How the World Really Sees Us
The Uncomfortable Truth About American Exceptionalism in 2025
We tell ourselves the world still looks up to America. We're wrong.
Americans have long nursed a particular delusion: that the rest of the world envies us, dreams of us, wants desperately to be us. We imagine billions of people gazing longingly at our Hollywood exports, our gleaming cities, our supposed freedoms, all while plotting their eventual migration to the land of opportunity. It's a comforting story we tell ourselves, one that reinforces our sense of specialness in an increasingly complicated world.
But step outside the American bubble—really step outside, not just a vacation in Paris or take a business trip to London—and you'll discover something unsettling: the world's perception of America has been steadily declining, with recent surveys showing global views of the US now falling below even supposed third-world countries in some measures.
We're not the shining beacon of freedom and opportunity we imagine ourselves to be. Increasingly, we are the cautionary tale.
The gap between America's self-image and global reality has never been wider. While we're busy debating whether our “exceptionalism” is by some act of divine providence or historical accident, the rest of the world laughs at us. They've stopped asking whether America is exceptional and started asking whether it's stable or safe enough to even visit.
The answer, increasingly, is no.
Everyone Wants to Come Here (Except They Don't)
Let's start with the most persistent myth: that America remains the world's premier destination. That everyone, everywhere, is dying to get here. It's a story that feels true because it once was true. But like so many American narratives, it's become fossilized, repeated long after the reality has changed.
Yes, there are still 281 million international migrants globally, and America still receives a significant portion. But dig deeper into the numbers, and the picture becomes more complex. Talk to recent immigrants, and you'll find that many view America not as a permanent home but as a temporary opportunity—a place to earn money, gain experience, maybe get a degree, then return home or move on to somewhere more appealing.
"The American Dream is increasingly becoming the American Nightmare," observes immigration expert Susan Bibler Coutin. For some, the dream hasn't entirely disappeared; it's been rebranded as a layover or a stepping stone rather than a sustainable longterm destination.
While America still attracts immigrants, it's also hemorrhaging expats. American expats aren't just wealthy retirees seeking cheaper healthcare in Costa Rica or digital nomads lying on beaches in Portugal. They are young families fleeing school shootings, middle-aged professionals seeking affordable healthcare, trans individuals fleeing persecution and seeking lifesaving care they no longer have access to in the US, and yes, even patriotic Americans who've concluded that the country they love is no longer a country they recognize.
Meanwhile, countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several European nations have quietly become the new promised lands. They offer what America once monopolized: economic opportunity paired with social stability, innovation coupled with sanity. When a software engineer in Bangalore dreams of emigrating, Toronto and Melbourne are increasingly appealing alternatives to big American cities.
The shift is generational too. Younger people worldwide, the demographic that traditionally drives migration, are far less likely to see America as aspirational. They've grown up watching our school shootings on social media, our medical bankruptcies, our political dysfunction. To them, America doesn't look like the future; it looks like a cautionary tale about what happens when a society loses its way.
The Reputation Recession: From “Beacon of Freedom” to Bogeyman
Recent polling shows that only 46% of people across 29 countries now say the US will have a positive influence globally, down from 59% just months earlier. This isn't just a temporary dip in favorability ratings; it represents a fundamental shift in how the world sees America's role.
Historian Andrew Bacevich has argued that American exceptionalism has become "a curse disguised as a blessing." Where we see manifest destiny, the world increasingly sees manifest instability. Where we see righteous leadership, they see reckless intervention. Where we see the land of the free, they see a land of the militarized police force.
This perception shift isn't driven by anti-American propaganda or jealousy, as we often comfort ourselves into believing. It's driven by observation. The world has watched America's response to its challenges, from Covid to climate change to domestic terrorism, and found it wanting. They have seen us choose conspiracy theories over science, polarization over problem-solving, showmanship and theatrics over real governance.
Foreign observers are particularly bewildered by our political system. Parliamentary democracies worldwide look at our gerrymandered districts, our Electoral College, our filibuster, and our Supreme Court and see not a template for democracy but a warning about what happens when democratic institutions fail to evolve. They see a system that has become less democratic over time, not more.
"America used to export democracy," notes political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die. "Now the only thing America is exporting is concerns about democratic backsliding."
The Healthcare Horror Show
Perhaps nothing damages America's global reputation more than our healthcare system. While Americans debate whether healthcare is a right or a privilege, the rest of the developed world has moved on from that question entirely. They've built systems that treat healthcare as a public good, like education or infrastructure, and they can't fathom why the world's wealthiest country can't or won’t do the same.
Foreign visitors to America often return home with stories that sound like dark fairy tales: families bankrupted by cancer diagnoses, diabetics rationing insulin, people dying because they can’t afford treatment. These are the horror stories of a society that has lost its moral compass and its footing.
The Pandemic crystallized these concerns. While other countries rallied around public health measures, America turned a global health crisis into a culture war. The world watched in bewilderment as Americans protested mask mandates, staged anti-vaccine rallies, and turned basic health precautions into political loyalty tests.
"America's response to Covid wasn't just a public health failure," observes global health expert Dr. Ashish Jha. "It was a display of institutional dysfunction that damaged our credibility on virtually every other issue."
A State of Fear: America’s Gun Violence Epidemic
Gun violence has become America's most visible export, and it's destroying our soft power. Every mass shooting is global news, every school lockdown a reminder that America has chosen to live with levels of violence that other developed nations find incomprehensible.
Foreign parents don't dream of sending their children to American schools; they have nightmares about it. The country that once symbolized safety and opportunity now symbolizes random violence and institutional paralysis. When European or Asian families consider moving to America, gun violence isn't just a concern—it's often the deciding factor that makes them look elsewhere.
The numbers are staggering and globally embarrassing. America has more gun deaths in a typical week than most developed countries have in a year. We've normalized levels of violence that would prompt international intervention if they occurred anywhere else.
"America's gun violence isn't just a domestic policy failure," argues security analyst Jessica Stern. "It's a national security issue that undermines our global leadership."
The Political Circus: Democracy as Reality TV
American politics has become a spectacle that the world watches with a mixture of fascination and horror. What we call democracy, they increasingly see as dysfunction. Our political system has become entertainment, with more focus on ratings than results, and more attention to the antics of Donald Trump than real substantive foreign policy.
The world has watched America elect a reality TV star, stage an insurrection at the Capitol, and the MAGA movement continue to debate whether the 2020 election was legitimate. They've seen us elevate conspiracy theories to mainstream political discourse and turn basic facts into argumentative talking points.
Foreign diplomats privately describe dealing with America as exhausting and unpredictable. They never know which America will show up—the global superpower or the dysfunctional Trumpocracy. This unpredictability has driven many allies to hedge their bets, building relationships with other partners and reducing their dependence on American leadership.
"America's political dysfunction isn't just an internal problem," notes international relations scholar John Ikenberry. "It's undermining the liberal international order that America helped create."
The Land of Extreme Inequality
While America debates whether inequality is a problem, the rest of the world has already reached a verdict: American-style capitalism is a cautionary tale about what happens when capitalism is allowed to fully go off the rails.
Foreign visitors are shocked by America's homeless encampments, our massive wealth disparity and extreme poverty, our food deserts and our educational inequality. They can't understand how the world's wealthiest society tolerates such extremes of poverty and wealth, such basic failures of a public safety net.
The contrast is particularly stark for visitors from social democratic countries. They see America's crumbling infrastructure, inadequate social services, and extreme inequality, and they don't see a model to emulate—they see a warning about what happens when societies prioritize the obscene wealth of a handful of individuals over collective welfare.
"America's inequality isn't just an economic problem," says economist Thomas Piketty. "It's a moral crisis that undermines the American model's global appeal."
The Climate Crisis: Leading from Behind
On climate change, America has become a global pariah when it should be a global leader. While other countries invest in renewable energy and plan for a sustainable future, America continues to debate whether climate change is real, invest in dirty fossil fuels and polluting infrastructure, and throw up our hands as to whether addressing it is even worth the cost.
This isn't just about policy disagreements, it's about moral leadership. The world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is failing to lead on the world's most pressing challenge. Young people worldwide, the demographic that cares most about climate change, see America as an obstacle to climate progress rather than a partner in solutions.
"America's climate leadership deficit isn't just about emissions," notes climate scientist Michael Mann. "It's about our failure to provide the moral leadership that the world desperately needs."
America’s Reckoning: What We've Lost
The tragedy isn't just that America has lost its exceptionalism (and whether that ever existed or not in the first place is highly debatable). It's that we have utterly lost our way. We've become so invested in the myth of American exceptionalism that we've stopped doing the work of actually leading or innovating. We've confused a false nationalism with patriotism, propaganda with truth, performance with progress.
The world hasn't stopped believing in American values, it's stopped believing that America practices them. They still admire our ideals of freedom, democracy, and opportunity—they just think we've abandoned them in favor of theater, tribalism, infighting, corruption, capitalism run amok, and of course, the biggie—fascism.
This isn't about America-bashing. It's about facing facts. The world has options now that it didn't have fifty years ago. Other countries offer better economic opportunity, political stability, social mobility, and certainly better healthcare. They don't need to look to America for a model of success; they can look to Scandinavia, Canada, New Zealand, or a dozen other countries that have figured out how to balance prosperity with equity, freedom with responsibility.