America First, America Last: The Loss of Soft Power
There are two kinds of power and most people understand one of them. Hard power is visible. It is military strength, economic sanctions, or the ability to compel other nations to act against their preferences through force or financial pressure. It shows up in defense budgets, aircraft carriers, and the threat of consequences. Americans are comfortable thinking about power in these terms because hard power is legible, you can see it and feel it when it is used against you.
Soft power is different. It operates largely out of sight, and its benefits are distributed so broadly and so quietly that most citizens who depend on it daily have no idea it exists. Soft power is the ability to shape the rules of the world before any specific conflict arises. It is the capacity to design international institutions, set global standards, lead multilateral organizations, and embed your values and interests into the operating system of the international order so that the world, by default, runs in ways that favor you. Hard power will win you a battle, but soft power shapes whether the battle must be had in the first place.
For the better part of the last century, the United States has held more soft power than any nation in modern history. That advantage is now being voluntarily surrendered. And the central irony of that surrender is that it is being carried out in the name of putting America first.
To understand what is being given up, it helps to understand how it was built.
The postwar international order was constructed out of strategic calculation by people who understood, with fresh and painful clarity, what a world without durable institutions looked like. They had just lived through it. The League of Nations had mainly collapsed because major powers prioritized short-term national interest over collective frameworks, and the vacuum that followed was filled by authoritarian states with catastrophic results. The architects of the postwar order had to manage ideological disagreements, national rivalries, and the wreckage of a war that killed tens of millions, and this required making a different and more durable bet.
They built institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization, NATO, and eventually the World Trade Organization (building on the postwar trade framework established under GATT in 1947). They funded them substantially. They staffed them with their best people. And they designed them so that American participation was structurally central, because American leadership within these institutions meant that American values, priorities, and interests were embedded in how global decisions were made.
This was soft power in its most sophisticated form, influence. The United States shaped and led these global bodies and, in doing so, ensured that the rules governing global health, global trade, collective security, and international development reflected an American worldview. That is an extraordinary advantage, and it costs remarkably little to maintain relative to what it delivers.
The numbers make the case plainly.
The United States provides about 22 percent of the United Nations regular budget, roughly a quarter of UN peacekeeping funding, and remains the largest assessed contributor to the World Health Organization. At the IMF and World Bank, its voting shares gives it de facto blocking power over major structural changes to both institutions. These contributions are the price of a seat at the head of the table, and from that seat the United States has, for the better part of that time, shaped the agenda for global health, trade, security, and development in ways that default to American values and American interests.
In January 2026, the United States “left” 66 international organizations in a single executive order. The funding halt that preceded the formal WHO departure forced the organization to scale back operations and cut thousands of positions, with the most severe consequences falling on global health programs serving the world's most vulnerable populations. In the past decade alone, the United States has withdrawn from UNESCO twice and from the Paris climate accord twice. Prior to that, the US had withdrawn from UNESCO only once, forty years ago. None of this is visible to most Americans because the benefits of soft power are invisible precisely when they are at work, like a power grid that nobody notices until the lights go out. The cost of dismantling it will arrive slowly in a world that has quietly stopped organizing itself around American interests.
The arguments for withdrawal are not entirely without merit, and they deserve a fair hearing. Some of these institutions have genuine accountability problems. The WHO's handling of the early stages of the COVID pandemic raised legitimate questions about its independence from political pressure. The UN Human Rights Council has included member states whose records make a mockery of its mandate. The case that American taxpayers deserve more transparency and more responsiveness from institutions they fund substantially is a reasonable one.
But there is a critical distinction between reform and abandonment, and the withdrawal strategy consistently collapses it. A country that holds 22 percent of the budget and an effective blocking power over structural changes is not a marginal participant with limited options. It is the most powerful actor in the room. Walking away from that position does not hold the institution accountable and forfeits the leverage required to demand accountability. The ability to compel reform leaves with the departure, and what remains is an institution now shaped by whoever stayed.
This is the strategic cost the America First framework has not priced in. The choice is not between leading imperfect institutions and being free of them. It is between leading them and ceding that leadership to others who do not share American values or American interests. Nature does not tolerate a vacuum, especially in geopolitics. The question is who else will set the agenda in America's absence, and toward what ends. We are already beginning to see the answer take shape.
There is a version of prioritizing American interests that is entirely coherent. It would use American leverage within these institutions more aggressively, demand reforms, condition funding on performance, and preserve the seat at the head of the table from which those demands can be enforced. What it would not involve is leaving the table and expecting the terms to improve.
The postwar architects understood that American power and international order were not in tension with one another. They were mutually reinforcing. That insight required a long enough time horizon to see how the investment paid off. The returns on that investment are now being spent, and the generation inheriting the consequences will understand the cost of this moment with a clarity only available in retrospect.
Putting America first is a legitimate goal. The question is whether the strategy being pursued in its name is capable of achieving it, or whether, a generation from now, America First will be remembered as the period in which America chose to be last.
