The administration of US President Donald Trump is boosting a powerful force in global affairs: anti-Americanism.
Canadians have taken to booing the US national anthem and Panamanians to burning US flags. The British tabloids have tarred and feathered US Vice President JD Vance for insulting British troops. A carnival float in Dusseldorf, Germany, displayed giant puppets of Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, shaking hands while squeezing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy between them into a bloodied pulp. A sign on the float read “Hitler-Stalin Pact 2.0.” Back at home, the Washington Post has published a guide on how to navigate hostility abroad (“dress neutrally, not patriotically”).
There has never been a better time to be anti-US. Trump embodies everything critics of the US have always warned about, multiplied several times over. Yankee arrogance? He and Vance, in the Oval Office, shamelessly bullied the leader of a nation victimized by Putin’s aggression. Yankee imperialism? Trump bragged to a cheering US Congress that he would take over Greenland “one way or another.” Yankee incompetence? His tariffs are destabilizing global stock markets and downgrading his own economy.
A YouGov poll published on March 4 showed positive feelings toward the US have fallen by between six and 28 points since Trump was elected. The smallest decline (from 48 to 42) was in Italy. The biggest (from 48 to 20) was in Denmark, where, unsurprisingly, people are annoyed by his intention to annex part of their territory. There is currently nowhere in Europe where more than half the population has a positive feeling about the US.
Those numbers are likely to worsen significantly, as the mass deportation of migrants starts and when the tariffs take an increasing toll on the global economy.
Is there anything more to rising anti-Americanism than just anti-Trumpism? I think so. There is intensifying hostility to the US’ enthusiasm for throwing its political and cultural weight around — a fervor that long predates Trump and is driven as much by the country’s command of the world’s most powerful technologies as it is by its politics. Living with the US is like rooming with badly behaved teenagers who demand constant attention and think they have solved the mysteries of the universe.
The US’ last great cultural export before Trump won the election — “wokery” — has infuriated people on the right and center with its weaponization of cultural tensions. Its social media Web sites — particularly Facebook and X, formerly Twitter — are increasingly seen as agents of division and distraction rather than, as they once liked to brand themselves, creators of a global village.
Equally, there has never been a worse time to be pro-US. Champions of the US have traditionally defended the nation (and excused its failures) on three grounds: That, as the world’s greatest power, the US provides stability and security; as the world’s leading liberal democracy, it defends and spreads liberal democracy around the world; and that it is an engine of free-market capitalism.
Those justifications are turning into dust. The US is becoming a source of global instability — most obviously because of Trump’s behavior, but also because of the growing habit of swinging between extremes (former US president George W. Bush’s crusading democracy promotion to Trump’s isolationism). The US’ internal politics are now so erratic as to make it an unreliable long-term partner no matter who occupies the White House. Under Trump, the US is groveling to the world’s biggest enemy of liberal democracy, Putin, and injecting massive instability into global markets.
During the last upsurge of anti-Americanism under Bush, the pro-US at least had something to fight for: The idea that the US was toppling a vicious dictator and spreading democracy in the Middle East. What can they fight for today? Nobody outside the US embraces its tariffs. And nobody outside the axis of autocracy backs Trump’s strongman-first foreign policy. Even people who make nice with Trump, such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, do so through gritted teeth.
Anti-Americanism is likely to be transformative in domestic European and international politics if Trump continues with the incendiary acts of his first seven weeks. The sentiment is already eroding the domestic support of populist politicians who have aligned themselves with him.
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK and a man who has traded on his position as Trump’s best friend in the UK, has backtracked on his suggestion that Zelenskiy was “rude” to Trump and denounced Vance as “wrong, wrong, wrong” on British troops. The Labour and Conservative parties think Farage’s closeness to Trump could prove to be an electoral problem for Reform. The Conservative Party of Canada, which has enjoyed a massive lead in the polls over Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals for two years, has seen its advantage evaporate since January, with a Conservative victory in October’s election no longer a foregone conclusion.
One of the reasons why sensible great powers present themselves as benign defenders of the global order is to prevent smaller powers from ganging up against them. Trump’s US has decided to do the opposite. Western powers are forging alliances that exclude (or at least do not include) the US. The EU, particularly Germany, is beginning to take its military destiny in its hands after decades of passivity. The EU has struck trade deals with Latin America and Malaysia, and has made various side accords with Canada and China. A number of its allies regard the US, in the words of political scientist Michael Beckley, as “a rogue superpower, a mercantilist behemoth determined to squeeze every ounce of wealth and power from the rest of the world.”
Even as the US weakens alliances that it has spent the post-World War II era cultivating, the axis of autocracy is doing the opposite. Russia and China have pledged lasting friendship. What used to be called non-aligned powers are queuing up to join the BRICS group of emerging-market nations. The US can no longer assume that other liberal powers would automatically come to its side, because of shared interests and culture. Nor can it assume that, when push comes to shove, non-aligned powers would choose the US over China.
The genie of anti-Americanism is now not only out of the bottle, but doing immense damage to the country’s long-term interests. Even if Trump proves to be an aberration, which seems increasingly likely as aversion to his policies spreads at home and abroad, it would take many years to regain the trust of the free world.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.
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