The West’s political crisis can be shrunk to one word — mistrust. Voters feel cynicism, prejudice and anger about their systems. But each is downstream of loss of trust. Less urgency is felt about the rest of the world’s plummeting faith in America. That China is now trusted more than the US in a large majority of countries surveyed should ring alarms. Yet America still acts as if it were the most admired place on earth.
Not all of the decline is because of Donald Trump. The US has not only been going down; China has been going up. America’s recent reputational slide began in 2023 when Joe Biden was president. This coincides with his support for Israel’s devastating response to the October 7 Hamas massacre. The US foreign policy establishment pays little heed to the effect of Israel’s militarism on the world’s view of America, including in the rest of the West. But Israel is not the chief source of US unpopularity.
The comforting view, which is also the view of the comfortable, is that the world detests Trump’s values. That suggests that when a more admirable president is elected, America’s standing will improve. This modestly reassuring take leaves out one big thing. Not everything is about values. A majority of countries rank the US higher than China when it comes to freedom, yet nevertheless distrust it more. Mistrust is thus a synonym for incompetence.
Even in Trump’s America, the world knows that people are far freer than they are in China to express their views and practise their faith. But are Americans governed more competently? Is America more stable than China? It is hard to say yes to either. Take Trump’s on-again, off-again Operation Epic Fury against Iran. In addition to being America’s most unpopular war at home since polling began — more so than Iraq and Vietnam in spite of far lower US casualties — it has alienated all of America’s friends and allies, including other western populists. They are now being insulted for not joining what many see as America’s most careless war of choice to date.
Gulf War III has also exposed the yawning gap between China’s approach to energy and America’s. China’s big investments in all forms of power, from renewables to coal, contrast with America’s slant towards fossil fuels. This is all on Trump. Not only has he scrapped Biden’s incentives for green energy, but he is also paying companies to walk away from alternative energy projects. Were it not for China’s big stockpile, global oil prices would have gone much higher in the past few months. Instead of claiming that China helped rig America’s 2020 election, Trump might thank it for saving US consumers from paying $6 a gallon at the pump.
Epic Fury coincides with unignorable signs of global warming, especially in the north. Countries like India and Iran have become used to large spikes in summer mortality. Only now is Europe ruing the absence of air conditioning after its hottest June on record. Global warming is shifting from elite preoccupation to mass consciousness.
The US is behaving as the baddie on this, doubling down on 20th-century habits. China, on the other hand, is perceived in the global south as the bearer of solutions. Even where the US is cutting edge, such as with Elon Musk’s Tesla, its reputation is atrocious. Few could forget the recent activist advert in London that showed Musk’s Cybertruck, or “Swasticar”. On it were the words: “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds.”
Trust can vanish quickly but take ages to rebuild. Four of the six countries that still approve more of America are in China’s neighbourhood — Japan, South Korea, India and the Philippines. But the countries that distrust the US more are near and far, not just its insecure neighbours, Canada and Mexico. This is despite the fact that China’s export machine threatens to eat everyone’s lunch. The outliers are Poland, chiefly because Russia is next door, and Israel. Even Australia and the UK trust China more than America.
Trump’s exit would surely help. America’s global standing rose sharply from George W Bush to Barack Obama. But Obama did not recapture the reputational heights America had enjoyed in the 1990s. It will be even harder for Trump’s successor to set the clock back to Obama’s era. US-China competition is increasingly dominated by AI. China’s models are mostly cheap and open source, even if their capabilities are often lower. America’s are pricey and closed. For the first time in generations, US technology is not assured of domination. It cannot even bank on admiration.
