US favorability collapses among allies as China gains ground, Pew survey finds

A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries and territories, conducted between February and May 2026, found that in 25 of them favorable views of China now exceed those of the United States — the first such reversal in roughly 20 years of tracking. More than 42,000 people were polled, with margins of error ranging from 2.3 to 5.5 percentage points. The inversion is not driven by an absolute surge in Chinese favorability but by a measurable collapse in confidence toward Washington, and the collapse is concentrated in countries the United States has treated as economic subordinates or rhetorical targets. The Trump administration executed a series of unilateral coercive moves during the survey window — the co-launched war against Iran, demands to control Greenland, a military raid that captured Venezuela’s then-leader Nicolás Maduro, sustained tariffs on Canadian goods, and the public suggestion that Canada could become a United States state — and the countries named in those moves are the countries where favorability dropped most steeply.

The sharpest single-country movement occurred in Canada, where positive views of the United States fell to 33 percent from 57 percent in 2023 — a 24-point drop — while positive views of China rose to 44 percent from 14 percent, a 30-point gain. The net shift in the favorability gap is 54 points in three years, and the timeline corresponds directly to the imposition of tariffs on Canadian goods and the public suggestion that Canada could become a US state. The United Kingdom, where about six in ten held positive views of the United States in 2023, has moved to parity with China. Three years ago, the gap was 32 percentage points in Washington’s favor. Major European powers — France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands — all shifted their preferences toward China. Only six countries still view the United States more favorably than China: Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, and Poland. Even in those holds, favorability has dimmed in recent years.

Laura Silver, associate director of Pew’s Global Attitudes Research, named the specific actions she considers causally linked to the shift. The United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on February 28, 2026. Trump demanded control of Greenland. The American military captured Venezuela’s then-leader Nicolás Maduro in a raid. The handling of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza drew sustained criticism. “There was just an actual relationship between the outbreak of the war and the sense that the U.S. is just not contributing to peace and stability and that people have less confidence in Donald Trump,” Silver said. She added: “The U.S. has done a lot in terms of global engagement in recent months to years that is not being perceived positively internationally.” China, by contrast, “is seen to be a more reliable partner in many places. It’s more likely to be seen to contribute to global peace and stability.” Xi Jinping is viewed more favorably than Trump in 22 of the 36 countries and territories surveyed, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

The root cause of the collapse is not a single policy error but an operating doctrine that treats public coercive signaling toward allies as leverage rather than as coalition damage. The doctrine is inferred from a repeated behavioral pattern across the Canada tariffs, the Greenland demand, and general tariff signaling toward European allies — not from a sourced policy document, but the pattern is unambiguous. A second driver, unilateral military action without allied coordination, independently damages the perceived role of the United States as a global stabilizer; Silver directly attributes the Iran war to the perception shift. Both drivers are independently sufficient: removing coercive signaling without ending the unilateral military posture would not restore favorability to pre-2023 levels, and vice versa.

Beneath the operational level lies an institutional incentive asymmetry. The benefits of imposing a tariff or executing a military strike are concentrated, immediate, and politically visible. The reputational harm to an alliance is diffuse, slow-acting, and attributable to no single decision. Post-Cold War institutional drift allowed this asymmetry to go uncorrected: alliance maintenance was never re-embedded as a standing metric in foreign-policy decision-making. The structural bias favors the immediate action, and the system has no mechanism to force the trade-off into the open. Correcting the asymmetry requires institutionalizing a mandatory diplomatic-reputation impact assessment at the National Security Council level, with Secretary of State review before any action affecting treaty allies, military partnerships, or trade frameworks — an alliance impact statement that quantifies reputational costs and weights them equally with tactical benefits.

A stakeholder map of the situation places the Trump administration as a “Dangerous” actor in Mitchell-Agle-Wood salience terms: high power, high urgency, and contested legitimacy among allied publics who view its actions as destabil

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Root-Cause Analysis

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Stakeholder Mapping

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