President Trump walks past British Prime Minister Theresa May at the start of the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Let’s stipulate that what other countries think about U.S. presidents may not always be relevant to American voters and American policy choices. But when there is near-unanimity, especially among most of our allies, that the U.S. president cannot be counted on to do the right thing and the image of the United States in the world declines, we have a problem.
The Pew Research Center, surveying 37 nations, finds “a median of just 22% has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64% expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.” Those who have been following President Trump’s blunders, insults to allies and fawning over Vladimir Putin won’t be surprised to learn:
The sharp decline in how much global public’s trust the U.S. president on the world stage is especially pronounced among some of America’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Canada. Across the 37 nations polled, Trump gets higher marks than Obama in only two countries: Russia and Israel. . . .
The drop in favorability ratings for the United States is widespread. The share of the public with a positive view of the U.S. has plummeted in a diverse set of countries from Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Favorability ratings have only increased in Russia and Vietnam.
And to top it off, the allied leader with whom Trump has had arguably the rockiest relationship, Germany’s Angela Merkel, instills much more confidence around the world (42/31) than does Trump (22/74). Merkel is by acclamation essentially the leader for the Free World at this point. Trump has managed to make America unpopular again.
You can trace Trump’s missteps by the low ratings he receives in the countries he’s insulted. (“Only 5% in Mexico and 7% in Spain have confidence in Trump. He gets consistently low ratings across Latin America and Europe, where medians of only 14% and 18% respectively have confidence in him. Around the globe, confidence in the U.S. president is at some of the lowest levels measured by Pew Research Center over the past decade and a half.”) South Korea went from 88 percent saying they had confidence in the U.S. president to 17 percent. (Saber-rattling does not appear to have impressed our ally.) Likewise, Australia, whose prime minister Trump picked a fight with, went from 84 to 29 percent. Unfortunately, Montenegro, whose prime minister Trump shoved out of the way at the NATO gathering, was not included in the survey.
Trump’s policies are unpopular (e.g., the Muslim ban and withdrawal from trade and climate deals), but that is not the only problem. His character is viewed as negatively around the world as it is at home. An astonishing 75 percent find him “arrogant,” while 65 percent say he’s intolerant and 62 percent say he’s dangerous. Only 23 percent say he cares about ordinary people and 26 percent say he is qualified. Americans (58 percent) and American culture (65 percent) get much more favorable ratings than Trump.
How do we evaluate all of this?
Trump said he was going to restore America’s standing. In his foreign policy speech (attended by the Russian ambassador, by the way) in April 2016, he declared: “We must make America respected again and we must make America great again.” The policies he has chosen and his own conduct have done the opposite. He was the one seeking to measure how America is regarded; by his own test then, he’s doing very poorly.
In particular, he does not seem to understand that military power, while essential to deterring aggression and earning confidence from allies, cannot in and of itself constitute American leadership. That derives from our values and our willingness to act on our values. When Trump denies what all our allies know to be true (global warming is real, Russia interfered with our election, etc.) and tries bullying other leaders, when he changes views and facts on a daily basis, when he embraces thuggish despots in Russia, Turkey and elsewhere, and when he demonstrates near total-ignorance about the world (and installs a clueless secretary of state), he makes himself and America smaller, weaker and less respected.
David Frum observed that Trump and his team “have reimagined the United States in the image of their own chief: selfish, isolated, brutish, domineering, and driven by immediate appetites rather than ideals or even longer-term interests. Like Trump himself, this general and this financier who speak for him know only the language of command, not of respect.” This has backfired spectacularly. “Under the slogan of restoring American greatness, they are destroying it,” Frum argues. “Promising readers that they want to ‘restore confidence in American leadership,’ they instead threaten and bluster in ways that may persuade partners that America has ceased to be the leader they once respected—but an unpredictable and dangerous force in world affairs, itself to be contained and deterred by new coalitions of ex-friends.”
Whatever Trump meant by it and however his advisers spin “America First,” his worldview has come across vividly — and negatively — to the rest of the world. As Tamara Wittes wrote, Trump’s “impoverished understanding of global affairs as a zero-sum competition for power and resources claims to reassert American leadership in the world even as it rejects that leadership’s basic foundation: that collective purpose and collective action can reduce costs and increase security and opportunity for like-minded nations.” She finds it “hard to see how a strategy rooted instead in cutthroat competition and arms’-length suspicion will somehow do better than that postwar liberal order at extending American influence, security, or prosperity.” It can’t, and it isn’t. Just ask our allies around the world.
