Donald Trump, Global Titan

President Donald Trump’s spat with Colombian leader Gustavo Petro earlier this week further underscored a truth that has already become obvious just a few days into his second term: the 47th president is confronting a very different world than the one that greeted him in 2016 or even the one he left in early 2021.

That world is one in which foreign leaders were quick to make pilgrimages to Florida and now Washington to gain his approval before he even officially re-entered the Oval Office. It is also a world where Israel and its enemies were eager to cooperate with the wishes of its Middle Eastern Emissary in Trump. A world where tongue-in-cheek references to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “Governor of Canada” resulted not in a nationalist backlash that saved Trudeau but a rush by his party to throw him overboard while his provincial premiers undertook pilgrimages to Trump’s inauguration.

And finally, that world is one in which Petro’s efforts to haggle over deportation flights resulted not in apologies or extended negotiations, but in the rapid imposition of tariffs and a humiliating surrender encapsulated by the Colombian President retweeting White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s declaration of victory.

Petro learned the lesson that other leaders grasped months ago: Donald Trump enters office as perhaps the most potent global leader in a century, if not longer.

What changed? The short answer is that Trump is more powerful at home than in 2017, while virtually every potential rival is weaker within their own countries. Eight years ago, the global political establishment viewed Trump as an aberration, the accidental byproduct of America’s Electoral College.

At every level, representatives of America’s elites – businessmen, politicians, career civil servants, even some of the president’s appointees – urged foreign governments to treat Trump as a transient figure. In their view, they, not the elected president, represented the actual center of American policymaking power. They may even have deluded themselves into believing it. No one would make the same mistake today.

If international leaders recognize that Trump and only Trump represents American policy in 2025, they will be far less able to resist his influence than in 2017.

Two things have now changed. First, whereas Trump confronted foreign governments that, in many cases, were at the peak of their domestic political legitimacy and strength in 2017, in 2025, he now confronts deeply unpopular governments presiding over a status quo viewed as unsustainable. Second, whereas Trump enjoyed even less support abroad than the typical American Republican in 2017, in 2025, he arguably has a greater personal following abroad than any Republican president in history. 

A good illustration of how these two factors interact is the case of Canada. In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was still basking in the glow of his 2015 electoral victory. He had a large majority and won after nine years of Conservative rule. Trudeau was enjoying an economic boom that allowed him to paint the Canadian model as a superior alternative to then American model and thereby use opposition to Trump to rally Canadian nationalism by associating national pride with far-left ideology.

Trump, meanwhile, had few allies in Canada. The Canadian Conservatives were deeply divided after losing power in 2015. Rather than presenting a bold alternative, they were determined to apologize for their government policies and assure Canadians that they would never dare do anything different from Trudeau if given the chance to retake power. It went without saying that the Canadian Conservatives would bend over backward to denounce Trump, and by picking fights with Trump, Trudeau could force the Conservatives to go even further in an anti-Trump direction.

The result was a situation in which Trudeau could rally left-wing Americans seeking a successor to Barack Obama against their own president. Still, even the most right-wing Canadians didn’t view Trump as a hero.

The situation this time around could not be more different. Trudeau was already profoundly unpopular during the 2024 election, presiding over a housing crisis primarily caused by his mass migration policies, a declining economy, and deteriorating government services and public safety.

In 2017, the message that Canadians should feel smugly superior to Americans could sell Trudeau as a nationalist, and the idea that Canada should join America would have elicited mockery. In 2024, Trump’s half-joking suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state drew some serious praise up north. Canadians were, on average, $15,000 poorer relative to Americans than in 2017, their cost of living was higher, and things looked like they were only getting worse.

Rather than rallying around Trudeau in the face of Trump’s criticisms, Trudeau’s party dumped him, while the Premier of Alberta traveled to Florida and then to the inauguration. Mark Carney, the leading candidate to succeed Trudeau as leader of Liberal Party, now cites Trump’s dislike of his rival, Chrystia Freeland, as a reason why voters should side with him.

Canada is probably the most extreme example of this phenomenon, but it is far from the only one. Trump’s interventions in British politics have met with efforts to placate his team, even before the election. Current British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who six years ago called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath,” has spent the past year trying to fawn over him, traveling to Mar-a-Lago and declaring that “The Donald Trump I met was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the U.K., our royal family, Scotland.”

When Trump’s team hinted they might reject the appointment Peter Mandelson, a Labour Partisan with links to the Chinese Communist Party, as Ambassador to the U.S., the British government began canvassing for an alternative ahead of time. A deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is also on hold under pressure from the Trump team.

Like Trudeau’s government in Canada, the British Labor government is deeply unpopular, with some polls showing it commands the backing of less than a quarter of the electorate. A similar situation afflicts Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party is polling between 15 percent and 19 percent. In 2017, Trudeau, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and France’s Emmanuel Macron were all able to parlay Trump’s criticisms of their domestic governance into attacks on their respective nations as a whole. In 2025, those criticisms elicit the response, “you know, Trump is kind of right.”

Even Trump’s unelected rivals are humbled. Russia’s Vladimir Putin faces a deteriorating economic situation and a stalemate in Ukraine, and his forces have suffered a humiliating rout in Syria. China’s Xi Jinping presides over an economic recession and increasing social unrest.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, Narendra Modi saw his party lose its majority in elections last spring, shattering his aura of invincibility.

Trump, meanwhile, can now command a genuinely international base of support, having bent the global conservative movement to his will in the same way he did American Republicans in 2016. In 2017, virtually every major center-right party was dominated by counterparts of Trump’s banished opponents from the 2016 primary.

Even in Britain, where Brexit had passed in 2016, both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage had been cast into the political wilderness, only to reemerge during the crisis of 2019. In France, Marine Le Pen, while gaining strength, remained a fringe figure, winning 33 percent of the vote in the 2017 presidential elections and only eight seats in that year’s parliamentary races. In the years since, a transformation has taken place.

The failures of Merkelism in Germany, traditional Toryism in Britain, and Macronism in France have discredited the establishment center-right. To the extent there are divisions, they are divisions over who is best equipped to lead the pivot into Trumpism. Hence, the division between Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative party in the U.K. is over who best serves as a partner for Trump, not over whether the next leader of Britain should do so.

In Germany, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Merkel’s old Christian Democratic Union, argues not in defense of Merkel’s legacy (he had been her enemy for decades) but that he, unlike the Alternative for Germany, is a more effective partner for Trump. Factions in the current political disputes in South Korea and Taiwan likewise compete over who is more aligned with Trump.

The net effect is to make Trump something that Barack Obama could only aspire to be, and that Joe Biden deluded himself into asserting himself to be. Trump is, in other words, the unquestioned leader of what might be termed “the free world.”

When Trump jokingly referred to Justin Trudeau as a “governor,” he nonetheless expressed a profound truth. Trudeau’s relationship to Trump was more akin to that of a governor in the United States than a fellow national leader in that Trump had loyal followers within Trudeau’s legislature and provinces eager to do his bidding. It was impossible for Trudeau to keep a finance minister in office and for Keir Starmer to send an ambassador to Washington whom Trump found distasteful. As Mark Carney, the man likely to be the country’s next prime minister for at least a short time, has asserted, it may not be possible for Canada to be led effectively by an individual Trump disapproves of.

Trump’s power abroad is no more absolute than it is at home. But both abroad and at home, Trump wields more power than any president in decades, perhaps in history, as even Franklin Roosevelt had to contend with Stalin. That is a marked difference from 2017 and will define global geopolitics over the next few years.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.