IN the first six months of his presidency, American President Donald Trump has transformed the rules of international relations in ways that are surprising for an isolationist president whose main concern is his ultra-nationalist voter base. Wielding carrots and sticks, he has used the threat of international tariffs and the weaponisation of trade to come down hard on everyone he believes is taking advantage of the US.
The list of culprits is long. Nearly everyone, it appears, is someone the current US president believes e guilty of taking from America and not giving back. The same president has even more disdain for expenditures such as development aid or cultural diplomacy, both of which have been a mainstay of US diplomacy in the past several decades. It is important to remember that one of the first agencies of the US government to be shuttered was USAID. Very soon after Trump entered the White House, the minions of the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, led by the infamous (and now absent) Elon Musk, barged into USAID offices and closed access to all employees. They even took down the sign bearing the agency’s name.
Nothing was to be handed out for free anymore; nobody in other countries was to be a priority. This was the anthem sung in the wake of USAID’s demise. It did not matter how many around the world criticised America, or how many lives were lost as the distribution of medications and vaccines to remote corners diminished. The idea that the ‘goodwill’ of other people was a foreign policy asset no longer held sway. It was the end of soft power.
In the months since, the same strain has been dominant in the massive restructuring of foreign policy now underway in the US. America has withdrawn from the WHO and is unsupportive of the UN and its many agencies. This September, when world leaders troop to New York to make speeches and participate in conversations with each other, a majority of the Trump administration’s most important people will be elsewhere. In all the many negotiations that President Trump has been feverishly undertaking in these past six months, the UN or any mention of it is absent. It is he alone who negotiated peace between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia and it is he alone who will (he believes) broker peace between Ukraine and Russia.
The recent meeting with European leaders is a case in point. Here again, there was, apparently, no mention of the UN as leaders of the most powerful European countries from Italy to Germany sat before Trump like schoolchildren. The placement of the leaders vis-à-vis Trump and the photo-op that followed seemed to be orchestrated by the Trump administration to give exactly that impression. In doing this, Trump was again underscoring the point that the US and its president were the boss.
To some extent, this proved true. In the wake of his repeated allegation that European countries were freeloading off the US, the countries have increased their military spending. Notably, most of this is to buy defence equipment from none other than the US. The tariffs have worked too — many European countries have worked out trade deals with the US and provided the hegemon the fealty it demands. The US has been acting this way with the rest of the world since long before Trump. It is now Europe’s turn to feel the heat.
One reason soft power may have died is that the biggest bet that the US had placed on its use failed.
One reason soft power may have died is that the biggest bet that the US had placed on its use failed. For decades, America thought that cultural diplomacy and soft power initiatives would transform China and force it to be a more open and democratic country. That did not happen. China remains opaque, and censors the internet. The Americans have paid attention. If China can expand its power and prowess without soft power, then the US can too. The result: a new foreign policy outlook that is uninterested in democratic advancement, liberalism or the promotion of Western values in general.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in US policy towards India. For decades, India’s status as a large democracy was the basis of bilateral cooperation between the two countries; something that allowed it to act as a high-tech emerging hub or a poor developing nation in need of subsidies — whatever suited its interests at a particular point.
With the lagging interest in any of this and frustration over Indian citizens landing up in America and the penchant of many among them to abuse their skilled worker visas, America has turned away. Add to this Modi’s fatal faux pas in refusing to acknowledge that Trump is peacemaker and dealmaker in chief, and you have a recipe for disaster, especially in the form of a 50 per cent tariff that diminishes India’s presence in the global marketplace for textiles, jewels, leather goods, etc. India cannot choose to protect its own market and take advantage of US free trade at the same time. With Trump, India will have to learn that everything is quid pro quo.
Where US foreign policy goes, much of the Western world follows. In the days to come, expect European countries to follow, wrap up their international development projects, tighten their borders even further and look for trade deals rather than international assistance projects. Pakistan has managed to make some impressive gains in this year of brutal transactions; whether these will be as good for the poor as they may be for business remains to be seen.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2025