As it turns 250, the US questions its role in the world: ‘Great Satan’ or ‘indispensable nation’?

Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, called it “the indispensable nation.” Its rivals have preferred labels such as “the Great Satan,” the epithet bestowed on it by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Admired or reviled, champion of human rights or perpetrator of grave abuses, instigator of coups or defender of democracy, the United States — the country that shaped the postwar world order — is passing through a pivotal moment 250 years after the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Amid a profound shift in its geopolitical stance, it faces growing global competition, economic uncertainty and questions about its future role in the world.

The global prominence of the United States would likely have surprised its founders. “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” argued the first president, George Washington, who feared drawing the young nation into the endless conflicts of Europe’s great empires.

Since then, U.S. foreign policy has swung like a pendulum between isolationism and interventionism. The latter approach prevailed after the Second World War, driven by competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and by the creation of a new international order of which Washington — its chief architect and principal beneficiary — became the guarantor.

Since independence, the United States has launched more than 500 interventions abroad, according to calculations by Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Some 60% of those interventions have taken place since 1950. The number surged after the end of the Cold War, despite the grand theories of the day about the “end of history” and the arrival of a benevolent Pax Americana: roughly a third of all U.S. foreign operations have occurred since 1999. Most took place in Latin America, although since the Cold War, Asia and the Middle East have increasingly become theaters of U.S. intervention.

In the postwar era, most of those operations were tied to the confrontation with the Soviet Union and the division of the world into two rival blocs. After the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. interventionism was recast — at least on paper — as a tool for humanitarian action and for addressing global crises. It was the era of operations in Somalia and the Balkans, and of the war on drugs in Latin America. At the time, a Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans were satisfied with the United States’ image abroad. Today, that figure has fallen to 38%.

The world, too, is no longer what it was. In 1960, the United States accounted for 40% of the global economy. Today, that share has fallen to around 25%. China, a desperately poor country seven decades ago, now represents 17%. The industrial economy is giving way to the digital economy, and geopolitical influence is shifting away from the North Atlantic toward the Asia-Pacific region and the Global South.

A tarnished image

The decline in confidence is mirrored abroad. A Pew Research Center survey across 36 countries found that half of respondents do not see the United States as a reliable partner, while 47% say they do. Nearly two-thirds believe it contributes little or nothing to peace and stability in the world, compared with just 35% who think otherwise.

In only seven of the countries surveyed do a majority of adults hold a favorable view of the world’s leading economy. Israel is the notable exception, with 81% expressing a positive opinion of the United States. Meanwhile, in countries as differing as Italy, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, favorable views have dropped by at least 10 percentage points in just over a year.

A key turning point in this trajectory came in 2003, when the United States — already occupying Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — chose to go to war in Iraq on the basis of spurious claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. The decision cost more than half a million lives, $1.7 trillion, and had far-reaching geopolitical consequences, including the rise of the Islamic State. It also fueled resentment among segments of the U.S. public who felt left behind, a sense of grievance that was further deepened by the 2008 financial crisis.

Those hit hardest by the financial crisis and shrinking economic prospects watched political leaders on their television screens fail to address their problems while continuing to devote vast resources to distant conflicts. Those “forever wars,” coupled with widening inequality, helped pave the way for Donald Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024, built around his promise to “Make America Great Again” and keep the United States out of foreign entanglements.

Despite that pledge, U.S. foreign policy under Trump has not shied away from interventionism. If anything, the opposite is true. The United States has intensified its efforts to bring about regime change abroad. This year, it intervened in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro; it launched a military campaign against Iran, whose stated primary objective — ultimately unmet — was to topple the regime of the ayatollahs; and on Wednesday, speaking in North Dakota, Trump insisted that communist Cuba was on the verge of “coming our way.”

What distinguishes this new phase is not so much a return to isolationism — those interventions clearly suggest otherwise — as a willingness to set aside the pro-democracy and human-rights ideals that, at least publicly, had long guided U.S. foreign policy. What now takes precedence is Washington’s national interest in its purest form. That point is made explicitly in the National Security Strategy published in December. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” the document states in outlining the Trump administration’s foreign-policy vision.

“President Trump doesn’t like to use American power to advance American ideals; it’s all transactional,” said Eliot Abrams — formerly assistant secretary of state in Ronald Reagan’s highly interventionist administration, a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations — during an event hosted by the British think tank Chatham House. According to Abrams, previous administrations generally tried to reconcile strategic interests with broader values, whereas the current approach gives little weight to ideological or democratic considerations.

As a result, Washington has begun dismantling international institutions — it announced its withdrawal from a dozen of them in January — as well as the network of alliances it carefully built over the 75 years following the Second World War. It has threatened to wrest Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, while criticism of the alliance and its members has become a near-daily feature of official rhetoric. On Wednesday, Trump also announced that he would not renew the USMCA free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that he himself renegotiated and once hailed as “the best agreement we’ve ever made.”

The multilateralism that Washington once championed — at least rhetorically — has given way to a preference for bilateral deals, where it is far easier to exert pressure and secure more favorable terms. There is also a growing willingness to use military force as a tool of foreign policy rather than as a last resort: U.S. forces have bombed suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific and carried out targeted killings of trafficking leaders as part of the fight against the drug trade.

Latin America as a domestic issue

Latin America, which the National Security Strategy identifies as the top priority of U.S. foreign policy, is increasingly being treated almost as an extension of domestic politics, harking back to a time when Washington openly regarded the region as its backyard. The shift goes beyond intervention in Venezuela, pressure on Cuba or the use of military force against drug trafficking. It also includes Trump’s support for far-right candidates in elections across the region, sanctions against Brazil, and threats and insults directed at Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

“Domestic politics in Latin America have become so intertwined with U.S. politics that they can no longer really be considered foreign policy,” says Francisco Rodríguez of the University of Colorado.

The rest of the world has begun responding to this change in paradigm. In Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has enjoyed notably friendly treatment from Trump, the Kremlin continues its offensive in Ukraine. In China, Xi Jinping is watching developments in the Middle East closely while keeping an eye on Taiwan. Europe, meanwhile, is strengthening itself and seeking new partnerships: the European Union and Canada are drawing closer; the EU has signed a free-trade agreement with India; and the United Kingdom, Japan and Italy have agreed to cooperate on the development of a new generation of fighter jets, while London and Paris are considering the creation of an independent nuclear deterrent.

After Trump leaves office, the pendulum may yet swing back. There may be efforts to restore the international order that prevailed for eight decades. But, as Heraclitus observed — and as experts frequently remind us — no one can step into the same river twice.

“The next U.S. president will not be able to go back to the way things were before Trump,” acknowledged Mira Rapp-Hooper, who served as the Biden administration’s senior National Security Council official for the Indo-Pacific, at the Chicago symposium mentioned earlier.

According to Rapp-Hooper, even if America’s partners remain eager to revive the alliances and agreements that existed before 2024, the Trump years have created a crisis of confidence. “How do you structure cooperation with a United States that has become so volatile? The time horizon for international agreements and other forms of cooperation has effectively been reduced to four years,” she said, given the risk that one administration may simply undo what its predecessor negotiated.

“There will be some form of American return, but it will have to happen on different terms,” says Rapp-Hooper, now a partner at the consulting firm The Asia Group. “The United States remains extraordinarily powerful on the global stage. One key question is whether we will continue to have allies willing to stand by us — and I believe we do. The other is how effective our rivals prove to be at filling the vacuum during this period of turbulence. Xi Jinping’s China has shown very little interest in global governance or other forms of international leadership that would suggest it is genuinely prepared to assume the role of the world’s leading power.”

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