No Stupid Questions

Practically, there's little they can do to win back the USA's soft power at this point -- bridges take seconds to burn, generations to build.

A starting point would be to hold the various people from the previous administration accountable for what's gone on. That's practically impossible, as we've seen them unable to hold people like Trump accountable for a literal attempted insurrection/coup the last time he was defeated at the polls. Putting people like Hegseth in front of the Hague, to answer for his war crimes in regards to killing civilians near venezuela, for example, would be a step in regaining trust from the international community (basically "We committed international crimes, and we'll allow the international community to determine the punishment"). The USA would never do that, and has never done that historically. The democrats would never sign off on it, no matter how nazi-like the republicans may get -- and the American people, even now, view themselves as exceptional/special to the point that they feel no 'real' accountability for the shit their government is doing.

Trade relations/integrations are screwed, as every western partner of the USA now knows/sees very clearly that the USA is just "one election cycle away" from using those very integrations to attack and destabilize their "allies". The USA spent decades/generations building up that trust, it'll take decades/generations of similar effort to try and rebuild it. I don't imagine it'll happen in my life time.

Electing Trump once may've been an outlier, but Americans re-elected him even as he was being transparent in his intentions to become a dictator and to dramatically re-orient America's international position - the current administration people published project 2025, and numerous other "pro fascism" essays/books prior to the 2025 election. Vance, their VP, literally lauds people like Posobiecs work, wherein he calls for democrats to be hunted/targeted/killed. The Americans voted in favour of fucking over western allies, voted in favour of alienating the EU, Canada, Mexico, etc. They voted in favour of a guy wanting to be buddies with Putin, Kim Jong, and any other ruthless dictator he met / exchanged love letters with. They voted for a literal convicted criminal, who any person with an IQ above room temperature would realise would conduct themselves like a criminal in office -- no one is shocked that he openly takes bribes and there's overt corruption going on, because America quite explicitly voted for those things. Why would the world forgive and forget that?

To quote/paraphrase the previous person thought to be the bottom of the barrel of American leaders: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.... uh... well you can't get fooled again, right?". Part of that sentiment, is that if you do it the second time, knowing how things went the last time around, you're basically accepting the result of being made a fool -- you're not getting 'fooled', but instead you are accepting your role as a fool by trusting the same untrustworthy group again, you're complicit in your poor treatment. Other countries cannot trust the states again, because we've all been shown the states is untrustworthy, and that they're intent on harming our people/countries. We cannot go back to 'trusting' the states, unless we want to do harm to our own citizens/interests.

Besides, there's still a few more years of insults and bullshit to come from the USA. We haven't even hit the bottom for this massive betrayal of western allies. It's a bit early to be pretending like they have a hope of digging themselves out of this pit, while they're still actively digging deeper.