The PR problem behind America’s falling global approval ratings

For eight decades, being an American ally meant something specific. It meant a security umbrella, a trading partner who kept its word and a superpower that, whatever its flaws, could generally be counted on to show up. That reputation took decades to build. It is now being tested harder than at any point since the Second World War.

1. Trust among allies has fallen off a cliff

Perception researchers rarely get numbers this stark. A Pew Research Center survey of more than 40,000 adults across 36 countries, conducted between February and May this year, found that confidence in the United States as a reliable partner has collapsed among its closest friends. In Canada, the share describing the United States as reliable dropped from 83 percent in 2022 to just 35 percent today. Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany each saw falls of more than 40 percentage points, while Japan slipped from 76 percent to 59 percent. In PR terms, that is not a bad news cycle. It is a collapse in brand equity built up over generations.

2. America’s global image has fallen behind China’s

Perhaps the single most striking finding in that same Pew survey is a first in nearly two decades. People in 25 of the 36 countries and territories polled now hold a more favourable view of China than of the United States, and in 22 of them respondents expressed greater confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump. When a country’s chief geopolitical rival starts winning the global popularity contest, that is not a talking point management can spin away.

3. The reputation for reliability has been replaced by one for unpredictability

Commentators tracking the administration’s diplomacy describe a pattern of abrupt reversals and contradictory decisions delivered through a highly personalised style of dealmaking. That approach has produced genuine headlines and occasional breakthroughs, but the perception cost is consistency. Allies who once knew roughly what to expect from Washington now plan around the possibility that today’s position may not hold next month.

4. NATO has been publicly and repeatedly needled

Trump has described the alliance as a one way street in which the United States funds protection that is rarely reciprocated. That framing might play well with a domestic audience frustrated by decades of underspending allies, but delivered publicly and often, it reads to partners as contempt for an alliance many of them regard as central to their own security.

5. Military moves have been made without consulting allies

The US administration’s decision to withdraw thousands of American troops from Germany, removing long range missile systems from central Europe, was announced with what analysts describe as no coordination with NATO partners. When Washington later sought allied help blockading the Strait of Hormuz during a tense ceasefire with Iran, the United Kingdom and France both declined to join. For a country that built its post-war power on being the alliance everyone wanted a seat at, being turned down in public is a perception problem money cannot easily fix.

6. Tariffs have landed hardest on friends, not rivals

Trade measures imposed on close partners including Canada have blurred a distinction that mattered enormously to America’s brand abroad, the line between ally and adversary. The European Union reportedly considered retaliatory tariffs before opting instead for a trade agreement weighted heavily in Washington’s favour, choosing to protect the security relationship rather than risk open confrontation. That is less a partnership than a hostage negotiation, and allies have noticed.

7. Soft power funding has been cut just as it is needed most

The administration’s 2026 budget request to Congress included substantial cuts to foreign assistance spending, the kind of programming that has quietly built American goodwill in the developing world for decades. Pulling back at the exact moment rivals such as China are expanding their own overseas investment is, from a perception standpoint, ceding the pitch without a fight.

8. Europe has stopped waiting for permission

French president Emmanuel Macron used a speech at Davos to reject what he called the law of the strongest, urging Europeans to resist what he termed vassalisation. Whatever the diplomatic language, the underlying message was unmistakable, that Europe can no longer assume Washington will always be there. The European Union’s ReArm Europe initiative, a rearmament push worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is the practical expression of that shift, and it represents precisely the kind of independent capability building that a confident, trusted hegemon would never need its allies to pursue.

9. Allies increasingly no longer see themselves as allies

A June survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that only one in ten people across fifteen countries now consider the United States an ally at all. That is a category collapse, not a mood swing. Brand loyalty, once lost at that scale, tends to be extraordinarily hard to win back.

10. The world is simply giving up waiting for the old America to return

Foreign Affairs magazine has described previous dips in American popularity, including during the Iraq war and Trump’s first term, as temporary corrections from which the country’s reputation always eventually recovered, sustained by deep reserves of goodwill built over a century. Analysts now argue those reserves are visibly thinning. Ordinary citizens in allied nations are reportedly more critical of the current administration than they were the first time around, suggesting this is not simply another dip in an otherwise steady relationship.

The other side of the argument

None of this is the whole story, and fairness demands the administration’s own case be heard too. Trump’s National Security Strategy explicitly reframes decades of what it calls dependency as the actual failure, arguing that wealthy allies spent generations under-contributing to their own defence while Washington picked up the bill. Supporters point to NATO’s new commitment to spend 5 percent of GDP on defence, agreed at last year’s summit, as proof the strategy is already working exactly as intended. They argue that burden shifting is a deliberate and overdue correction rather than an accident, that direct dealmaking with China represents a more realistic form of great power diplomacy than multilateral consensus building ever achieved, and that lower approval ratings abroad are the natural price of a foreign policy that finally puts American taxpayers first rather than global opinion polls. Whether that trade proves worth it, history rather than headlines will eventually decide.