Filenews 11 March 2025 - by Adrian Wooldridge
The Trump administration is strengthening a powerful force worldwide: anti-Americanism. Canadians have begun booing the American national anthem and Panamanians burning American flags. The British tabloids have dubbed Vice President J.D. Vance "tar and feather" for insulting British troops. A carnival float in Dusseldorf, Germany, dragged giant puppets of Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, shaking hands crushing bloody Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. On the tank was written: "Hitler-Stalin Pact 2.0". Back home, the Washington Post published a guide on how to cope with hostility abroad ("dress neutrally, not patriotically").
There has never been a better time to be an anti-Americanist. Trump embodies all that U.S. critics were warning about, and more. The arrogance of the Yankees? He and Vance, in the Oval Office, shamelessly bullied the leader of a nation that fell victim to the Russian president's aggression. American imperialism? Trump bragged to a cheering Congress that he would occupy Greenland "one way or another." The impotence of the Yankees? His tariffs are destabilizing global stock markets and degrading his own economy.
A YouGov poll published on March 4 shows that positive feelings toward the U.S. have fallen by six to 28 points since Trump's election. The smallest drop (from 48 to 42) is observed in Italy. The largest (from 48 to 20) is in Denmark, where, as expected, people are annoyed by his intention to annex part of their territory. Right now, there is no country in Europe where even half of its population has positive feelings about the United States.
These numbers are likely to deteriorate significantly as mass deportations of migrants begin and tariffs begin to weigh more heavily on the global economy.
Is there anything that explains growing anti-Americanism beyond mere anti-Trumpism? I think so. There is growing hostility to America's enthusiasm for flaunting its political and cultural influence — a zeal that predates Trump and is driven as much by the country's dominance of the world's most powerful technologies as by its politics. Living with America is like living with spoiled teenagers who demand constant attention and think they have solved the mysteries of the universe.
The last major cultural product America exported before Trump won the election — the so-called "woke" — has angered people on the right and center by instrumentalizing cultural conflicts. U.S. social media sites — particularly Facebook and X, formerly Twitter — are increasingly seen as agents of division and distancing rather than, as they once liked to describe themselves, as creators of a "global village."
At the same time, there has never been a worse time to be pro-American. Pro-U.S. advocates have traditionally defended the country (and justified its failures) for three reasons: first, that as the world's greatest power, the U.S. provides stability and security; second, that as the world's leading liberal democracy, it defends and spreads liberal democracy around the world; and third, that it is the engine of capitalism and the free market.
These excuses are slowly evaporating. The US is becoming a source of global instability – presumably because of Trump's behaviour, but also because of the growing habit of alternating between extremes (from President George W. Bush's "crusade" to promote democracy to Trump's isolationism). America's domestic politics are now so volatile that it makes it an unreliable long-term partner, regardless of who holds the key to the White House. Under Trump, the US is dragging on the world's greatest enemy of liberal democracy, Putin, and introducing enormous volatility into global markets.
During the latest upsurge in anti-Americanism under Bush, pro-Americans had at least something to defend: the idea that the U.S. was overthrowing a dictator and spreading democracy in the Middle East. What can they defend today? No one, except the U.S., supports the tariffs. And no one outside the axis of autocracy supports Trump's foreign policy. Even those who manage to get along with Trump, such as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, do so with clenched teeth.
Anti-Americanism is likely to be transformative in domestic European and international politics if Trump continues the incendiary acts of his first seven weeks in office. This sentiment is already eroding domestic support for populist politicians who have aligned with him.
Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's Reform party and a man who has exploited his position as "Trump's best friend" in the U.K., backtracked on his assumption that Zelensky was "rude" to Trump and denounced Vance's "wrong, wrong, wrong" about British troops. Both the Labour and Conservative parties believe that Farage's closeness to Trump could prove an electoral burden for Reform. The Canadian Conservative Party, which had enjoyed a huge poll lead over 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 given.
One of the reasons great powers present themselves as benevolent defenders of the world order is to prevent smaller powers from allying against them. Trump's America decided to do the opposite. Western powers are forging alliances that exclude (or at least do not include) the US. The European Union, especially Germany, is beginning to take its military fate into its own hands after decades of passivity. The EU has trade agreements with Latin America and Malaysia and has made several parallel agreements with Canada and China. Some of its allies regard the United States, according to political scientist Michael Beckley, as "a rogue superpower, a mercantilist behemoth determined to wrest every shred of wealth and power from the rest of the world."
As America weakens the alliances it cultivated in the postwar era, the axis of autocracy is doing the opposite. Russia and China have promised eternal friendship. Forces formerly called non-aligned are now queuing up to join the BRICS group of emerging markets. The US can no longer assume that other liberal forces will automatically come to its side because of shared interests and culture. Nor can they assume that, when the time comes, non-aligned powers will choose America over China.
The genie of anti-Americanism has now not only come out of the lamp, but is already causing enormous damage to the country's long-term interests. Even if Trump turns out to be an aberration in the end, as aversion to his policies spreads at home and abroad, it will take many years to regain the trust of the free world.
Performance – Editing: Lydia Roumpopoulou
