PRESIDENT TRUMP AND AMERICAN SOFT POWER

Anand Kole

As John F. Kennedy believed that “the magic power” on their(American) side is the desire of
every person to be free, of every nation to be independent … ‘It is because I believe our
system is more in keeping with the fundamentals of human nature that I believe we are
ultimately going to be successful.’1 That is what has been attracting people towards the
United States. Truman, Eisenhower, Roosevelt built a system of security alliances, liberal
economic policies, multilateral institutions which was popularly known as ‘liberal
international order’. It defined America’s predominance in the world after Second World War
for 70 years now. Today it has been at risk with rise of new actors, like China in the
international scene and a rise of new wave of populism parties in democracies.

In his inaugural address on 20th January 2017, President Trump clearly stated his priorities
‘from this day forward, it's going to be America first. America first … We will seek
friendship and good will with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding
that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.’2 His focus on nationalism and
protectionism can be seen as repulsive to America’s allies and its broad liberal principles.
According to this view, there is no international community, and the allies are only
freeloaders taking advantage of the US. This approach belittles democracy as a source of
American soft power. Nye terms President Trump as an “idiosyncratic realist” who focuses
on narrower definitions of American national interest3.

A similar approach of inward looking policies by Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century.
He was not a supporter of universal human rights and shared racial prejudices and cultural
hegemony of Anglo-Saxons that were prevalent during his time. He was an early proponent
of public diplomacy but it was not the most realized and sought after powers in international
arena. Therefore it was not an issue when Wilson refused to compromise with Lodge refusing
to join the League of Nations or his outright support of Ku Klux Klan. It did not affect

1
Senator John F. Kennedy, quoted in Jonathan Rauch, ‘Real is not a four-letter
word’, National Journal, 9 June 2006.
2
Donald J. Trump, inaugural address, 20 Jan. 2017
3
Joseph S. Nye, The rise and fall of American hegemony from Wilson to
Trump, International Affairs, Volume 95, Issue 1, January 2019, Pages 63–
80, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy212
America’s image that time, however there would have been a different reaction in the
international community.

President Trump’s presidential campaign of America First may have garnered him domestic
support, but it has not been very susceptible of appealing to international community. His
presidential campaign itself ran on controversies (“birther” controversy against former
President Barack Obama, accusations of sexual assault) and free publicity from press who
couldn’t get enough of his outrageous comments. It was termed as improbable, inflammatory
and circus like by few online press.

President Trump is being disliked in the international community, equally by leaders,

political scientists, academicians, migrants and civilians as well. This dislike is being turning
into dislike about President Trump and his administration, which has trickled into ruining the
image of US. Traditionally, people’s views about a nation and its governments or heads have
been quite separate. According to a poll of 134 countries by Gallup, only 30% of people held
a favourable view of USA under President Trump’s administration. The Pew Research Centre
surveyed 37 countries within which only 22% had confidence in President Trump to do the
right thing inn international affairs.4 This was highly contrasting to Obama’s final years of
presidency. The Soft Power 30, a British Index, ranked US 4th in 2018, slipping from 1st place
in 2016.

4
Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, Jacob Poushter, Janell Fetterolf, U.S. Image Suffers as Publics Around
World Question Trump’s Leadership, retrieved from https://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/u-s-
image-suffers-as-publics-around-world-question-trumps-leadership/
Before understanding the erosion of soft power due to President Trump, it is important to see
if the phenomenon is peculiar to President Trump and his administration or somehow
independent. The bipolar world in the Cold War period was put to an end by the fall of
USSR, with Soft power pivotal to US’s supremacy. The world turned into a unipolar world
with America becoming the only superpower, able to project military strength on a global
scale.5 Soft Power as government initiative nearly vanished, but it was rising as a stream
through US’s culture and was highly renowned. After 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia spread in
western countries and Former President George W. Bush’s invasion on Iraq raised doubts
about America’s supremacy. Democratic peace theory, democratic transition theory and a
responsibility to protect that overrides sovereignty culminated in the neo-conservative case
for the invasion of Iraq.6 American principles were started to being questioned in the Islamic
countries and even the West, especially in Europe. Former President Barack Obama’s
election campaign focussed on repairing these blotches created by the Bush administration
and he was very much successful in doing so. USA’s first black, Muslim President Barack
Obama reiterated the values that America propagated to the world. His reception of Nobel
Peace Prize in 2008, was partly also credited to US’s thriving Soft Power in the world and US
became a symbol of Freedom and Justice. However, the seeds of American unattractiveness
were not mitigated and were still growing. Many countries and communities had their

5
Charles Krauthammer, ‘The unipolar moment’, Foreign Affairs 70: 1, 1990–91
6
Tony Smith, Why Wilson matters, p. 232.
reservations about ideals in the American culture. Only about a third of Europeans now
believe that the US protects civil rights on its own soil. Before the 2013 an uproar over the
National Security Agency and its pursuit of whistleblower Edward Snowden, far more
number of people believed that Americans took at least their own civil rights seriously. Far
fewer still believe that to be true today. The change of attitudes has worsened by episodes of
race-related violence, such as the 2014 shooting of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri,
and rising inequality.

Election of President Trump as the president was not speculated and many scholars termed it
as the result of wave of populism that was taking over many countries in the world. The roots
of populist reactions are both economic and cultural, and are the subject of important social
science research. Voters who lost jobs to foreign competition tended to support President
Trump, but so also did groups such as older white males, who lost status in the culture wars
that date back to the 1970s and involve changing values related to race, gender and sexual
orientation. Abramowitz shows that ‘racial resentment was the single strongest predictor for
President Trump among Republican primary voters’, but that the economic and cultural
explanations are not mutually exclusive and President Trump ‘explicitly connected these
issues by arguing that illegal immigrants were taking jobs from American citizens’.7

President Trump’s introduction of National Security Strategy of December 2017 looked at

international or multilateral organization and global commerce very sceptically. It refocussed
attention on Great Power rivalry with China and Russia. In contrast, Former President
Obama’s NSS 2015 emphasized on leading by example at home. According to The
Economist, ‘Trump seems to reject both the Bush and Obama doctrines’ and the strategy's
‘transactional, zero-sum tone is dismaying’.8 The US President seems bent on creating a
Hobbesian world9. The Trump administration has made it clear that it cares only about hard
power — tariffs, trade wars, and threats of military action. President Trump has used
American resources to back up his threats to NAFTA, NATO, the United Nations and the
World Trade Organization, textbook examples of the use of hard power. His withdrawal from
Paris Climate Agreement received critical acclaim equally in public as well as political arena.
His handling of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder10, recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel

7
Alan I. Abramowitz, The great alignment: race, party transformation, and the rise of
Donald Trump (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)
8
‘Defending America, Donald Trump's way’, The Economist, 23 Dec. 2017
9
Hobbes' natural philosophy that human beings are, at their core, selfish creatures
and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, played its part in the disgruntling of
Iran.

In May 2018, the Justice Department announced ‘zero tolerance’ policy orchestrated by
Trump Administration was condemned domestically. Many feared the policy as a precursor
to President’s campaign demand of Wall on the border payed by the Mexicans. His demand
for $5.7 billion dollars for the construction of the Wall, led to the longest US government
shutdown in history. It reflects the malicious circus of American politics and policies which
negatively impacts its perception domestically and globally. His approach to wield influence
completely ignores soft power which is one of the reasons of decrease in American Soft
Power as a result of President Trump’s policy decisions

Apart from that, President Trump is astonishingly crude and bombastic11, and one of the
problems at the present moment is that President Trump’s crudeness attracts so much
attention from the media that the substance of the difficulties US is facing tends not to get the
attention it deserves. He introduced the word “schlonged” to campaign coverage, discovered
an inexhaustible mine of exclamation points in late-night Twitter rampages, pronounced with
certainty, “I alone can fix it”—and coined a style so distinctive that “Trumpism” has come to
define an entirely new genre of American political speak.

It all started on June 16, 2015, when he announced he’d run for president of the United
States. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Donald Trump told
the crowd gathered at his New York headquarters to hear the first campaign speech. “They’re
bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good
people.”

In July, he said of Senator John McCain: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like
people that weren’t captured, OK?”12

In November, he said he knew “more about ISIS than the generals.”13

10
A Saudi Arabian dissident, author, columnist for The Washington Post, and a general
manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel who was assassinated at the Saudi
Arabian consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government.
11
Bacevich and Mearsheimer’s interview by Derek Davison. https://lobelog.com/bacevich-
and-mearsheimer-on-year-one-of-the-trump-administration/
12
Donald Trump on Senator John McCain at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on July
17, 2015
13
Rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, November 12, 2015
He said “nasty”14 Hillary Clinton would be “in jail”15 if he were president.

“Why are we having all these people from sh*thole countries come here?” the president said
at a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators according to the Post, who cited people
briefed on the meeting. The Post said President Trump was specifically referring to Haiti, El
Salvador, and African countries. The “sh*thole” story dominated the news for several days.16

These and many other comments, tweets, and remarks have not played very well with gaining
a favourable image of President Trump in the crowds of US. It has reflected President
Trump’s incompetence to concentrate on substantive issues and talk about those in a logical,
legal language. According to Mearsheimer, he is an individual pursuing policies that are
fundamentally flawed and doing it regardless in an incompetent way. Public opinion polls as
mentioned earlier article, show a lack of confidence in President Trump. A large part of this
decline is due to President Trump’s rhetoric and not so much of his policies.

President Trump visited 20 countries since he assumed office, with crucial summits of
NATO,-Belgium, G7-Italy, Hanoi summit (US-Korea), Helsinki summit (US-Russia) and
addresses in UN General Assembly. At the Helsinki summit in 2018, the US President met
his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, whom he stated to ‘get along with very well’.17 This
meeting gave grounds to earlier accusations of US Intelligence of possible intervention of
Russia in the Presidential election of 2016. President Trump boasted of how USA and Russia
control 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, exhibiting his fondness of hard power
capabilities. President Trump increased the 2018 U.S. defence budget to US$639
billion while in 2017, Russia decreased its budget for the first time in two decades,
to US$66.3 billion. Despite its hard power disadvantage, Russia seems nonetheless to have a
lot of influence over the U.S.

On 25 September 2018, he delivered his second address to the United Nations General
Assembly. It included recent tensions over US-China trade, Iran Nuclear deal, nuclear
standoff in North Korea and his sceptical view of international institutions. The most
memorable thing that stood out was his remark “In less than two years, my administration has
accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The whole
General Assembly could not resist but to laugh at this statement. It made the scholars and

14
 The Third Presidential Debate, October 19, 2016
15
The Second Presidential Debate, October 9, 2016
16
A comprehensive analysis given on https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/atrocities-1-to-112
17
Interview on July 30, 2015, in Glasgow, Scotland
media houses all over the globe to check the facts who found most of them to be cherry-
picked, exaggerated or false18. President Trump’s speech reflected a misguided dismissal of
global governance and international rules. The Helsinki summit and the embarrassment at the
UNGA shows, more broadly, the erosion of America’s soft power capabilities due to
President Trump’s temperament and attitude.

The U.S. no longer projects a coherent identity to the international community, which is how
its soft power has diminished. Conflict between political parties, division within civil society,
and changing domestic and foreign policies have eroded the image of the U.S. as an
internally and externally consistent and united country.

It is much less known about how the President Trump administration is weakening U.S. soft
power. Inconsistency erodes soft power. President Trump himself is inconsistent: He
switched his position on the urgency and timeliness of North Korea’s denuclearization,
from “immediately” to “no time limit.” It can be seen with his earlier views on Iran and
Venezuela. There are many other paradoxes as well.

Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely
on us any longer.19 It’s not just that allies don’t believe the reassuring voices in the
administration They’re exhausted with US’s self-interest and drama, and disappointed with
its indifference to anyone else’s problems and politics. They are resigning themselves to a
world without American inspiration or partnership, to a post-American international order.
Yet soft power has huge value, particularly in a more polarised and complex world. And
while views of American presidents are notoriously volatile, the international view of the
nation itself takes longer to shift. Once soft power is lost, it is hard to regain it.

Independence of soft power resources like firms, universities, foundations, churches, and
other non-governmental groups develop soft power of their own which may reinforce or be at
odds with official foreign policy goals. And all of these private sources of soft power are
likely to become increasingly important in the global information age. That is all the more
reason for governments to make sure that their own actions and policies create and reinforce
rather than undercut and squander their soft power.

18
New York Times
19
Kori Schake,’ The End of the American Order’, The Atlantic, Nov, 19, 2018
Many scholars believe that America is not just the President and his administration or
institutions and it might prove to be a chance recover its soft power. One of the greatest
sources of America’s soft power is the openness of its democratic processes. Even when
mistaken policies reduce its attractiveness, America’s ability to criticize and correct its
mistakes makes it attractive to others at a deeper level. In an information age, success
depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins.