The Age of American Leadership is Over

Apr 12, 2025

America has been the leader of the free world for 80 years. It took Trump fewer than 80 days to throw it all away. He took Elon Musk’s chainsaw to our soft power. He betrayed our allies and befriended our enemies. And now he has destroyed our primacy in the global economic order.

Soft Power

The destruction began with soft power on Inauguration Day, when Trump signed Executive Order 14169, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” wherein he instated a 90-day pause on all foreign aid payments, and then unleashed Musk’s DOGE lackeys to gut USAID. The U.S. Agency for International Development, better known as USAID, was founded by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to implement parts of the Foreign Assistance Act, passed by Congress in order to combat the influence of antidemocratic regimes abroad.

According to the Congressional Research Service, “USAID has sought to provide assistance to countries that the U.S. government has deemed to be strategically important and countries in conflict; lead U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need abroad; and assist U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade.” In other words, USAID provides humanitarian aid around the world that ultimately creates goodwill for the U.S. and makes the world a safer place for us all.

In 2024 alone, USAID provided aid to more than 130 countries. Now, under Trump’s second administration, we are abandoning those countries to one of two fates—either to fend for themselves or to allow another superpower, like China, to fill the void we have so abruptly created. The destruction of USAID directly endangers American national security, economic stability, and public health. It will lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, heighten security risks, and contribute to destabilizing fragile regions. Reports of preventable deaths are already coming in from former USAID partners.

And China is already filling the vacuum created by USAID’s absence; they were the first on the ground in Myanmar after the country suffered a 7.7 earthquake last month. Historically, a U.S. “DART” (Disaster Assistance Response Team) would have been the first on scene, with as many as 200 workers, a pack of sniffer dogs, and specialized rescue equipment. But there was no one left at USAID to organize or execute a rescue mission to Myanmar—DOGE had fired them all. Ultimately, the U.S. sent three workers, who left after only a couple of days trying to help with the rescue efforts because their positions were eliminated even while they were deployed in Myanmar.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio falsely blamed the U.S.’s near total absence in the rescue efforts on the Myanmar government’s hostility toward us, but former USAID employees refuted his claim, pointing out that, because their work is seen as nonpolitical, USAID is welcome by almost all regimes. In fact, Myanmar had reached out to the U.S. for assistance, but without USAID, we simply couldn’t deliver.

Hard Power

While the annihilation of American soft power was swift and brutal, the abdication of our hard power emerged a bit more slowly.

Trump began making comments about his desire to annex American allies like Canada and Greenland and to take back the Panama Canal even before he took office, but no one was sure whether to take him seriously. The comments were disturbing and utterly inappropriate, but we’d already survived his first term, during which—while he’d profusely complimented Putin and chosen to side with the Russian dictator over his own foreign intelligence officials—he had never outright attacked an ally or backed an enemy, so it seemed reasonable to hope he was simply spewing more of his usual nonsense.

Then, on February 24^th, the Trump administration did something unprecedented; it voted against a U.N. resolution condemning Russia as the aggressor in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The resolution passed in a landslide, with 93 countries supporting it. But the U.S. wasn’t one of them. Besides the U.S., the only other countries to vote against the resolution were authoritarian regimes like North Korea, Belarus, and Hungary.

The move was alarming, to put it mildly, but it wasn’t until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House that Trump’s intent to undermine decades of American world leadership became impossible to deny. On February 28^th, the whole world watched Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. They publicly betrayed an ally who had been bravely fighting for his country’s freedom for more than two years, and they sided with the aggressor, Russia. Trump refused to offer Ukraine any security guarantees and tried to extort Ukrainian mineral rights all while he and Vance accused President Zelenskyy of not being grateful enough. That meeting will go down as one of the most shameful moments in U.S. foreign policy history.

Trump and Vance berate President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office

Trump then went on to freeze Congressionally approved aid to Ukraine and pause intel sharing with its military, even going so far as to publicly threaten to deport 240,000 Ukrainian refugees. Claude Malhuret, a French Senator, summed up the free world’s new reality following the infamous meeting: “We were at war with a dictator; now we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”

In addition to turning traitor against Ukraine, Trump has continued to threaten acts of war against our NATO allies (any attempt to annex Greenland or Canada would qualify as an act of war). The administration’s hostility toward Greenland and by association Denmark (Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark) escalated two weeks ago when Vice President J.D. Vance joined his wife, Usha Vance, on an unsolicited trip to the island. Reportedly, the idea of being annexed by the U.S. was so anathema to the island that a U.S. envoy failed to find a single Greenlander willing to meet with the Second Lady. As a result, the whole trip was pared back to one day and all plans that required leaving the on-site U.S. military base were canceled.

During their three hours in Greenland, J.D. Vance gave a scathing speech wherein he reiterated Trump’s assertion that the U.S. needed Greenland and would take it by force if necessary, and attacked Denmark, a fellow NATO member and loyal ally who has always come to America’s aid. The Danes lost 44 soldiers in Afghanistan, more than any other U.S. ally as a proportion of their population, but Vance accused them of not doing their part. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen described her nation’s feeling of betrayal: “We have looked up to you. You have inspired us. You have stood guard over the free world. But when you demand to take over a part of the kingdom’s territory — when we are subjected to pressure and threats — what are we to think of the country we have admired for so many years?”

The administration’s disdain for our European allies isn’t limited to Denmark though. In the SignalGate messages that should never have been, J.D. Vance complained, “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” to which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth readily agreed: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading [sic]. PATHETIC.” In addition, Trump continues to question NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense commitment and whether the U.S. has to honor its obligation to provide aid if a member nation is invaded. No wonder the E.U. doesn’t feel it can trust America anymore.

Trump has treated our friendliest neighbor no better than our allies across the Atlantic, repeatedly calling to make Canada the 51^st state and derisively referring to their prime minister as a governor. He has expressed a desire to tear up our century-old border treaty and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, as well as put an end to our countries’ combined military command, NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). Canada has taken the threats of annexation seriously. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly warned her counterparts at a March G7 gathering that “Canada is the canary in the coal mine. If the U.S. can do this to us, their closest friend, then nobody is safe.”

In addition to threatening to annex our NATO allies, Trump continues to talk about taking back the Panama Canal (we granted Panama full autonomy over the canal in 1999) and took his desire to turn war-torn Gaza into a resort so far as to publish an AI-generated commercial for the inhumane venture. Under Trump’s second term, not only can our allies not rely on us, but the world must always be wary of our next move.

Economic Power

While Trump squandered U.S. soft and hard power, until last week we had managed to retain our leadership role in one arena—the world economy. But now that, too, is over. Since “Liberation Day,” Trump has singlehandedly upended the global economy by imposing irrational, draconian tariffs on friend, foe, and penguin alike (except Russia), and the world will never be the same.

Although Trump put a 90-day pause on his “reciprocal” tariffs after they’d only been in place for a few hours (and after he’d repeatedly declared he would not pause them), the 10% blanket tariffs remain in place as well as the tariffs imposed on the top three importers of goods to the U.S.—Canada, Mexico, and China. Plus, Trump began a trade war with China, the U.S.’s largest importer. As of close of business Friday, there is now an absurd 145% tariff on Chinese imports and a Chinese-imposed retaliatory 125% tariff on U.S. exports to the country.

Trump’s Liberation Day announcement caused stocks to freefall, and the markets have been on a wild ride since, but the most troubling consequences of Liberation Day were seen in the U.S. Treasury bond and currency markets, because they reflect a loss of faith in the U.S. economy.

First, yields on U.S. Treasury bonds soared over the past week, when normally you would see the opposite reaction in response to losses on the stock market. U.S. Treasuries have historically been considered safe havens for investors, so when there are swings in the stock market, people tend to move their money into these Treasury bonds for safekeeping. That increased demand for U.S. Treasuries causes the bond prices to increase, which in turn causes their yields to decrease. So we should have seen a drop in Treasury bond yields over the past week.

But the exact opposite happened in response to Liberation Day, with yields on 10-year U.S. Treasuries skyrocketing up by 50 basis points and registering their biggest weekly increase in more than two decades. According to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, “This highly unusual pattern suggests a generalized aversion to U.S. assets in global financial markets.” In fact, these consequences indicate that the global financial markets are now treating us “like a problematic emerging market,” according to Summers. Bottom line: The world no longer sees U.S. Treasury bonds as safe investments.

Yield Rates on 10-Year U.S. Treasury Bonds

Another sign that the world is losing trust in U.S. economic policy is a decline in the value of the dollar. In a comparison of ten currencies, each one rose in value against the dollar over the past week while the dollar fell 90 basis points. This shouldn’t be surprising according to Steven Kamin, former Director of the Division of International Finance at the Federal Reserve. “Everything that the administration has done in the recent months seems well calibrated to overturn the supremacy of the dollar,” he explained. The U.S. dollar has been the world’s currency of choice for more than a century and the reserve currency since Bretton Woods. But Trump’s irrational trade war has undermined decades of confidence borne of sound American economic policy decisions.

The Result

The unusual increase in Treasury yields is likely why Trump blinked on Wednesday (in addition to facilitating an insider trading scheme), only hours after the “reciprocal” tariffs went into effect, and announced the pause he swore wasn’t an option. But it was too late. The kind of reputational damage he inflicted can’t be undone with a pause. Indeed, his fickleness only exacerbates the consequences of his blunders and reinforces the new reality that America can no longer be trusted on any front.

We have broken the world’s trust, and already we are seeing the consequences. The world is moving away from U.S. Treasury securities and the dollar. China is filling the soft power gap. The E.U. is building up their arms stores, but not buying weapons from U.S. suppliers. Our allies are making defense plans that don’t include us. A new world order is forming.

For the first time since pre-World War II, America is not the leader of the free world. Trump managed to obliterate 80 years of American leadership in less than 80 days. Will it take 80 years to undo the damage?