A few years ago, at a panel in North Africa, a tone-deaf American diplomat sat before a room full of people from the global south, many from countries scarred by U.S.-led wars, and declared that he wanted to see America everywhere. Like some kind of global “McFreedom” chain, planted in every corner of the map, whose burgers don’t actually look anything like they do in the advertising.

Now, that old soft-power mindset may finally be losing its grip, if a new State Department memo is any indication. And not a moment too soon.

“While the United States will hold firm to its own democratic values and celebrate those values when other countries choose a similar path, the president made clear that the United States will pursue partnerships with countries wherever our strategic interests align,” read a memo to diplomats worldwide from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to Reuters.

“DO NOT use election-time messaging to advance a U.S. foreign policy goal. DO NOT use it to promote an ideology,” it added.

The message is clear: Trump wants Washington out of the global gaslighting racket. Besides, why burn billions on sneaky taxpayer-funded “civil society” operations when a free caps-locked rant will do?

The new approach doesn’t just end the lectures, but also the pretense that soft power was ever really about people’s dignity or freedom rather than about access and control.

That shift isn’t just rhetorical, with the Senate approving the president’s request to slash $8 billion in foreign aid funding, including the kind of soft-power nation- shaping activities usually carried out by the CIA-adjacent United States Agency for International Development, which Trump moved to abolish in the early days of his second term.

And what has it all actually achieved? The aim has never really been to foster the lofty values that even the West struggles to uphold, but rather to shape other societies to better serve Washington’s economic interests, no matter how wildly they diverge from local needs or realities.

Europe, the loyal sidekick, has long followed suit, with disastrous results. Democracy and human rights have served as the moral lubricant for riding shotgun on costly U.S.-led geopolitical adventures. Wars sold as humanitarianism have triggered mass displacement on European borders that have been flung open in the name of diversity. And cheap Russian energy — Europe’s economic lifeline — was sacrificed in a failed performative crusade against Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Europeans plunged into financial hardship to pay for it.

Those pointing out these glaring self-inflicted wounds have faced censorship for deviating from the accepted narrative, but now the situation has become so egregious that the truth is seeping out through the cracks like sewage in a collapsing cathedral. That reality is no longer fringe, but front page. “France’s budget bombshell is a wake-up call for Europe as it veers toward bankruptcy,” Politico headlined last week.

But while Washington is now slipping out the side door of the soft-power theater, its allies are still clinging to their scripts like aging actors in denial.