There’s never been a better time to be anti-American

By Adrian Wooldridge

The Trump administration is boosting a powerful force in global affairs: anti-Americanism.

Canadians have taken to booing the American national anthem and Panamanians to burning US flags. The British tabloids have tarred and feathered Vice President JD Vance for insulting British troops. A carnival float in Dusseldorf, Germany, displayed giant puppets of Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, shaking hands while squeezing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy between them into a bloodied pulp. A sign on the float read “Hitler-Stalin Pact 2.0.” Back at home, the Washington Post has published a guide on how to navigate hostility abroad (“dress neutrally, not patriotically”).

There has never been a better time to be anti-American. Trump embodies everything critics of the US have always warned about, multiplied several times over. Yankee arrogance? He and Vance, in the Oval Office, shamelessly bullied the leader of a nation victimized by the Russian president’s aggression. Yankee imperialism? Trump bragged to a cheering Congress that he will take over Greenland “one way or another.” Yankee incompetence? His tariffs are destabilizing global stock markets and downgrading his own economy.

A YouGov poll published March 4 shows positive feelings toward the US have fallen by between six and 28 points since Trump was elected. The smallest decline (from 48 to 42) is in Italy. The biggest (from 48 to 20) is in Denmark, where, unsurprisingly, people are annoyed by his intention to annex part of their territory. There is currently nowhere in Europe where more than half the population has a positive feeling about the US.

These numbers are likely to worsen significantly as the mass deportation of migrants starts and when the tariffs take an increasing toll on the global economy.

Is there anything more to rising anti-Americanism than just anti-Trumpism? I think so. There is intensifying hostility to America’s enthusiasm for throwing its political and cultural weight around — a fervor that long predates Trump and is driven as much by the country’s command of the world’s most powerful technologies as it is by its politics. Living with America is like rooming with badly behaved teenagers who demand constant attention and think they have solved the mysteries of the universe.

America’s last great cultural export before Trump won the election — wokery — has infuriated people on the right and center with its weaponization of cultural tensions. Its social media sites — particularly Facebook and X, formerly Twitter — are increasingly seen as agents of division and distraction rather than, as they once liked to brand themselves, creators of a global village.

Equally, there’s never been a worse time to be pro-American. Champions of the US have traditionally defended the nation (and excused its failures) on three grounds: that, as the world’s greatest power, the US provides stability and security; as the world’s leading liberal democracy, it defends and spreads liberal democracy around the world; and that it is an engine of free-market capitalism.

Those justifications are turning into dust. The US is becoming a source of global instability — most obviously because of Trump’s behavior but also because of the growing habit of swinging between extremes (President George W. Bush’s crusading democracy promotion to Trump’s isolationism). America’s internal politics are now so erratic as to make it an unreliable long-term partner no matter who occupies the White House. Under Trump, the US is groveling to the world’s biggest enemy of liberal democracy, Putin, and injecting massive instability into global markets.

During the last upsurge of anti-Americanism under Bush, pro-Americans at least had something to fight for: the idea that the US was toppling a vicious dictator and spreading democracy in the Middle East. But what can they fight for today? Nobody outside the US embraces its tariffs. And nobody outside the axis of autocracy backs Trump’s strongman-first foreign policy. Even people who make nice with Trump, such as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, do so through gritted teeth.

Anti-Americanism is likely to be transformative in domestic European and international politics if Trump continues with the incendiary acts of his first seven weeks. The sentiment is already eroding the domestic support of populist politicians who have aligned themselves with him.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s Reform Party and a man who has traded on his position as Trump’s best friend in the UK, has backtracked on his suggestion that Zelenskiy was “rude” to Trump and denounced Vance as “wrong, wrong, wrong” on British troops. Both the Labour and Conservative parties think Farage’s closeness to Trump could prove to be an electoral problem for Reform. The Canadian Conservative Party, which has enjoyed a massive lead in the polls 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 foregone conclusion.

One of the reasons why sensible great powers present themselves as benign defenders of the global order is to prevent smaller powers from ganging up against them. Trump’s America has decided to do the opposite. Western powers are forging alliances that exclude (or at least don’t include) the US. The European Union, particularly in Germany, is beginning to take its military destiny in its hands after decades of passivity. The EU has struck trade deals with Latin America and Malaysia and has made various side accords with Canada and China. A number of its allies regard the US, in the words of the political scientist Michael Beckley, as “a rogue superpower, a mercantilist behemoth determined to squeeze every ounce of wealth and power from the rest of the world.”

Even as America weakens alliances that it has spent the post-World War II era cultivating, the axis of autocracy is doing the opposite. Russia and China have pledged lasting friendship. What used to be called nonaligned powers are queuing up to join the BRICS group of emerging-market nations. The US can no longer assume that other liberal powers will automatically come to its side because of shared interests and culture. Nor can it assume that, when push comes to shove, nonaligned powers will choose America over China.

The genie of anti-Americanism is now not only out of the bottle but doing immense damage to the country’s long-term interests. Even if Trump proves to be an aberration, as seems increasingly likely as aversion to his policies spreads at home and abroad, it will take many years to regain the trust of the free world.