LONDON, England — Once, they loved us.
Not everybody, of course. But many millions of people beyond our borders were grateful for our generosity, admired our creativity, envied our freedoms, shared our dreams and purchased our products.
Never in the history of the world had the principal global power been so magnanimous, so beloved. And while some if not much of the assistance Americans provided was enlightened self-interest — it helped battle and then defeat communism, for example, and helped build strong economic markets for American goods — the benefits to people around the world were real, in many cases lasting, in some cases transformative.
The $3.8 trillion the United States has spent on foreign aid since World War II — now diminished if not jeopardized — was part of that goodwill. But America’s founding principles arguably are even more important. Our Constitution shaped French thought during the country’s 1789 revolution, inspired such figures as Sun Yat-sen of China, and provided a model for as many as 170 governing documents around the world.
From its insurrectionary days as a revolutionary presence on the global scene to its mature, stable years as the definition, and preserver, of the status quo, the United States has been an inspiration even to the countries it opposed. So universal were the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 proclamation that Ho Chi Minh, who later engaged in a brutal war with the United States, began the declaration of independence of his own country this way: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The decline of America’s prestige — indeed, the apparent end of an era in which the United States was admired by leaders and people abroad — isn’t entirely attributable to Donald Trump, who has assailed American allies, questioned the value of international institutions and imposed tariffs on longtime trading partners. But that decline has accelerated under him, beginning in his first term in office and continuing and even growing in his second.
For decades, anti-Americanism — fueled by envy, by resentment about the country’s wealth and power, by worries that its consumer culture and its entertainment offerings have intruded on foreign lands — was a phenomenon. Now it is a condition.
Only about a third of the number of people around the world who had confidence that Barack Obama would do the right thing believed the same thing about Trump a year later, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 37 countries. Today, even our closest allies, across the border in Canada, have a poor view of the United States.
During the American bicentennial, the Canadian National Film Board created “Between Friends/Entre Amis,” a nearly 300-page oversized coffee table book, “as an enduring expression of the friendship of Canadians for the people of the United States of America.” In that book, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote, “Over hundreds of years we have worked and played together, laughed and mourned together, fought side by side against common enemies.”
In “A Diary Between Friends,” a volume recounting the reaction of Canadians to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Prime Minister Jean Chretien spoke of “a friendship of profound depth; a friendship between two nations — Canada and the United States — which has been renewed and reaffirmed, in words and deeds, in the crucible of the worst terrorist attack in history.”
No Canadian prime minister, including the one who assumed the position early this spring (Mark Carney), would say anything remotely like that today. Business and tourist flights from Canada are down by about a fifth. A Leger poll in April showed that 92% of Canadians felt disappointed, angry or scared by Trump’s rhetoric about the country. A few weeks later the president said, “We don’t need ANYTHING they have.”
This occurs while performances of “Come From Away,” the Broadway musical about the small Newfoundland community that sheltered American jetliner passengers following flight disruptions caused by the terrorist attacks, continues to attract audiences in the United States. The show closed here in London after four years of packed performances.
British sentiment about the United States fell dramatically after Trump announced tariffs, later softened, against British products. Last month’s More in Common survey of 2,058 Britons found that fewer than half of the residents of the country that boasts of a “special relationship” with the United States — a term coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 — saw the U.S. as an ally. A third said the two countries were neither allies nor enemies.
More astonishing: A YouGov poll last month that showed that, by a 57%-to-16% margin, Britons — the very people who voted in 2020 to leave the European Union — believe the country should prioritize trade with the EU over the United States.
This is a dramatic departure for the United States, which offered the Marshall Plan to a war-wrecked Europe, fought AIDS in Africa, built schools around the world, fostered the Green Revolution, helped defeat smallpox, rendered polio almost extinct, and, in this century, helped cut rates of malaria in half.
It was a country about which Harry Truman said in his 1949 inaugural address, “We have sought no territory. We have imposed our will on none. We have asked for no privileges we would not extend to others.” It was a country about which Lyndon B. Johnson said in a Johns Hopkins University commencement speech in 1965, during the misbegotten American mission in Vietnam, “We have no territory there, nor do we seek any.”
But most of all, it was a country that, shortly after World War II, fed the hungry young Joachim Zinram, who was surviving on a single slice of bread a day and took an empty lunch box to school in Koblenz, Germany, only to have it filled with provisions from America.
“The best memory I have of the Americans back then was when they drove their tanks and Jeeps through the streets of our town,” Zinram said 77 years later. “I always heard them long before they got there, and then I stood patiently on the side of the road, waving to them. Many soldiers stopped their vehicles and gave candy, chocolate and bubble gum to us children. We were in awe — these were like treasures to us.”
Those kinds of memories are like treasures to Americans as well.
North Shore native David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.