America's Reputation Is In Ruins

It's said that it takes years, if not a lifetime, to build a good reputation and only one scandal or betrayal to destroy one's reputation. Since January 20, 2025, the Felon and his sycophants have destroyed America's global reputation and sent repeated messages that America cannot be trusted and that treaties mean nothing to the Felon and the hapless GOP where no profiles in courage will be found. Indeed, the Felon's attacks on Canada sound like a retreaded version of Putin's fairy tale that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion by Russian troops. In less than two months the Felon has destroyed the world order that has maintained a fragile peace since the end of WWII save for the Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq debacles where ideologues and American hubris - sadly, our leaders never learn from history and too often believe America can do what others were unable to - cost tens of thousands of American lives and even more in those countries. With the Felon, hubris is off the charts and his sycophants and enablers put perceived personal advancement over all else, including morality and decency. Meanwhile, the GOP, the self-styled party of "family values" and support of traditional religious belief has shown itself to be the enemy of average American families and religion is used to bludgeon those deemed as "other."  A long column in the New York Times looks at America's ruined reputation and the damage being wrought. Here are highlights:

Many years ago, I asked a friend who had been hired as a senior foreign policy official what he’d learned in government that he didn’t know beforehand. He replied: “I used to think policy-making was 75 percent about relationships. Now I realize it’s 95 percent about relationships.”

It’s very hard to do big things alone. So competent leaders and nations rely on relationships built on shared values, shared history and shared trust. They construct coalitions to take on the big challenges of the age, including the biggest: whether the 21st century is going to be a Chinese century or another American century.

In that contest the Chinese have many advantages, but until recently America had the decisive one — we had more friends around the world. Unfortunately, over the last month and a half, America has smashed a lot of those relationships to smithereens.

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

In Canada and Mexico you now win popularity by treating America as your foe. Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas.

This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.

So what’s going to happen?

NATO is over. Joe Biden spent four years defending the postwar liberal order. That order grew out of a specific historical experience: Isolationism after World War I led to the horrors of World War II; internationalism after World War II led to 80 years of superpower peace. . . . . The postwar order was a historic accomplishment, but it was a product of its time, and we are not going back to it.

The West is (temporarily) over. What we call “the West” is a centuries-long conversation — Socrates searching for truth, Rembrandt embodying compassion, Locke developing enlightenment liberalism, Francis Bacon pioneering the scientific method. This is our heritage. For all of our history America understood itself as the culmination of the great Western project.

The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft. Don’t overthink this. Trump is not playing four-dimensional chess and trying to pry Russia from its alliance with China. American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft. Elon Musk codes as hard; U.S.A.I.D. codes as soft. WWE is hard; universities are soft. Struggles for dominance are hard; alliances are soft.

Europe will either revive or become a museum. It’s possible Europe will become a low-fertility, low-innovation, slow-growth vacation destination for the world. But Europeans know that this is their moment to cut the security cord with America and revive their own might. Germany is increasing its borrowing capacity so it can build weapons. The former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi jolted the continent by arguing that market fragmentation was killing innovation in tech. Many conservatives are convinced that Europe is too secular and decadent to ever recover. Maybe. But Germany is a serious nation. France has an unsurpassed Civil Service. History has shown that the British people can be trusted when times are hard.

A new age of nuclear proliferation. As America withdraws its security umbrella, nations around the world, from Poland to even Japan, will conclude that they need nuclear weapons. What could go wrong?

China will fill the gap. As America betrays its friends, China will seek to make them. China’s special representative for European affairs to the E.U. recently called the Trump administration’s treatment of Europe “appalling.” He continued: “I believe European friends should reflect on this and compare the Trump administration’s policies with those of the Chinese government. In doing so, they will see that China’s diplomatic approach emphasizes peace, friendship, good will and win-win cooperation.”

[T]he reality is that when they are faced with two rogue superpowers — China and America — nations across Europe, Asia and Africa will have to hedge their bets and play both sides.

A global culture war. For years, the World Values Survey has shown that Western Europe and the blue parts of American are drifting toward a hyper-individualistic, postmodern culture that is farther and farther away from the more traditional communal cultures in other parts of the globe. That was bound eventually to produce political rifts. One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia.

A return to national greatness. History is not over. As the historian Robert Kagan points out, America oscillates between periods of isolationism and interventionism. . . . . Trumpian incompetence will provoke a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth. When that happens people will be ready to hear the truth that Trump will never understand — that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at home and abroad, that are actually the source of America’s long-term might.