There was a poster of the New York skyline on the bedroom wall. The Twin Towers were still standing in it. It stayed up for years.
Growing up, America was not just a country — it was a feeling. A specific kind of optimism that came through every film, every news story, every NASA launch watched on a small television in another part of the world. When Hollywood showed you America, it showed you something that felt almost fictional in the best way. Glass towers catching sunlight. Highways that went on forever. A sense that the country was always moving toward something larger than itself.
Even the worst films were worth watching if they were set in New York or Los Angeles or somewhere that felt like the centre of the world.
What America Used to Mean
In childhood, the United States was synonymous with a particular kind of achievement. Not just military or political power — though those were present — but the kind of achievement that felt genuinely exciting. NASA pushing further into space. Scientists making discoveries that changed how everyone understood the world. The tallest buildings. The fastest cars. Records being broken, frontiers being pushed, the sense that somewhere on the other side of the planet, extraordinary things were happening and America was leading them.
There were contradictions, of course. There were interventions in other countries, wars that raised uncomfortable questions. But even those came packaged in a kind of moral confidence — the idea, at least, that America believed it was doing good in the world. You could disagree with the methods and still understand the stated intention. The narrative held together.
The music was American. The films were American. The dream, for a while, was American. There was a serious plan, at one point, to study there. The plan did not survive contact with the realities of money and family responsibility — the things that quietly redirect a lot of youthful ambitions without anyone announcing it — but the dream of at least visiting remained.
The Visit
That dream was fulfilled in 2017. A solo trip covering six cities across the east and west coasts — Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles. Three weeks. The first time actually standing in the places that had existed in the imagination for so long.
It was good. Genuinely good. The scale of everything, the variety between cities, the particular energy of New York at night — all of it delivered something real.
But things were also noticed that the films had not prepared for. The friction between people of different backgrounds, present in a way that felt different from how it reads in headlines. The homelessness, not as a statistic but as an unavoidable presence on the streets of every major city. The absence of any meaningful public transport outside of New York — the way the car was not a convenience but a requirement, a fact of life so embedded in the infrastructure that its absence was essentially inconceivable. And the neighbourhoods that did not make it into the films — the parts of cities that exist behind the skylines, where the postcard version of America and the lived version diverge considerably.
None of this made the trip disappointing. It just made it honest. The country was real, which meant it had the full texture of real things — the beautiful parts and the parts that needed work.
At the time, it still felt like a country pointed in a direction. Working on something.
What Changed
It is difficult to identify a single moment. Things tend not to work that way. But at some point, opening the news became an exercise in accumulation — each story adding to a picture that bore less and less resemblance to the one on the bedroom wall.
Global surveys and reputation trackers that used to show America near the top have told a different story recently. The shift in how allied nations — not rivals, allies — view the United States has been significant and swift. Countries that had the most invested in America being what it said it was have updated their assessments. That is worth sitting with.
What is harder to quantify is the feeling. The particular disorientation of watching a country dismantle, piece by piece, the things that made it worth admiring. Not the military power or the economic size — those remain — but the softer things. The idea that there were rules. The idea that alliances meant something. The idea that institutions existed for reasons and that those reasons were respected even by people who disagreed about everything else.
Credibility, once lost, is genuinely hard to regain. Trust, once broken, is not easily restored. That applies to individuals and it applies, it turns out, to countries.
One Person
It is a strange thing to observe how much a single person — or more precisely, the mentality of the people who put that person there and keep them there — can reshape the perception of an entire country. Not because one person should have that power, but because it turns out the perception of a country is more fragile than it looks from a distance.
The racism that always existed but is now louder. The bullying that has moved from the margins to the centre. The absence of consequences that used to at least be pretended at. The treatment of long-standing allies as inconveniences. The open prioritisation of wealth concentration over everything else. The withdrawal from causes that, whatever their complications, represented some version of the country trying to be useful in the world.
Any given day, trying to remember the last piece of genuinely positive news to come out of America is an exercise that does not resolve quickly.
The achievements do not disappear. The history does not erase. But the way a country conducts itself in the present — what it tolerates, what it rewards, what it excuses, what it celebrates — that recalibrates something in how the rest of the world reads it.
There is a particular strangeness in feeling relieved about a dream that did not come true. The plan to move to America, the one that fell apart for ordinary practical reasons years ago — it is hard not to look back at that particular failure and feel, quietly, that it worked out.
That is a strange thing to feel. It is also an honest one.
How Empires End
History does not offer many examples of great powers that recognised their own decline as it was happening. The pattern tends to be more gradual — a slow divergence between what a country believes about itself and what the rest of the world observes. The gap widens quietly until it becomes undeniable.
Every great kingdom, every empire that has peaked in history, has eventually met its turning point. Not always through invasion or catastrophe — often through a quieter erosion of the things that made it coherent. The Roman Empire did not fall in a day. Neither did any of the others.
Whether America is in genuine decline or in a correctable rough patch is a question reasonable people disagree on. The country has reinvented itself before. That capacity has not disappeared and may yet reassert itself.
But something has shifted in the global arrangement that feels less temporary. New trade relationships are forming. New alignments are emerging. Countries that would not have questioned certain assumptions ten years ago are making calculations they had not previously needed to make. Not out of hostility toward America, but out of a rational reassessment of what can be taken for granted about it.
New friendships are being made on the grave of older handshakes. A new order is being negotiated in the ruins of the current one. The only question that remains genuinely open is the timeline.
The poster came down a long time ago. The city is still there, still extraordinary in the ways it always was. But the feeling it used to carry — that specific, uncomplicated optimism about what America was and where it was going — that has not made it back onto the wall.
Some things, once changed, stay changed.
These are personal observations and opinions. Almost Sunny is a personal blog.
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