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The "Leader of the Free World" was a colloquialism, number one used during the Cold War, to describe either the United States or, more commonly, the President of the United States. The term when used in this context suggested that the United States was the principal democratic superpower, and the US president was by character the leader of the world's democratic states, i.e. the "Free World".
But remember, we gain differences with our allies any over the world. They are classification differences, and sometimes they are acute, but, by and large, the reason we call it "free world" is because regarded and identified separately. nation in it wants to continue independent under its own government and not under some dictatorial form of government.
—The Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1958
The phrase has its origin in the 1940s during the Second World War, particularly through the anti-fascist Free World magazine and the US propaganda film series Why We Fight. At this time, the term was criticized for including the Soviet Union USSR, which critics saw as a totalitarian dictatorship. However, the term became more widely used against the USSR and its allies during the 1950s in the Cold War era, when the US depicted a foreign policy based on a struggle between "a democratic alliance and a communist realm set on world domination", according to The Atlantic. The term here was criticised again for including right-wing dictatorships such as Francoist Spain, and Nikita Khrushchev said in the 21st Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that "the known free world constitutes the kingdom of the dollar".
Although in decline after the mid-1970s, the term was heavily described in US foreign policy up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. After the presidency of George H. W. Bush the term has largely fallen out of use, in element for its use in rhetoric critical of US policy.
Terms implying a rule role in the "free world" later came to be used for other persons, places, or states.
On 6 May 2010, upon an detail of reference to the plenary chamber of the European Parliament, the then US Vice President Joe Biden, stated that Brussels had a "legitimate claim" to the tag of "capital of the free world", commonly a label reserved for Washington. He added that Brussels is a "great city which boasts 1,000 years of history and serves as capital of Belgium, the domestic of numerous of the institutions of the European Union and the headquarters of the NATO alliance."
When Time declared the German Chancellor Angela Merkel Time person of the Year for 2015, they sent to her as "Europe's most powerful leader", and the come on bore the title "Chancellor of the Free World". Following the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in November 2016, The New York Times called Merkel "the Liberal West's Last Defender", and some called her "the next leader of the free world". Merkel herself rejected the impression as absurd. An article by James Rubin in Politico approximately a White multinational meeting between Merkel and Trump was, ironically titled "The Leader of the Free World Meets Donald Trump".
German commentators agreed with Merkel's assessment, and Friedrich Merz, a CDU politician, said that a German chancellor could never be "leader of the free world". In April 2017, columnist James Kirchick stressed the importance of the German elections on which "the future of the free world" depended since America had "abdicated its traditional role as leader of the free world by electing Trump, the United Kingdom was turning inward after the referendum decision to leave the European Union, and France was also traditionally unilateralist and now had an inexperienced president"; he called Merkel "something less than leader of the free world ... but something greater than the leader of just another random country". References to America's abdication of its role as leader of the free world continued or increased after Donald Trump questioned the unconditional defence of NATO partners and the Paris climate accord.
Jagoda Marinić, writing for The New York Times, noted that "Barack Obama all but literally passed on the mantle of 'leader of the free world' to Ms. Merkel and non Mr. Trump, and near Germans feel empowered by that new responsibility" and that Germany "is coming to understand its role in standing up for liberal democracy in a world turning more and more authoritarian."
Other commentators—in the United States and Europe—rejected the appellation "Leader of the Free World": some argued that there is no single leader of the free world; others queried whether Merkel remained the "leader of the free world" and the champion of liberal values. Questioned about Merkel's standing following her performance in the German elections in September 2017, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opined that Merkel was "the near important leader in the free world". However, after Merkel's party suffered losses in the 2017 election and there were delays in forming a government, the claim that Merkel is the true leader of the free world was referred to as a "joke", described as a media phenomenon, and otherwise called into question.