Hal Brands
Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Most recently, he is the co-author of "The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order."
Under President Donald Trump, the collapse of American soft power — the ability of a nation to influence others through attraction rather than coercion — is real, and it's spectacular. A survey released last month by the Pew Research Center reveals that Covid-19 has accentuated a four-year slide since Trump took office: Confidence in the U.S. and its leadership has plummeted among the friends and allies that should admire the U.S. most.
It is easy to despair about whether the U.S. can regain the power of inspiration it has used to such unique strategic advantage in the past. Fortunately, history provides some consolation: American soft power has traditionally been easy to wound but remarkably hard to kill.
The wounds are serious today, no doubt. Among 13 democracies, all of which are U.S. treaty allies or strategic partners, only in South Korea does a majority of the population have a positive opinion of America. In six countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. — America’s favorability rating is lower than at any time since Pew began tracking the subject two decades ago.
In none of the 13 countries surveyed, moreover, does more than 23% of the population trust Trump to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” putting him behind even Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. The leader of the free world is being outpolled by the leaders of the world’s most dangerous autocracies.
Part of this is the result of the Trump administration’s handling of Covid-19, which roughly 84% of those surveyed deemed lacking. Yet it is also the culmination of a longer decline in U.S. soft power under the current president.
Just six months after Trump took office, America’s global favorability rating had fallen sharply, to 49%, from 64% at the end of Barack Obama’s tenure. International audiences characterized the president as “intolerant,” “arrogant” and “dangerous.”
Since then, Trump’s behavior — his appeals to racism and xenophobia, his indifference to climate change, his repeated insults of allied countries and leaders, his unembarrassed admiration for autocrats — has only worsened the situation. If one were trying to destroy America’s reputation, it would be hard to come up with a more effective approach.
Trump, presumably, isn’t bothered by this: He acts as though military power and coercive leverage are all that matter in international affairs. He fails to realize that prestige — not the kind that comes from being feared, but the kind that comes from being admired — is a particularly potent form of power.
How America polls in Germany or Japan may not affect, today or tomorrow, whether those countries cooperate with the U.S. Over time, though, how America is perceived by foreign audiences does affect how politically feasible it is for the nation’s friends to align with it on important issues. Additionally, from the often tense U.S. relationship with the U.K. during the 19th century, to the Cold War against the Soviet Union in the 20th century, America’s ability to inspire foreign populations — even the populations of its rivals — has paid vast strategic dividends.
Some of the Soviet reformers who came to power in the 1980s, such as Alexander Yakovlev, a top adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, had earlier spent time in the U.S. thanks to academic exchanges and other programs. Their experience of what a free society was fueled their disillusion with what Soviet society was not.
The U.S. is engaged in another great-power competition today, and it has spent the last few years dissipating this vital capital. Thankfully, not all is lost. Americans have short memories when it comes to soft power: They imagine that the country was always loved in the past. Yet the history is messy.
The Marshall Plan, which demonstrated U.S. generosity and initiative, was followed by McCarthyism, which led even close allies to conclude — as one secret Eisenhower-era report put it — that America “has no genuine attachment to some of the fundamental values of a democratic society.”
In the 1960s came the Vietnam War, which was a bleeding wound for American prestige. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one,” a Defense Department memorandum admitted.
During the Ronald Reagan years, a variety of issues — from the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe to “dirty wars” in Central America — provoked angry international protests against the U.S. And under President George W. Bush, the 2003 invasion of Iraq rapidly depleted the sympathy the U.S. had enjoyed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. America has tarnished its reputation, and even made catastrophic errors, in the past; in each case, U.S. prestige eventually rebounded.
One reason for this is that America’s reputation is about more than America’s president. In the short term, the president is the central symbol of U.S. power and policy on the global stage. But presidents come and go, by design, and so over the longer run the country’s prestige is more a reflection of the pervasiveness of its popular culture, the allure of its political system and its founding ideals, and the dynamism of its economy and society.
There is cause for concern here: The Pew survey indicates that foreign audiences believe the U.S. has become less committed to protecting the rights of its citizens. (And if Hollywood is one of the casualties of the pandemic, that won’t help, either.) Yet the U.S. still exercises a strong power of attraction.
That the Black Lives Matter marches triggered solidarity protests in foreign countries may seem like a blow to U.S. prestige, but it actually highlights the ability of American social movements to inspire sympathy and emulation around the globe. That’s a form of power, too.
Finally, if America’s image is struggling these days, so is China’s. Beijing’s global favorability ratings have plummeted because of Covid-19, a pandemic that the U.S. may have botched, but that China unleashed. Distrust of Xi Jinping is at record levels, as well, reaching upward of 70% or even 80% in all but one of the countries polled. True, Xi is still more popular than Trump in many countries. Yet Trump will probably pass from the political scene well before Xi does, and the increasingly repressive — and unattractive — Chinese political system that produced Xi isn’t going anywhere.
Americans shouldn’t be indifferent to the soft-power plunge of the Trump years. It shows how rapidly a democratic superpower can become the object of international resentment and even pity. Yet the genius of the American system has always been its capacity for self-correction. Once the Trump era is over, we will learn whether American soft power remains as resilient as it has been in the past.
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