My first encounter with the U.S. was through an American magazine called SPAN. A free glossy periodical unlike any I had seen before, it came to my grandfather’s house in coastal India. Published by the U.S. Embassy, it featured striking photographs and articles on education, sports, culture and trends, people, science and innovation, and politics. How did a businessman with no connection to America manage to get a subscription? No idea. Maybe all my grandfather had to do was write a letter. While I don’t remember reading SPAN, as I flipped the pages, I do recall marveling at the paper quality and the crisp layouts.
My next encounter, in the form of novel gifts (like the addictive Rubik’s Cube) from my U.S.-based uncle, made me popular with my classmates.
These are small examples to show how, during my formative years in India, the U.S. impinged on my life. I was far from alone. Even though we lived on the other side of the world, America became inescapable and fascinating, whether it was through movies or technological advances or comic books or pop music or, most crucially, its renowned universities. Unsurprisingly, in recent years, no nation has been sending more students to the U.S. than India.
But everything changed last year, with the sharp drop in America’s intake of foreign students being just one of the head-spinning developments we’ve seen since Donald Trump returned to power. Overall, compared to 2024, the number of international students coming to the U.S. last year decreased by 19%, according to data provided by the government. In the case of Indian students, the drop was 44% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. During peak enrollment in August last year, the decline was as dramatic as 50% for students from India.
It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of this and other changes, because for six decades—since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965—few countries were held in greater esteem than the U.S. by middle-class Indians and their ambitious offspring. Some would argue that this period, at least for the West, stretches back eight decades. After the Allied victory in World War Two, it was the U.S. that took the lead in rebuilding the free world.
In India, the mandarins and nationalists had a more jaundiced view of the U.S., which they saw as arrogant, hypocritical, and untrustworthy. Not so my family and many other people we knew. Upper-class Indians who aped the posh Brits seemed more overbearing. To us, despite what the governing class said, the U.S. was generous and unimpeachable. We were, of course, selective in how we saw America, choosing to ignore its shortcomings.
If I walked into a well-educated family’s home, the heady discussion I heard was more likely to focus on what management gurus like Tom Peters and Peter Drucker were saying, rather than what our homegrown Marxist and Maoist intellectuals were spouting. Free markets ruled, as did democracy. Neoliberalism, not socialism or communism, was what mattered to this crowd.
The brilliant, overachieving students we came across spoke knowledgeably about Harvard and Stanford, instead of Oxford and Cambridge. Britain, though its influence lingered through the English language, cricket, and the Commonwealth, was already much diminished when we were coming of age. It was racy American novels and pulp paperbacks that gave us thrills, not the staid British classics gathering dust on bookshelves at home or in school.
India, like the U.S., was familiar with British condescension. So I couldn’t relate to how Americans were made fun of in, for example, the popular James Bond films. For me, it was the suited and stiff-upper-lip Brits, with their plummy accent, who looked faintly ridiculous, not the friendly and garrulous Yankee tourists in shorts. We had a complicated relationship with our former ruler, which had also been America’s ruler much earlier. While the BBC was revered (some Indians owned shortwave radios only because of the Beeb), the anachronistic British royal family, reminding us of India’s long, bitter experience with colonialism, was risible.
Although India had chosen a parliamentary system, it was the U.S., a forward-looking superpower, that seemed worth emulating. The U.K., on the other hand, represented the past, as “Kingdom” in the abbreviation implied. We continued to use British spelling, but increasingly, American English was making inroads, thanks to popular culture and guidebooks that would help us ace standardized tests such as the TOEFL, GRE, and GMAT. Understanding American speech patterns became important for students, just as it did for workers in call centers.
Now, however, American dominance has peaked. Trump 2.0 is a catalyst for whatever comes next. It’s a perilous moment. As polls from last year and this year make clear, the U.S. has become unpopular globally. Sadly, the “Ugly American” stereotype, promoted during the Cold War, is being revived—and more widely this time, given how interconnected the world is today.
The U.S. is no longer a highly desired destination. Last year, for the first time in half a century, it experienced negative net migration. The Brookings Institution expects it to be negative or very low in 2026 as well. According to the 2025 Democracy Perception Index, only 45% of nations had a positive view of the U.S. last year. In 2024, it was 76%. In the majority of countries, Trump is more unpopular than either Xi or Putin. Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer, a frequent guest on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, noted last month that political instability in the U.S. poses a greater threat than China or Russia.
Even Americans are very worried about their country. A Gallup survey of Americans in December showed that their predictions for 2026 were more pessimistic than they were for 2025. They were not optimistic about the U.S. improving political cooperation, solving international disputes, and promoting economic prosperity. Most were positive only about the stock market.
An NPR/Ipsos poll last month shows that only 39% of Americans think their country is a moral leader. It was 60% in 2017—another sign of how Trump 2.0 has turned out to be quite different from Trump 1.0. There were guardrails back then, limiting the damage. Now we only have ill-qualified and unrestrained Trump loyalists in power. Other recent polls also show Trump’s deepening unpopularity (approval is below 40%, mostly)—and according to a CNN poll, 58% think the first year of Trump 2.0 was a failure.
Is Trump making China great again? Yes, polls confirm that among Americans as well. A survey by Carnegie scholars reveals that almost two-thirds think China’s power now equals or exceeds America’s. University rankings show that China is gaining ground while the U.S. is falling behind. But here’s some surprising news. “Amid increasingly favorable views of China, the status of the U.S. as an ally has declined across almost all the countries surveyed, with India the only one where a majority still feels the U.S. is an ally, sharing the country’s values and interests,” The Guardian noted. So India, interestingly, hasn’t given up on the U.S.
There are ominous signs, though. According to a survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, the support for joining a U.S.-led bloc (as opposed to a Chinese-led bloc) has declined in India and other big emerging powers.
“We have rejected globalism and embraced patriotism,” Trump famously declared.
That’s been his governing philosophy, and as the historian Yuval Noah Harari reminds us in Nexus, his latest book, Trump said that in his first term. Such “Us vs. Them” thinking appeals to our tribal instincts. But it is reductive and counterproductive—and, ultimately, it will fail.
“Luckily, this binary position is mistaken in its basic assumption,” Harari writes, referring to Trump’s 2020 statement. “Global cooperation and patriotism are not mutually exclusive. For patriotism isn’t about hating foreigners. It is about loving our compatriots. And there are many situations when, in order to take care of our compatriots, we need to cooperate with foreigners.”
Murali Kamma is the managing editor of Khabar.This article also appeared in The Quint.