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> soft power, public image

Yes and no.

There's always been an undercurrent of contempt for the US, particularly from Europe. Even during the Clinton and Obama years. There's no satisfying that.

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> There's always been an undercurrent of contempt for the US, particularly from Europe. Even during the Clinton and Obama years. There's no satisfying that.

Of course. But there's a difference between the sort of mild disdain tinged with envy you get from being the self-appointed "leader of the free world" and the reaction that electing a nakedly corrupt thundering moron who constantly belittles and threatens allies whilst kowtowing to a former superpower gets you.

(Of course, there are people that always regarded the US as actively hostile, but they tended to be rival superpowers, Global South socialist governments, Islamists and Western protest groups, not Western officials who might once have identified as strongly aligned with the US. And for the wider world, there's a difference between the longstanding view that many of the values the US preached were sanctimonious hokey and the increasing view that the values the US preaches are fundamentally opposed to stability and democracy)




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