The world is watching America lose its moral compass and its global credibility

By any conventional measure of power, the U.S. remains formidable. Its military power is unmatched, and it still possesses the world’s largest national economy. Yet power in the 21st century has never rested on material capabilities alone.

For decades, America’s true strategic advantage lay in something less tangible but more potent: its capacity to attract. Its ideals, openness and professed commitment to universal values conferred a moral authority that made alliances easier, its influence deeper and its leadership more legitimate. That advantage is now being squandered.

The current focus on the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran should not obscure a larger reality: The damage the second Trump presidency is inflicting on U.S. soft power — on the very credibility that made American leadership possible — is profound and likely to outlast the administration itself.

The concept of soft power, a term coined by the late Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, rests on three pillars: an appealing culture, political values that a country actually upholds, and a foreign policy imbued with moral authority. Today, each of those pillars is being eroded.

The most visible fracture is domestic. President Trump’s rhetoric has normalized a form of racialized politics that previous generations of American leaders, from both parties, publicly rejected. His disparaging comments about Somali immigrants, like his circulation of dehumanizing imagery of the Obamas, revives some of the ugliest tropes in the long history of racial oppression. These are not isolated excesses — they signal to the world that the U.S. is retreating from the very values it once claimed as its moral core.

For audiences across Africa, Asia and Latin America — regions whose histories are deeply scarred by European colonialism and extractive rule — such rhetoric is not just offensive. It is revealing. It suggests that the language of equality and human dignity, long invoked by Washington in international forums, may have been less a principled commitment than a convenient instrument of power.

That perception is reinforced by what Trump and his team now say about the world beyond America’s borders.

In his Jan. 21 address in Davos, Trump spoke with disarming candor about territorial acquisition and imperial expansion. Voicing nostalgia for colonialism, he said European empires had simply acquired “great vast wealth, great vast lands all over the world,” adding that “there’s nothing wrong with it.” This was a statement of worldview.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Feb. 14 address at the Munich Security Conference only sharpened the point. He praised Western colonialists for settling “new continents” and building “vast empires extending out across the globe,” lamenting what he called the “terminal decline” of those empires after World War II. The signal was unmistakable: The age of empire was not a moral tragedy but a civilizational achievement.

Different tones, same message: The past they praise rests on racial domination.

No mainstream Western leader has voiced such unvarnished neo-imperial yearning in decades. For European allies who have spent 80 years publicly renouncing colonialism, and for countries across the Global South that fought to escape it, the implications are jarring. When American leaders speak this way, they do more than offend; they delegitimize the very international order the U.S. claims to uphold.

Words are only part of the story. Under Trump, they are increasingly matched by actions that suggest a return to 19th-century imperial precedents. From renewed pressure for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal to open-ended military intervention in Venezuela and talk of redrawing borders or relocating populations, the administration has revived a logic more familiar to the age of empires than to the post-1945 international system.

The old Monroe Doctrine has been globalized into a claim that American power itself is legal authority. The capture of Venezuela’s president, the tightening of a blockade that has deepened Cuba’s humanitarian crisis, and the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader represent a pattern that erodes major principles of international law.

This worldview may strike its proponents as a restoration of strength. In reality, it is a confession of insecurity. Great powers confident in their legitimacy do not need to glorify conquest or invoke racial hierarchy; they rely instead on the willingness of others to follow their lead. That willingness is precisely what is now eroding.

The consequences are already visible. Allies hedge. Partners question U.S. commitments. Countries across the Global South, long lectured by Washington on democracy and human rights, now hear such rhetoric with growing skepticism. Rivals, from Beijing to Moscow, find it easier to portray the U.S. as hypocritical and self-serving.

None of this means that American decline is inevitable or irreversible. The U.S. has reinvented itself before. Its greatest strength has always been its capacity for self-correction. But renewal begins with recognition.

The tragedy is not merely that America’s image is being tarnished by signals of a retreat into racialized nationalism and nostalgia for empire. It is that the very qualities that once made U.S. leadership attractive are being dismantled by American hands themselves.

Credibility, once lost, is hard to regain. Trust, once broken, is not easily restored.

If the U.S. continues down this path, the Trump presidency will not merely mark a contentious chapter in domestic politics. It will be remembered as the moment when America forfeited the moral authority that sustained its global influence, thereby accelerating a relative decline that no amount of military or economic power can easily arrest.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

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