So, what changes to the US government system would actually restore international trust? This was a question someone posted on Quora, a website for people to ask questions and get answers. Like most sites, it started off with a noble and great concept to allow people to find information that was difficult to access elsewhere. Today not so much.
But the question was posed. So, I thought I'd answer with a blog post.
America was founded through rebellion. A nation of dreamers, cast-offs, the flotsam and jetsam of most of Europe, they rebelled against the norm and threw off the yoke of absentee leadership, totalitarianism, and monarchism. Outside of Switzerland and tiny San Marino the US is the oldest democratic republic on the planet. America was for most of its history a nation of rebels, innovators, thinkers, and doers.
And because of this history, there has never really been ‘trust’ toward America. Americans didn't follow the rules. They made up their own. They even made up their own sports. Baseball, basketball, gridiron football are all American sports either made up or modified by making up new rules.
So, the world never trusted the US. They only needed America. And that began in the late 19th Century with the massive industrialization of America's economy.
The Western Allies needed America in World War I for food, arms, and finally military manpower. All of Europe and Asia needed the US during and after World War II. Without American arms, food, and energy the allies (Britain, Australia, China, France, and the USSR) would have struggled mightily to replace their losses and build a modern military large enough to defeat the Axis. The, the American Marshall Plan rebuilt nearly the whole of Western Europe after the war. The US rebuilt Japan and the Philippines, too. They would also rebuild South Korea after that war.
Even now, America is the single greatest donor nation on the planet. Whenever there is a natural or even man-made disaster, Americans arrive in droves with food, water, medical aid, and equipment and technology to help clean up and rebuild. And the US does all this with less than four percent of the world's population. Yet it produces a quarter of the world's wealth. There are more Europeans (even without Russia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus) than Americans, yet the Americans STILL outproduce Europe. Whether it is defense, technology, food, or whatever, respect has NOTHING to do with it. The world needs the US far more than America needs the world.
Canada, Europe, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan have been living under the US taxpayers’ largesse and the American defense umbrella that those same American taxpayers have paid for since 1945. The Philippines essentially got rid of any strategic defense 20 years ago and is now scrambling to recover with the recently aggressive actions of China. Europe has a huge lack of strategic air and sealift capability, naval capability, reserve forces, nuclear weapons, armor, etc., and depends on the US to keep Putin's big, bad Russian Bear at bay.
Today, President Trump has called them all out. He and many other Americans are sick and tired of subsidizing ‘international trust’ that is only a leech on America's finances and prosperity. And the planet concurrently criticizes on a constant basis the very nation that affords them the ability to subsidize mediocrity and sloth, hate and protest, and even barely-disguised police states.
America has shown the planet far more trust than that given the US, except when America is needed by the world. They DO trust that the US will be there when they are in need. Real international trust is a joke when it only goes one way.
And frighteningly for America's 'friends' that joke stopped in January 2025.
