Commentators increasingly warn that the United States is losing its soft power – and the data backs them up. The Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index 2026 ranked the US as the steepest decliner among the 193 countries surveyed, with China now less than 1.5 points behind.
Richard Stengel, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in the Obama administration, recently likened Trump’s America to post-war Britain – an imperial hegemon shrinking into “Little America.” The analogy is vivid, though slightly misleading. And it risks obscuring a more consequential story playing out, at least in Southeast Asia.
The Britain comparison has real limits. Post-war British decline was structural and largely irreversible: the empire was economically unsustainable, decolonization had its own momentum, and the United States was actively displacing British influence.
That is not where the US is today. American universities still dominate global rankings. The dollar remains the world’s top reserve currency. US technology firms still shape how much of the world communicates, works and consumes. These are not exhausted imperial assets.
The declinists also have a poor track record. After Iraq, US favorability ratings plunged across much of the world and stayed low through 2008 – then snapped back to pre-war levels within a year of Obama taking office.
After Trump’s first term, the pattern repeated: favorability jumped from 34% to 62% almost overnight when Joe Biden took office. Each time, the institutional infrastructure of US influence remained intact, and American soft power bounced back.
So the real question is not whether the US is indeed becoming “Little England.” It is whether the damage is accumulating faster than it can be repaired. The declinist framing, for all its flaws, captures something real about intent.
What is new under Trump is not American decline but American indifference. The gutting of USAID, the 80% funding cut to the US Agency for Global Media, the 17% drop in new international student enrolments – none of this is the byproduct of overstretched resources. These are deliberate choices to withdraw from the infrastructure of influence.
It is not just withdrawal, either. The administration is actively replacing the old soft power brand with something far less exportable.
Trump’s embrace of Christian nationalism, the privileging of conservative Christian constituencies in foreign policy and the racial undertones running through the administration’s immigration and trade messaging resonate nearly nowhere, especially not in a region as religiously and ethnically diverse as Southeast Asia.
The US once offered itself, however imperfectly, as a pluralist model. What it is projecting now looks more like a civilizational preference – and that does not build coalitions in a region home to the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and significant Buddhist, Hindu and Christian populations.
And in Southeast Asia, indifference is functionally equivalent to decline. This matters because the region is where strategic competition with China will actually be decided – not in the Middle East, where the war with Iran has consumed virtually all of Washington’s bandwidth since late February.
US soft power in Southeast Asia has not relied on the appeal of liberal democracy or the allure of the “shining city on the hill.” It has been built on practical foundations: scholarships and exchange programs that link Southeast Asian elites and talent to American institutions; development partnerships that give Washington a seat at the table on everything from energy security to public health, or military training pipelines that socialize officers into US doctrine.
Regional preferences for the US over China are driven less by admiration for American democracy than by anxiety about Chinese assertiveness in the region and a pragmatic desire for a security counterweight.
That pragmatism might suggest hard power is what matters most. But military presence depends on political access – basing rights, overflight agreements and intelligence sharing – and that access depends on the broader political trust that diplomatic and trade engagement, be it cultural exchange, scholarships, development aid or market penetration, have built over decades.
These pipelines are quiet, unglamorous and easy to cut. They are also extraordinarily difficult to rebuild once severed. The US has spent decades building defense relationships in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand – from officer training through the IMET program to large-scale multilateral exercises like Balikatan and Cobra Gold.
Cut those pipelines, and you reshape the professional networks and influence those officers carry through decades of career advancement. China is already working to build its own version, having funded officer training in Cambodia and expanding military education exchanges across the region.
But Beijing’s reach extends well beyond the military. Chinese dramas dominate streaming platforms across Southeast Asia, TikTok shapes how younger Southeast Asians consume information and Chinese brands from Huawei to BYD are becoming part of daily life.
Across the board, Beijing is filling gaps that Washington is voluntarily creating. And despite reservations, the gap is narrowing fast.
The consequences are already visible. The ISEAS 2026 survey, released this week, found that a majority of Southeast Asian respondents would now choose China over the US if forced to align. Trump’s leadership was named the region’s top geopolitical concern, ahead of global scam centers and tensions in the South China Sea.
The irony is that the Trump administration’s own strategic logic demands exactly the kind of soft power investment it is dismantling. The Indo-Pacific Strategy that both parties nominally endorse depends on willing partners – countries that choose alignment with Washington because US institutions and economic engagement make it the more attractive option. Strip that away, and the strategy reduces to military posturing and transactional deal-making.
None of this means the US has lost Southeast Asia to China. The structural advantages remain formidable. But structural advantages are not self-executing. They require the connective tissue of engagement – the scholarships, the training programs, the diplomatic presence – to translate into actual influence.
The structural decline of US soft power, at least for now, is overstated. But the strategic cost of indifference is being understated. In Southeast Asia, the US is not being displaced by a rising power. It is leaving the field voluntarily – and the seats it vacates will not stay empty for long.
Lam Duc Vu is a Vietnam-based risk analyst focused on regional trade and geopolitics