F
ranz Kafka never visited America. But at the beginning of his unfinished novel Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) – posthumously published in 1927 as Amerika – Karl Rossmann, a 17-year-old German boy, is exiled after being seduced by a maid and getting her pregnant. Arriving in New York Harbor, “he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.”
It is not clear if Kafka knew the Statue of Liberty holds a torch, not a sword. But the image of the statue with a sword is evocative and resonant – especially since Donald Trump became president again last month. Like Kafka’s protagonist, we seem to be seeing the US in an “intenser sunlight” – and what we see is an America that threatens rather than offers hope.
For most of the post-Second World War period, what characterised US power was hypocrisy. While American politicians talked in an idealised way about what the country stood for – above all freedom and democracy – the reality was very different. In western Europe, where the US helped democracies resist Soviet domination during the Cold War, it was just about possible to believe the rhetoric, even if Nato included a few authoritarian states at times. But elsewhere in the world, especially in the Global South, it was less convincing.
This mode of American power – lofty in rhetoric, sordid in practice – culminated in the actions of the Biden administration. After the interlude of the first Trump administration, Joe Biden said that the US – by which, of course, he meant an idealised version of it – was back. What Trump stood for was “not who we are” – as if Trump was some alien force in American life rather than the latest manifestation of dark currents in American history that go all the way back to the founding of the country.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it almost seemed as if we were back to the Cold War in Europe, with America as the leader of the “free world” – a term which, since Trump was first elected in 2016, Democrat diplomats have revived. Then came the war in Gaza. It was not just that the US stood by as Israel did all the things that diplomats like then secretary of state Antony Blinken constantly slammed Russia for doing in Ukraine after its invasion – like bombing hospitals and schools – but that it actively enabled Israel to do so.
Now, with Trump back in the White House, the pretence is over. This America, it is already clear, is one that relies on raw economic and military power and aims to intimidate allies and adversaries alike. Trump has already threatened to annex Greenland, take back the Panama Canal, and has suggested that Canada become America’s 51st state.
Even as Biden provided Israel with diplomatic, financial and military support, he pretended the US wasn’t enabling the destruction of Gaza. Trump, meanwhile, has publicly said that America should take over Gaza, remove its population, and redevelop it as a beach resort.
The dismantling of the United States Agency for Aid and Development (USAid) – which softened the hard edges of American power around the world, especially in the Global South – is the best illustration of this shift. Samantha Power, the director of USAid in the Biden administration, said in a New York Times op-ed that by halting the agency’s programmes, Trump was making “one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in US history”.
In a talk at Harvard on 6 February, Barack Obama’s former foreign policy adviser and speechwriter Ben Rhodes contrasted the “expansive vision” of the US in the era of President John F Kennedy – who created USAid – with the era we are now in. He admitted that the US hadn’t lived up to the values it proclaimed but said that they at least remained “an aspiration”. Now, however, the country has abandoned any attempt to uphold these values. “What happened here in this country that this is what we’re projecting to the world?” he asked.
Meanwhile, as the sugar-coating of American power abroad comes to an end, thousands of migrants are being rounded up in raids across the country. This brings us back to the Statue of Liberty and the hope it seemed to offer the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, in the words of Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem “The New Colossus” – words which were added to the statue in 1903. As it became a symbol of America around the world, it was tempting to imagine there was a consensus around the idea it should be a refuge for the oppressed and poor.
But that idea was consistently contested. By the time the statue was built in 1886, American republicanism was becoming increasingly racialised, for example with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited labourers from China from emigrating to the US. Moreover, it was not until well into the 20th century, when mass immigration had come to an end, even from Europe, that it could be romanticised. This is when the statue more widely came to be seen as a symbol for refuge.
Clearly, the US is changing. But the present moment also illustrates that the country was never quite what many of us imagined in the first place.
[See more: Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of religion]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation