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The results of a recent international survey by leading global pollster Ipsos will surprise no one: America’s reputation is tanking.
Two findings stood out: China is believed to be playing a more positive role than the US on the world stage; and fewer than 20% of Canadians think the US has a positive influence globally, a drop of more than 30 points over the past six months, the largest recorded for any country in the survey.
The 29-country Ipsos poll conducted in April explored how attitudes towards the United States have been affected by President Donald Trump’s actions in the first 100 days of his second term in the White House.
It is a referendum on America’s “soft power”.
In the 1980s, the American political scientist Joseph Nye Jr introduced what would become a core concept in diplomacy and geopolitics: a country’s ability to influence others without using coercive measures – hard power – like sanctions or military force.
What Nye called “soft power” inhered in the values and ideals of a nation that resonated beyond its borders, enabling it to strengthen partnerships and advance its interests.
Governments had a role in cultivating and wielding soft power. They could squander it, too, through unpopular policies or behaviour. But it was mostly about people – their culture and ideas, their institutions and industries. The more these were perceived by others as desirable or a force for good, the greater your store of soft power.
America leads the world in hard power. Its deployable soft power is no less vast. From its foundational myths – freedom, opportunity – to its mighty institutions – Silicon Valley, Hollywood – America has long held sway over the global imagination.
US soft power tends to dip in response to war or scandal, as it did after the US invasion of Iraq, and then rise again, as it did after the election of Barack Obama, which was viewed abroad as an affirmation of America’s better angels (freedom, opportunity). US presidents have always tried to deploy both hard and soft power in pursuit of their strategic aims.
Until now.
In one of his final interviews before he died last week, Nye suggested that Donald Trump is the first president in modern times who doesn’t care about US soft power.
He saw it in the administration’s lurch from “America first” to “America alone”; in the targeting of long-cherished engines of soft power, like USAid or Voice of America; and even in the fear gripping foreign students at Ivy League campuses, which over generations have bred countless ambassadors for American excellence and ingenuity. Nye suggested that US universities would lose some of their shine abroad.
It’s a safe bet that they have in Canada. The country has already benefited from a “brain gain” of some prominent US academics heading north. US student applicants to Canadian universities are up 25%.
Trump’s puerile jabs and threats of annexation against the US’s closest ally over the past century have gone down badly: Canadians are pissed. All things American are being boycotted with astonishing alacrity. Southbound travel to the US continues to decline month on month during 2025.
But will Trump lose sleep over the dramatic fall in Canada’s regard for US leadership in the world? Probably not.
Ipsos’s findings about China’s reputation are more startling, perhaps even to the US president.
Since World War 2, successive administrations in Washington have projected the US as the ultimate guarantor of the liberal world order against challenges to it by its communist rivals, first the Soviet Union and then latterly, China. This was as much about values as territory.
For all the harm that disastrous wars and military adventurism inflicted on its reputation overseas, the US still won more admirers than its adversaries. It had the more compelling story in the 20th century, never more stirringly told than by President John F Kennedy in his inaugural address:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
A lot of American blood and treasure was spent on trying to do the right thing abroad. The US stood for values it deemed not only universal but central to what it means to be human.
China rejects the idea of universal values that was championed by Kennedy and all his successors – except Trump. “It’s [not] our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders”, Trump told an audience in Saudi Arabia earlier this week, “and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
Trump’s statements in his second term echo the Chinese critique of universalism as a Western concept, used to promote its way of life everywhere. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi are of the same view.
The kind of foreign policy traditionally associated with the US or Europe is anathema to Trump’s worldview. He disdains multilateralism and wants the US to stop providing global public goods. Deals – with seemingly anyone – are his thing.
China is moving deeper into the void opening up on the world stage. Beijing is spending billions enhancing its image, leveraging cultural, technological and diplomatic initiatives. In this, Trump is an unwitting ally. The more mercurial his behaviour, the more China seems the “adult in the room”.
In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, “We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China’s message.” He is not losing.
But soft power driven and shaped solely from the top will prove ephemeral in the long run. People and societies give soft power its charge. The ability to influence attitudes and behaviours beyond national borders will eventually be undermined by a state bent on always controlling the “message”.
The question for the US is not whether its soft power can survive Trump’s disregard – there is too much of it to simply vanish – but how much will be lost. Many of the US’s traditional allies and friends are asking a different question: how seriously might people-to-people links be infected?
Travelling by road across the US-Canada border with family last month, I was deeply conscious of the seismic changes in Canadian attitudes towards the United States. Too conscious, in fact.
Rumours ran wild that Canadians were being refused entry by US customs officials if they expressed anti-Trump sentiments. Though almost certainly exaggerated if not baseless, would articles not unlike this one qualify me for interrogation? I scrubbed a few things from my phone.
The explosive surge in patriotism in response to US tariffs and Trump’s reimagining of international borders has served Canada well. Its new prime minister, Mark Carney, will rely on an invigorated unity and common purpose to restore Canada’s wounded economy.
But he will also want the genie of nationalistic excesses stuffed back in the bottle. The booing of the US national anthem at sporting events – a more un-Canadian act would be hard to conceive – mercifully stopped a few months ago. However the booing was justified, it could have scarred our relations with ordinary Americans for years.
As it happened, the US customs official who quickly processed me through the border could not have been more genial.
About six hours later, I found myself in the tortuously named city of Schenectady. The plan was to charge our e-vehicle and then head off towards our final destination, Boston. But we stayed longer than expected.
Walking to a café in the city’s historic centre, an elderly woman and her daughter sitting on their porch greeted me in the way Americans often do – disarmingly, without pretence or hesitation. I stopped out of politeness. The others pressed on.
They told me about the Dutch explorers who settled in this part of current-day New York state in the seventeenth century. How the name Schenectady was a Mohawk Indian term used by the Dutch, which meant “beyond the pines”. They told me that George Washington once slept in a house down the road from theirs. And that the General Electric Company (GE) was established in the city by Thomas Edison in the late 19th century, which I wrongly assumed must be rubbish.
We talked a bit about politics and how expensive things were getting. They nearly fell off their porch when I told them that I was a Canadian living in South Africa.
There was a basic decency and familiarity about them. Our conversation felt more meaningful than it normally would.
After about 20 minutes, we said our goodbyes.
Trust relies heavily on soft power. It is essential for interaction and collaboration in global affairs. One of the casualties of the US retreat from its traditional role in the world is the loss of trust. Even if Donald Trump’s shake-up of the international system has some salutary effects, further erosion of US soft power spells only more bad news for its friends and allies.
All the more important to remember that leaders cannot easily undo the bonds forged between peoples who share fundamental values or similar heritages. Their connections run deeper. We have all probably lost sight of that fact amid the ceaseless attention given to one man.
We arrived back at the Canada-US border a few days later. By then, my initial apprehensions had melted away.
But as it happened, the Canadian customs official who processed me was not as nice as his US counterpart. Go figure. DM
Dr Terence McNamee is a writer and consultant to various international organisations.
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