This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

In Casablanca, a movie first released in 1942, the protagonists gathered in Rick’s Café Americain are desperately trying to reach America where they will be safe from fascism, violence and corruption. Their expectations may have been exaggerated at the time, but until recently much of the world bought into this idealised version of the US because it had at least some substance.

This benign perception was the basis of American “soft power”, the belief that the US was – with many reservations – a force for good in the world, a view which made it a cultural and political superpower.

This image was reinforced by the extraordinary cultural dominance achieved by American films (of which Casablanca is a prime example) as well as television and popular music. The US was seen as a country where most people in the world felt they would be happy to live, even if they did not take practical measures to go there.

But two years into Donald Trump’s second term this once huge American advantage in “soft power” is swiftly disappearing like an iceberg melting in warm water. Trump and his lieutenants are furiously attacking all that was best in American government and society, replacing it with a cruelty and lawlessness. 

The latest grotesque example of this is the plan to livestream the military execution of major Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, on 3 December. The public execution brings the US into line with Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, and it is only a step behind Islamic State which filmed decapitations and dowsing victims with fuel before setting them ablaze.

State violence and illegality is the norm in the age of Trump. Screens across the world showed ICE agents pump bullets into non-violent protesters in Minneapolis and the arbitrary killing of fishermen in the Caribbean, alleged without evidence to be drug smugglers, their boats targeted by missiles and survivors finished off by a second strike as they struggled in the water.

Immigrants with the legal right to stay in the US are snatched away from their families, incarcerated, shackled and flown to countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, which they do not come from and cannot speak the language. Trump boasts of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and assassinating the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Casablanca, appearing on film screens just after the US had joined the war in Europe, was an early and highly influential promoter of American “soft power”. Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the hard-bitten, cynical and egocentric American who nonetheless chooses the good of others and the world over love and self-interest. The overall message is of America as saviour and refuge for Europeans in terrible trouble.   

Today this all looks grossly out of date: if the fictional would-be-immigrants carousing at Rick’s to keep their........

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