How the World Sees America Now

In a single year, the United States went from divided ally to active liability. The polling from twenty-four countries — Pew, Gallup, Levada, Munich Security — tells a story Americans aren’t telling themselves.

Sometime between January and June of 2025, the United States stopped being the country the rest of the world said it admired and started being a country the rest of the world said it could not trust. The data is not a snapshot. It is a collapse. In Mexico, favorable views of the U.S. dropped 32 percentage points in twelve months. In Canada, twenty. In Sweden, twenty-eight. In Poland, twenty-two. Across the twenty-four countries Pew Research Center surveyed between January 8 and April 26, 2025, a median of 49 percent now view the United States favorably, an identical 49 percent do not, and a median of 62 percent say they have no confidence in the American president to do the right thing in world affairs.

Those numbers were collected before the U.S. withdrew from 66 international organizations in January 2026. Before the war with Iran began in late February. Before the Supreme Court invalidated the first tariff regime in February and the administration rolled out a 15 percent global replacement the next day. Before the Caracas raid that captured Nicolás Maduro on January 3. The data is already obsolete. It is also the most recent comprehensive look at how nearly 30,000 people across six continents see this country, and it is uglier than any administration of the last twenty-five years has produced.

The Architecture of the Decline

Pew has measured global views of the United States for over two decades. Through George W. Bush’s second term and the Iraq war. Through Obama’s drone campaigns. Through Trump’s first term, when ratings fell sharply and then recovered under Biden. None of those declines look like 2025. U.S. favorability dropped significantly in 15 of the 24 countries Pew surveyed. Views of Trump himself were negative in 19 of those 24. The numbers did not recover at any point during the fieldwork.

The cause is not mysterious. Surveys ran almost entirely after the February 28 Oval Office meeting in which President Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and largely before Trump’s April 2 announcement of sweeping tariffs. The 2025 Gallup World Poll, released April 3, 2026, found median approval of U.S. leadership across the 31 NATO member countries at 21 percent — a 14-point drop from 2024 and the largest single-year decline Gallup has ever recorded for the United States in NATO.

Canada: From Friend to Boycotter

The country with the longest peaceful land border in the world is no longer sure it has a friend on the other side. A September 2025 Ipsos poll found that 60 percent of Canadians believe they can never trust the United States the same way again. Half are boycotting U.S. companies. Cross-border travel has fallen sharply. Provincial liquor boards pulled American whiskey off shelves. The Liberal Party went from a 25-point polling deficit in January 2025 to winning the federal election in April, almost entirely because Mark Carney positioned himself as the candidate best able to stand up to Donald Trump.

What Canadians are reacting to is not abstract. It is a 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods imposed in February 2025. It is a president who has repeatedly suggested annexing their country, referring to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor.” Polling in January 2025 found roughly 90 percent of Canadians opposed becoming the 51st state, though an Abacus Data survey that same month found more than one in five would at least consider it — a fissure the Trump administration has spent eighteen months widening into a chasm. The Munich Security Report 2026 found that 57 percent of Canadians now consider the U.S. a less reliable NATO member than it was six months earlier. Fifty-three percent say Western nations are more divided than a decade ago.

For New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, which fills its cottages and ski hotels with Canadian visitors, this is not abstract either. Sentiment north of the border translates into empty rooms south of it.

Mexico: A 32-Point Collapse

No country surveyed by Pew turned against the United States more sharply than Mexico. Sixty-one percent favorable in 2024. Twenty-nine percent in 2025. A drop steeper than anything Pew has recorded in two decades. Forty-five percent of Mexicans now say their country should prioritize economic ties with China over the United States — triple the share of a decade ago.

President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has navigated the tariff war with a mix of selective compliance and quiet diversification. Mexico extradited 55 cartel figures, accepted roughly 13,000 third-country deportees, and raised tariffs on Chinese-made cars from 20 to 50 percent. At the same time, it advanced legislation imposing tariffs of up to 50 percent on some 1,400 goods from countries it lacks trade agreements with. The message to its own public has been that the United States is a customer to be managed, not a partner to be relied on.

Europe: The Cold Truth

European publics have stopped pretending the transatlantic alliance functions the way it used to. Two-thirds of Germans now say the U.S. has become a less reliable NATO member over the previous six months — the highest level of doubt among the five major allies Munich surveyed in November 2025. The United Kingdom registered 52 percent, France 50, Italy 47. The European Council on Foreign Relations, in a 12-country May 2025 poll of 16,440 respondents, documented broad support for increased military spending, conscription, independent nuclear deterrents, and continued defense of Ukraine even if the United States abandoned it.

The numbers behind that shift are stark. Sweden is the most anti-American country Pew surveyed: 79 percent unfavorable. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain all register majority unfavorable. Germany lost 16 points and France 10 since 2024. The Pew data was collected before the worst of the 2025 tariff fights and before the U.S. forced a Ukraine peace framework that British, French, and German publics tend to view as unacceptably favorable to Russia.

Britain occupies a slightly different position. Favorability there dropped, but not as steeply — about half of Britons view the U.S. unfavorably, compared with a third in 2024. London still treats the alliance as serviceable at the official level. The British public is less convinced. Polling by More in Common in late 2025 found 79 percent of Britons believe it matters that Ukraine defends itself against Russia. The implicit corollary is that Britons increasingly distrust the U.S. position on Ukraine, which has tilted toward concessions Kyiv would not freely accept.

Adversaries: Russia and China

The countries the United States designates as strategic competitors are not gloating. They are doing what they always do. The Levada Center’s January 2026 poll found 45 percent of Russians hold a negative view of the United States, three points above the historical average since the 1990s, and a return to baseline hostility after a brief warming in early 2025 when Trump appeared open to Russian terms on Ukraine. Russians’ favorable view of China has held above 80 percent since March 2022.

China’s global standing has not soared, but it has improved relative to America’s, which is what matters in the comparative game both countries play. The 2025 Gallup World Poll found median approval of China at 36 percent and approval of the United States at 31 percent. The five-point gap is the widest Gallup has recorded in China’s favor in nearly two decades. It is the third time China has led the U.S. in the survey’s history — the previous two came during George W. Bush’s second term and Trump’s first term. Germany led the four major powers at 48 percent approval. Russia trailed at 26. The American public might find it instructive that the rest of the world, asked to rank four major countries on leadership, now puts Germany first, China second, and the United States third.

The Allies Who Stayed

Pew identified eight countries where majorities still view the United States favorably: Israel, Hungary, Brazil, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Poland, and South Korea. Two patterns explain the list. The first is ideological alignment. Israel registered 83 percent favorable — the highest of any country surveyed — with 97 percent of right-leaning Israelis viewing the U.S. positively. Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, registered similar warmth. Supporters of right-wing populist parties across Europe and Latin America rate America 30 to 40 points higher than their countrymen. The United States, in 2025 and 2026, is not popular abroad as a country. It is popular as a faction.

The second pattern is dependence. South Korea (61 percent favorable) and Japan (majority favorable) need American security guarantees against China and North Korea. Their favorability has held even as the Trump administration has demanded sharply higher payments for stationing U.S. troops and imposed tariffs both governments view as punitive. Tokyo and Seoul have spent 2025 building hedges — new trilateral exercises with India and Indonesia, expanded cooperation with Australia, supply-chain agreements that exclude American manufacturers — while continuing to praise the alliance in public. India sits in a similar position. Modi’s government tolerates American pressure because the alternative is alone with China.

The Mirror Americans Won’t Look At

There is one final data point worth sitting with. In Pew’s March 2026 release on international morality, drawn from the same 2025 fieldwork, researchers asked respondents to rate the moral character of their fellow citizens. In 24 of 25 countries surveyed, more adults said their compatriots were morally good than morally bad. The exception was the United States. Fifty-three percent of Americans say other Americans have bad morals; 47 percent say good. Younger Americans (ages 18 to 39) are even more negative, at 57 percent. What the rest of the world sees when it looks at the United States is, in part, what Americans themselves see. The global decline is not a misunderstanding to be corrected by better public diplomacy. It is a recognition. Foreign publics are watching the same political dysfunction, the same erosion of institutional norms, the same partisan venom Americans report in their own surveys, and drawing the same conclusion. The difference is they are also drawing tariff lines, defense procurement plans, and trade diversification strategies based on it.

The Cost of Being Seen This Way

An America that 49 percent of the polled world views unfavorably and 62 percent distrusts at the presidential level is an America that pays more for everything. It pays more in coalition-building, because fewer allies show up. It pays more in trade, because partners diversify away. It pays more in security, because Europe and Asia build redundant capacities that used to be American. It pays more in soft power — in foreign students, in tourism, in a Canadian retiree willing to spend a week at Lake Winnipesaukee, in a German firm willing to locate a factory in New Hampshire instead of the Czech Republic.

The Trump administration’s response to this data has been to dismiss it. The American public’s response, judging by Pew’s January 2026 numbers, has been to lose confidence in the president whose actions caused it — 37 percent approval, half of Americans saying his administration’s actions have been worse than expected, only 27 percent supporting most of his policies. The world saw it first. The country is catching up.

What happens next is not a mystery. NATO members are buying European weapons. Asia is building mid-power compacts. Canada has elected a prime minister whose central promise was to stop relying on Washington. Mexico is courting China. Britain is reconsidering whether it has a special relationship or just a longstanding one. Americans who used to believe their country was admired by the world are now living in a country the world distrusts — and that they themselves do not trust either.

The rest of the world has not turned against America in anger. It has turned against America in disappointment, then in calculation. The first phase ends quickly. The second one lasts.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of The Atomic Privilege.