President Trump assures the faithful, with unwavering confidence, that the United States is now “the hottest country in the world.” The crowds cheer enthusiastically. One suspects that, before long, someone will suggest engraving it on a mountain.
And, with characteristic certainty, he declares that only a short time ago America was “the laughing stock of the world.”
This presents a fascinating dilemma. The rest of the world appears to have misplaced the memo.
For while the applause rings loudly at home, the view from abroad is rather more complicated.
America’s closest allies have found themselves questioning whether Washington remains as predictable as it once was. Canada has looked to diversify its trading relationships. European nations have been discussing how to become less dependent on the United States for their security. Universities that once seemed irresistible to the world’s brightest students are discovering that some now look elsewhere. Even international tourism has softened as some visitors quietly decide there are easier destinations to enjoy.
None of this suggests universal admiration. It suggests that the world’s relationship with America has become rather… complicated.
If this is what being the world’s most respected nation looks like, one wonders what a diplomatic embarrassment would entail.
Perhaps there is a simple explanation. Respect, like beauty, is apparently in the eye of the beholder. If one repeats often enough that everyone envies you, eventually the applause begins to sound remarkably convincing.
There is, of course, one place where America’s reputation has never been higher: the podium at a Trump rally.
The difficulty, however, is that applause is not evidence.
Evidence looks rather different. It appears when allies are eager to stand beside you rather than quietly making contingency plans. It appears when overseas students compete for places at your universities because they see your country as a beacon of opportunity. It appears when tourists cannot wait to visit your shores, and when governments seek your friendship because they trust your judgement.
Those things cannot be measured by the volume of applause.
It is rather like the owner of a restaurant announcing every evening that his or her establishment is unquestionably the finest in town, while diners are quietly trying the café across the road. The remaining customers may applaud the speech, but they are unlikely to order dessert.
Nations earn respect in much the same way people do – not by proclaiming it, but by demonstrating it. Confidence can be announced. Respect has to be conferred by others.
The irony is almost irresistible. The more frequently one insists that America has never been more respected, the more the world seems inclined to ask whether it should consult a dictionary.
There was a time when the United States scarcely needed to tell anyone how influential it was. Its leadership was evident in the alliances it built, the institutions it helped shape, the scientists it produced, the universities it nurtured and the ideals it projected. Its actions spoke loudly enough.
History offers a simple lesson. The nations that command genuine respect seldom need to remind the world how respected they are. Their influence is reflected in the choices others make, the partnerships they build and the trust they inspire.
When a nation begins issuing regular reminders of its greatness, one cannot help wondering whether the intended audience is the rest of the world… or itself.
Also by Michael Taylor
Pauline Hanson: Too easy to dismiss, too late to ignore
Two men found dead on the Moon
The Siege of a National Treasure: Why ‘Our ABC’ Feels Like a Stranger
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Please consider donating now via:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund to help secure the future of our site.
Your support will go directly toward covering essential costs like web hosting renewals and helping us bring new features to life. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us keep improving and growing.
Thank you for standing with us – we truly couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
“Respect”
(Any excuse to quote from the greatest film of all time). You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Trump is the final nail in the US coffin
Oh Michael; you are so cruel! Trumpy Daddy was referring to the unusually hot weather in Washington. And of course – when it is hot in Washington nowhere can it be hotter. Or did I miss the point?
In regard to the seemingly perpetual quest to peer into the mental maelstrom that is Donald Trump, I found the following from Z Magazine useful.
Links to important references are available in the original here —
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/my-conversation-with-karl-marx-about-donald-trump/
“My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump”
By Norman Solomon July 6, 2026
Source: “Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.”
(The following has been edited for clarity and length.)
Norman Solomon: You’ve downplayed the importance of the individual in history. But the United States now has as president an individual who transformed power relations and the political landscape.
Karl Marx: I can assure you that he did not do that by himself. Power relations are class relations. And by the way, I never said individuals are irrelevant to history. I exhorted individuals to get involved in changing history.
NS: President Trump has rolled back gains from the last hundred years and more. Also, he’s mentally unstable, to put it mildly.
KM: The basics still hold. As I wrote in 1869 about a situation in France where a cult existed around a tyrant, the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”
NS: But now one highly dangerous and unhinged person has taken control of the U.S. government. And he got there with a majority of votes of the working class. It’s been a huge shock to have a virtual psychopath as president.
KM: Those you would call liberals like to disconnect such poisoned flowers from their historic roots.
Victor Hugo was like that, as with so many commentators in your day, endlessly heaping their derision on the despicable despot. Hugo excelled at bitter and witty invective against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup d’etat.
As I pointed out, “The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.”
NS: Actually, Trump does seem to insanely wield destructive power in ways unparalleled in world history.
KM: But he did not obtain that power through his own will. If you fixate on an individual personality, you’ve lost the historical plot.
NS: One sociologist, Dylan Riley, recently commented: “From a Marxist perspective, much of the left-liberal critique of contemporary American politics can be viewed as essentially petty bourgeois. It revolves around moral arguments advocating for equal opportunities and less social division and conflict.” And he added: “I think that Marx’s central point on this is to emphasize the importance of class struggle as the mechanism through which any class compromise is actually imposed. And if you miss that point then your politics are disabled from the get-go.”
KM: First, I’m glad to say that I am not a “Marxist,” given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves. You can look it up, “Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.”
But that aside – yes, certainly, there is just no way to reasonably talk oneself around the primacy of class struggle. The phrase might sound overly polemical to petty-bourgeois ears in the America of the 21st century, but that’s the most powerful engine driving history. You can deny or evade it, but you can’t really avoid it.
NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.
KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.
NS: The horrible fact remains that we are now oppressed by an extremely reactionary vicious president aspiring to become an unlimited tyrant. And he harbors special hatred for women and people of color, with horrendous social impacts.
KM: Class struggle failed to result in the needed remedies to appalling human conditions, with some special victimizations within the working class.
On this point, we could leave the last words to my comrade Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1890: “The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”
NS: So, you and Engels agreed that many different forces shape history, yet one individual can conceivably make all the difference at certain junctures?
KM: Fred clarified his point further this way: “We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.”
And he went on: “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event.”
NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.
KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion.
As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life.
The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.
NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.
KM: That’s because it’s always true.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.
Steve, it seems to this scribbbler that we are in a contest between markedly differing protagonists. On the one hand, you, and others of similar ilk, offer up well-argued hypotheticals about how things can be improved socially for the betterment of the greater masses, viz, the necessary death of neo-liberal policies and the political machines that support them, the possible (but in my view, unlikely) rising up of the said masses to violently overthrow the governing systems that are clearly responsible for the risible states of affair that exist in almost every location around the world… a ruction of extraordinary note and with, to be sure, uncertain consequences – a Russian Revolution deja vu, and we all know how that went over the following years – whilst on the other hand, we have the unfolding disaster of global warming and its certain consequences, consequences that have been eloquently laid out again and again, with the evidence accumulating… the latest being the European summer with thousands of deaths due to heat waves never before experienced, that aside, half of Europe and North America on fire, floods, droughts, all glaciers on the planet in massive decline, polar ice cap melts and more. The proverbial elephant in the room, no longer invisible.
I listened to a bunch of scientists in a 2025 documentary on insects say that the massive decline on numbers, as high as 80% or more, of many species, and growing, if leading to mass extinction of species, will spell the eventual extinction of mankind. No possibly or maybe, but axiomatically, if the insects go, then so will we.
Seems kind of moot to discuss political issues and pathways to best practice when the physical realities of what we’ve managed to achieve on a planetwide basis may be the very thing that signs our death warrants.
Kanga, I agree with everything you say here on this, except that the government by oligarchy that now prevails across much of the world is so powerful that violent revolution in the historical sense is almost impossible.
However, their System is so short-sighted that the world could collapse into localised violence due to the environmental factors you mention. Factors that the oligarchy chooses to ignore.
The US seems to be teetering on the edge of domestic chaos.
They are not investing in national development; instead they flirt with WW3 at every opportunity, engaging in brinkmanship that will eventually end in miscalculation.
And because they have not invested in national development, I do not see them having the social cohesion to handle that.
I see secession movements as a real possibility in the event of WW3.
An invasion of the US would unify the country, but WW3 will not involve invasion, it will be a missile war, and plenty will want to opt out because plenty are already thinking about it.
So it’s not altogether moot to “discuss political issues and pathways to best practice when the physical realities of what we’ve managed to achieve on a planetwide basis may be the very thing that signs our death warrants” as you rightly say.
Those physical realities result from political decisions.
Discussing those political decisions and the warped thinking behind them is essential. First, because such discussions might, with a bit of luck, influence outcomes. But also because if we survive the chaos that is coming from environmental destruction, we need a firm ideological base to avoid a repetition.
That’s why I posted the hypothetical interview with Marx.
We can only understand the destruction and the chaos that has you rightly concerned, if we understand that, from the interview, “The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.”
Thanks Steve, as expected, an appropriate return of serve.
The overwhelming problem was identified by Hans Christian Anderson, the “king” has no clothes” and nobody is willing to tell him for fear of …..??
TACO Trumpery will be remembered as the PPOTUS, Pederast Protector of the Undemocratic Swamp of Apartheid, a person with the inherent talent to make everything he touch turns to manure, a decaying, demented, geriatric, four times bankrupt, convicted sex felon, adulterer, philander, who in sensible countries would be considered unfit for any public service job, including toilet cleaner, perhaps the only successor to make Richard Nixon look like an angelic cherub.
I read somewhere that trump was a mythomaniac(psychological condition characterized by a persistent and compulsive tendency to fabricate elaborate, self-aggrandizing stories) and therefore what ever he says is the truth. Same result as opus dei men, a lie for god is not a lie, but some opus dei know they are lying.
Uhm ….. When I was in the Army there were a lot of self-important individuals who we mere ORs were required to salute for no reason other than they were present in our immediate location. ”Show respect!” was the repeated order that most of my unit simply ignored.
Respect is hard earned and given freely.
TACO Trumpery certainly has failed to earn my respect, being ranked somewhat lower than John Howard or Beetrooter Joyce, other self-serving politicians working against the best interest of the voters for the benefit of the billionaire’s club and foreign owned multinational corporations.