order to overthrow the Castro regime. In partnership with , whom he supported in the massacre of , he is now waging war on Iran, with unpredictable — but certainly harmful — consequences for the world economy.
If the balance is negative for the world, which has become an even more insecure place, the White House holder’s commitment to the shameless use of his economic and military power devastates the country’s international reputation.
Recent research reveals the disaster. Conducted by the Japanese company Nira Data, at the request of the Alliance of Democracies, it is titled “” and was carried out in 68 countries. In it, public perceptions and feelings are compared not only about the democratic system but also about security and global conflicts, in addition to evaluating, one by one, the nations included in the sample.
When comparing the difference between positive and negative perceptions about each country, the USA ranks 64th, ahead of only Iran, , and Israel.
But that’s not all. Three years ago, positive opinions about the northern power far outweighed the negative ones. The situation was reversed, with a precipitous drop in approval from 2025 onwards — not by chance, the first year of Trump 2.0.
The study captures a phenomenon with lasting consequences: the rapid erosion of soft power, a term dear to scholars of international relations. It designates a country’s ability to influence the conduct of others through persuasion and mobilization of shared values rather than coercion and brute force, known as instruments of hard power.
Countries become international powers when they use a combination of these two attributes. They have economic and military resources to coerce, but they will not impose themselves for long if they do not know how to attract and convince other nations of the values they defend.
Trump’s cynical and reckless use of his immense arsenal of coercive resources is destroying much of the soft power that the US has built. This is the thesis defended by Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University, in a scathing article published in Foreign Policy magazine: “”. Couldn’t be more right.
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