Update: How the US Lost 76 Countries
While the EU quietly wins
Something extraordinary happened in April 2025. For the first time in modern history, the international community judged China more likely to have a positive influence on world affairs than the United States. After a decade of tracking global attitudes, IPSOS recorded the moment when American soft power officially surrendered to Beijing: China 49%, America 46%.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
This isn’t your usual story of geopolitics. My plan, rather, is to conduct something of an “autopsy of reputation”. Over the next five articles, this being the first, I’ll dissect how America, China, Russia, and the EU each won — or catastrophically lost — the world’s trust across a decade of upheaval. First, the battlefield overview: the numbers, the betrayals, and the psychological patterns that explain why your grandchildren may grow up in a world where “Made in China” applies to global leadership.
For anyone who read the first version, and is confused about the update, I was maniacally collecting more and more data for this series, and found some fascinating comparative data that covered favourability, influence, and democracy. So, upon acquiring newly released datasets from IPSOS and the Democracy Perception Index, for example, I’ve chosen to revisit and expand my original analysis to reflect unprecedented granularity in global sentiment tracking. Think of the earlier version of ‘How America Lost 76 Countries’ as a critical first draft of this inquiry.
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Today’s revised work incorporates decade-long trendlines, regional breakdowns, and psychological frameworks that transform speculative observations into evidence-backed conclusions. This update reflects my commitment to matching the complexity of global power shifts with equally rigorous analysis — and to delivering insights worthy of the trust you’ve placed in this series that starts here.
So, once more into the fray!
Let me start with the 4 Key Observations underwriting this series of articles:
- United States: The U.S. experienced a significant decline in global favourability, dropping from approximately 66% in 2015 to 46% in 2025. This decline reflects concerns over inconsistent foreign policies and internal political polarisation.
- China: China’s favourability remained relatively stable, with a slight increase from around 47% in 2015 to 49% in 2025. This stability suggests a consistent global perception, possibly influenced by China’s strategic international engagements.
- European Union: The EU maintained a high and stable favourability rating, hovering between 65% and 72% throughout the decade. This consistency indicates a steady global trust in the EU’s role in world affairs.
- Russia: Russia’s favourability saw fluctuations, with a notable decline around 2022, due to torrid geopolitical events, followed by a partial recovery to approximately 34% in 2025.
This IPSOS chart reveals a seismic reordering of global power perceptions over the past decade. For the first time since tracking began, China (49%) has surpassed the United States (46%) in perceived positive influence on world affairs. The European Union (data not available 2015–16) demonstrates remarkable stability, maintaining 65–72% approval throughout its measured period, while Russia’s trajectory shows dramatic volatility — plummeting to 23% following its Ukraine invasion before partially recovering to 34%. Most striking is America’s dramatic collapse, losing 22 percentage points from its 2015 peak of 68%, with a particularly steep 13-point drop in the last year alone. These metrics reflect a fundamental realignment in how nations view the major powers’ contributions to global stability and prosperity.
When Barack Obama left office in 2016, American influence enjoyed 66% global approval. Yet in just ten years, that figure collapsed by twenty percentage points. The nation that invented jazz, landed on the moon, and birthed the internet now trails not just China, but also the European Union (68%) in perceived positive influence.
What causes a civilisation to lose its standing so dramatically? And what does it signal about the psychological bargain humanity strikes with its leaders?
The American Collapse
The data tell a story of staggering decline. In 2015, two-thirds of the global population believed America would exert positive influence. By 2025, less than half maintained this view. The Democracy Perception Index reveals an even bleaker picture: just 38% trust America’s democratic leadership.
Consider Germany, once America’s most reliable European ally. German belief in America’s positive influence plummeted from 76% in 2015 to 30% today. The Dutch dropped from 72% to 20%. Most telling is Canada, which shares America’s longest border and much of its cultural DNA — Canadian trust in American leadership crashed from 82% to a mere 19%.
This represents far more than temporary disappointment with specific policies. We’re witnessing the psychological unbinding of the post-WWII order.
When people choose to follow someone — whether a parent, a boss, or a global superpower — they evaluate two core attributes: competence and benevolence. Is this entity capable? And does this entity care about my interests? America has managed to fail both tests simultaneously.
Competence evaporated during America’s chaotic COVID response, Afghanistan withdrawal, and constitutional crises. Benevolence vanished through diplomatic inconsistency, alliance abandonment, and self-focused “America First” messaging.
The primal psychology of trust tells us something crucial: once lost, trust requires five positive interactions to counterbalance each negative one. America has accumulated too many negatives too quickly.
This NIRA Data chart reveals also a dramatic reversal in global trust dynamics over a decade, with the European Union (from the start of the available data in 2018) easily overtaking the United States as the most trusted global power. While American leadership suffered a steady 27-point erosion of trust (65% to 38%), the EU has maintained consistent 60%+ approval since its 2018 measurement began. Meanwhile, China’s modest trust ratings (hovering around 25–30%) have shown remarkable resilience compared to Russia’s post-Ukraine invasion collapse. These trends from the Democracy Perception Index reflect how institutional stability increasingly outweighs traditional military and economic might in global standing.
Let’s take a quick look at each as an amuse bouche for the following deeper 4 articles.
China’s Patient Rise
The Chinese trajectory tells a starkly different story — not of sudden collapse but strategic patience. Beijing’s global approval metrics floated consistently around 47–54% for most of the decade, dipping briefly during COVID (36%) before steadily recovering.
Chinese leadership operates by different psychological rules than Western democracies. Where American politicians seek validation through polling bumps and media cycles, Chinese strategists think in decades. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched in 2013 with promises of infrastructure development across 70 countries. Early Western critics dismissed it as neo-colonialism bound to fail.
Yet twelve years later, China sees the fruit: China’s positive influence rating stands at 49% globally — higher among developing nations that received ports, railways, and digital infrastructure when Western capital stayed home.
The data reveal something uniquely disturbing about human nature: we claim to value freedom over authoritarianism, but our actions suggest otherwise.
When asked about democratic values in the Democracy Perception Index, China scores just 29% on “democratic trust” compared to America’s 38%. Yet China leads America in “positive influence” by three points.
This contradiction illuminates an intriguing truth: humans prize stability and material improvement over ideological consistency. When Chinese representatives arrived in Mali with concrete proposals for solar farms and water treatment plants, philosophical questions about freedom of speech seemed distant theoretical concerns.
The European Paradox
Perhaps most fascinating in the decade’s data is Europe’s remarkable stability. The European Union maintained approval ratings between 65–72% throughout the past eight years — a consistency unmatched by any other power.
Europeans didn’t need to dominate headlines or project military might globally. Their strength came through boring reliability: consistent trade policies, predictable diplomatic stances, and a general absence of constitutional crises. Witness the EU-Mercosur trade pact — a grinding 22-year negotiation with South America that survived 15 changes in national leadership across both blocs. While America flip-flopped between Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump’s tariffs, and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Brussels doggedly expanded market access for European pharmaceuticals and automotive exports. The result? A 2025 deal locking in €45 billion in annual trade, signed not with fanfare but bureaucratic persistence.
Stability, it turns out, compounds interest.
The Democracy Perception Index confirms this, ranking the EU highest in “democratic trust” (61%) among major powers. When IPSOS asked respondents whether various entities would “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” the EU scored 14 points higher than America.
What explains this? The psychological concept of “consistency bias” offers insight. Humans crave predictability in their authorities, sometimes even preferring consistent negative behaviour over erratic positive actions. The EU rarely promises revolutionary change or messianic salvation — just steady, technocratic governance. This limitation became its strength.
Russia’s Rehabilitation Roadmap
Russia presents our data’s most volatile trajectory. From a respectable 41% positive influence rating in 2016, Putin’s (further) Ukraine invasion cratered global approval to just 23% by late 2022. Yet by April 2025, Russian influence had climbed back to 34% — an 11-point recovery in three years.
The Democracy Perception Index shows Russia still bottoms the democratic trust rankings (18%), yet its “positive influence” score outperforms this metric by 16 points.
How did a nation responsible for Europe’s largest land war since 1945 rebuild so much standing?
Well, first caveat, 2025 is far from over. So let’s consider 2025 numbers as penciled in; I get the feeling some of these powers will be ending 2025 in quite different regard as at the start.
Be that as it may, Russia’s recovery follows a psychological pattern familiar to anyone who’s observed relationship repair after betrayal. Russia adopted what therapists call “compartmentalisation strategy” — isolating the damaged area (European relations) while strengthening bonds elsewhere (BRICS nations, Africa, Middle East). The Wagner Group’s African operations exemplify this split. Unlike Soviet-era proxies that exported Marxist ideology, Wagner mercenaries secure mining rights (Sudan’s gold, CAR’s diamonds) while avoiding state-building rhetoric. Their 2024 Niger coup backing wasn’t framed as anti-Western solidarity — just a blunt transaction: uranium access in exchange for expelling French troops. Post-Cold War Russia doesn’t seek ideological converts; it buys loyalty through targeted resource colonialism.
When sanctions limited Russian options in Europe, Moscow pivoted aggressively toward the Global South. Russian grain shipments to Africa doubled. Military cooperation with India expanded. Wagner Group mercenaries secured resource rights across the Sahel. By 2025, Russia had effectively split the world into punishment zones and reward zones.
The results appear in the regional IPSOS breakdown: 12% positive influence in Poland versus 68% in India. Most revealing is Turkey, which maintained 55% approval of Russia despite NATO membership — the transactional relationship prevailed over ideological alignment.
The Deeper Pattern
These four trajectories — American collapse, Chinese ascent, European consistency, and Russian recovery — reveal something profound about human psychology and governance.
We’ve sold ourselves a comforting myth that humans naturally prefer freedom, democracy, and liberalism. The data suggest a more complex reality: people crave results first and principles second.
Consider this striking finding from the Democracy Perception Index: when asked whether they’d prefer a “less democratic government that delivers better economic outcomes” or a “more democratic government with worse economic outcomes,” 59% of respondents globally chose economic results over democratic principles.
This preference hierarchy explains why China outperforms America in the IPSOS influence rankings despite trailing in democratic trust. It explains why Russians tolerate authoritarianism that delivers perceived stability. It explains why the EU’s bureaucratic predictability outperforms American democratic volatility.
What does this tell us about the human condition? Perhaps we’ve misunderstood what hierarchy truly means. The traditional Western view holds that people organise themselves primarily by values — freedom above all. But the global sentiment data suggest people organise themselves primarily by interests — stability, prosperity, then freedom.
Samuel Huntington warned about this in the 1990s:
Liberal democracy doesn’t automatically win hearts just by existing. It must deliver tangible improvements to ordinary lives
When it fails this basic test — when American streets grow violent, institutions decay, and politicians behave like warlords — people look elsewhere for governance models.
The Way Forward
None of this means American influence must continue its decline. The EU demonstrates how consistency builds trust. China shows how infrastructure investment yields gratitude. Even Russia’s rehabilitation offers lessons in strategic focus.
The core problem is psychological, not technological or economic. America suffers from what psychologists call “temporal discounting” — sacrificing long-term reputation for short-term political wins. Each administration attempts to erase its predecessor rather than build upon achievements. Each party treats governance as a zero-sum game rather than a custodial responsibility.
We see this pattern in the IPSOS trend line: American influence rose under Obama (2015–16), fell under Trump (2017–20), rose under Biden (2021–23), then collapsed again during recent political turbulence. This whipsaw effect exhausts global partners who crave predictability above all else.
The path to renewed influence begins with acknowledging uncomfortable truths. Democracy must deliver results, not just rhetoric. Freedom requires consistent demonstration, not just declaration. And power — real, lasting power — flows not from military hardware but from the perception that you can be trusted to wield it responsibly.
The American drop from 68% positive influence to 46% wasn’t inevitable. Neither was China’s rise to 49%. These shifts reflect millions of small decisions about governance, diplomacy, and priorities. Each nation writes its own reputation through daily choices that accumulate into decades of data.
Perhaps most telling are the Democracy Perception Index responses about which countries “threaten democracy abroad.” In 2025, 52% identified America as a threat to global democracy — higher than China (48%) or Russia (46%). This represents an existential crisis for American foreign policy: the self-proclaimed defender of democracy now viewed as its greatest threat.
When perception becomes this distorted, something fundamental has broken in the social contract between leader and led.
And that brokenness creates space for alternatives — from Beijing’s development-focused authoritarianism to Brussels’ technocratic stability — to flourish in the vacuum left by America’s retreat from responsibility.
These charts and stories form the prologue, not the conclusion. In the coming weeks, we’ll stalk each power through their unique arc of triumph and disgrace — America’s self-sabotage, China’s transactional seduction, Russia’s phoenix act, and the EU’s stubborn refusal to entertain drama. Stay tuned. The era of Western moral exceptionalism is over. The age of reputation-as-currency has begun.
UPDATE: The first in the follow-up pieces, the US’ self-sabotage, is out: The USA is a Post-Trust Superpower
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