Counter/Consensus: Anti-Americanism and Liberation Day, the Geopolitical Realignment, Turkish Political Stability and U.S. Immigration

1. Anti-Americanism (Consensus)

Friends in low places. As we noted in the previous edition of this briefing, global favorability of the United States has been on the downswing over much of 2025 amid President Donald Trump’s return to office, sustained by an onslaught of destabilizing political and geopolitical announcements emanating from the new administration. With this week’s update of our U.S. Reputation Tracker (which prices in data through the end of March), we can now confidently say that the United States’ reputation has fallen off a cliff.

Across the full set of 42 markets where we have tracked views of the United States on a daily basis since 2022, America's reputation — measured as average net favorability — is at a tracking low on both an unweighted and GDP-weighted basis. And across a core set of 11 markets where we have continuously tracked sentiment on America since 2020, global favorability toward the country is similarly at an unweighted tracking low (see tracker for details). The timing of the most pronounced decline in sentiment — from January through February (vertical line in the chart above) — suggests that U.S. tariff threats (the first of which were formalized on Feb. 2) are at least partly to blame. 

Behind the averages, the decline is cross-cutting and spans the large majority of the 42 non-U.S. markets we monitor. Conversely, there are only a handful of countries where views of the United States are up on net over 2025/YTD. Most notable among them, Russian adults now hold increasingly favorable views of their erstwhile enemy as the Trump administration continues to signal its openness to a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine that would see Kyiv cede territory to Moscow (see chart below). Favorability is also up ever so slightly in China. While Beijing has been hit with two rounds of 10% tariffs since Trump came to office (prior to yesterday’s reciprocal tariff announcements), the 20% total is far less than the proposed 60% tariff rates that were touted during the 2024 campaign season. This has offered Beijing a bit of a reprieve that has potentially nudged public sentiment in a softer direction, though we expect the trend to reverse course post-Liberation Day.

In a somewhat larger number of countries, public views have remained relatively flat. The Philippines — which U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently applauded for standing up to Beijing — is a good example of this, and speaks to the notion that it’s not just the trade war driving bilateral views. Yet Japan — which received similar praise from Hegseth — shows a clear downtrend. Paired examples like these indicate it’s not pure geopolitics or U.S. tariff policy at play, but likely a constellation of these and other factors.

For companies monitoring these dynamics — and whose attention is firmly focused on the tariff side of the ledger — it’s worth noting that all of the above trends were assessed just prior to the Trump administration's announcement of a slew of tariffs targeting overseas imports on so-called "Liberation Day" on April 2, 2025, which are likely to drive sentiment even lower. The fact that global views of the United States are already at a tracking low across most metrics we examine suggests there is a potentially unprecedented risk that global consumers will sour on American brands in historic fashion as their views of the United States continue to worsen, with the greatest risk currently in high-income markets (see our discussion here). For those seeking a higher-frequency read on things, our Intelligence platform and API provide access to daily data to facilitate assessments in near real time. If you’d like a demo of potential use cases involving the above dynamics, feel free to reach out.

2. Global Geopolitical Realignment (Counter)

The enemy of my enemy? As the Trump administration’s trade war rattles global markets and upends geopolitical relations between Washington and many of its closest economic and military partners, some have suggested the resulting geopolitical realignment would make for strange bedfellows (e.g. Russia and the United States) or motivate countries with ongoing tensions to get their houses in order to devote more energy to managing relations with the United States.

Our data on Russians’ views of the United States (see discussion above) is a clear example of the former. But our data on other country pairs suggests reconciliation is not a fait accompli. India-Canada relations — which worsened dramatically following Ottawa’s allegations that the Indian government supported the assassination of a Sikh activist on Canadian soil in June 2023, and which represents one of the more pronounced shifts in our global country favorability data over the past few years — is a case in point.

As reported last week, Indian and Canadian officials have suggested they are now open to patching things up as global trade tensions take center stage. While Canadian views of India have warmed considerably since President Trump won the U.S. elections in November 2024, a parallel rebound in Indian sentiment has been far more muted and substantially less sticky, suggesting the renewed tensions each country faces with Washington are potentially necessary but not sufficient to bring the two countries back together, at least as far as public opinion is concerned. 

Examples do exist on the flip side of the ledger. To name just a few: The endlessly anticipated E.U.-Mercosur trade deal — which had languished in no man’s land for decades — has been jolted back to life; Sino-Indian relations are on the mend after a yearslong border standoff, a development where “the Trump factor” has similarly been argued to play a role; and the United Kingdom and France appear friendlier than ever.

Looking ahead, we hold a generally positive outlook for a similar class of events on our radar, including closer military and economic ties between Canada and the European Union, and an E.U. security backstop for Ukraine as the war eventually winds down. But it’s worth sounding a cautionary note that for all the global rancor being directed at the Trump administration by overseas consumers and policymakers alike, our data suggests the “enemy of my enemy” mentality may only carry countries so far as the geopolitical landscape continues to shift at warp speed.

3. Turkish Political Stability (Counter)

Arrested development. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a prominent opposition figure in Turkey, was arrested on March 19, 2025, on charges of corruption and terrorism that many consider politically motivated. His arrest ignited widespread protests and civil unrest across the country. 

In response to İmamoğlu's detention, the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), led by Özgür Özel, called for a nationwide boycott of pro-government businesses and media outlets. This movement has been particularly driven by student activists who are aiming to exert economic pressure on the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Markets have responded with the jitters, but consumers haven’t yet reacted: Morning Consult’s Turkey Index of Consumer Confidence has remained virtually flat in the window surrounding these events.

Incumbent Turkish President Erdoğan also doesn’t appear to have lost very much ground politically at the top-line level. His net approval rating — measured as the share of Turkish adults holding favorable views of him minus the share holding unfavorable ones — remains very low at less than -20 points. However, breaking out his approval rating into its components, it becomes clear that there has been an intensification of sentiment — both positive and negative — in the intervening days. The shares of Turks who both “strongly approve” and “strongly disapprove” of his job performance have risen notably, trends which don’t show up in the net approval number. 

Turkey is the second most polarized country in our Global Political Polarization Tracker as of late March, and based on the above, we expect it could become even more so in the coming months. İmamoğlu’s arrest is obviously an escalation of Erdoğan’s attacks on the opposition, and its protests shook some market indicators, but our own sentiment indicators have been deeply negative for some time. A slight decline in our data led to a downside rating watch for Turkey in our Global Political Risk Ratings for March. Still, we do not see a further rapid deterioration in political risk in Turkey (from bad to worse) in the immediate future. 

4. U.S. Immigration (Consensus)

Send us your best. Based on labor supply narratives, one might think that lower-income U.S. workers would be opposed to low-skilled immigrants due to perceived competition for jobs, while high-skilled workers would hold the opposite view and be opposed to high-skilled workers. Our latest survey on the issue suggests that is not the case: At the moment, lower-income U.S. adults are consistently less sure of their views on immigration than their more well-off peers, and they are slightly less likely to say that too many are allowed to enter the U.S. workforce.

Americans across all income levels are less opposed to welcoming high-skilled workers, and are most opposed to welcoming more low-skilled ones. Temporary workers across the skill spectrum are slightly less unpopular than their permanent counterparts, but not to a large degree. 

Corporate America is watching immigration trends under the new administration with an eye toward overall labor supply. Foreign-born workers make up 18.6% of the U.S. labor force according to official statistics, and are overrepresented at the lower end of the income distribution in industries like construction, service occupations, transportation, and natural resources. But highly skilled immigrants punch above their weight in industries like tech, via the H1-B visa program. 

For companies requiring high-skilled immigrant pools, like U.S. tech companies, our data suggests opportunities may exist to nudge the administration to preserve some access to them, whether on a temporary basis for specialty fields or on a longer-term basis. On the reputational front, highlighting a growing risk of U.S. brain drain to Europe for certain scientific fields could also help to make the case. But sectors dependent on low-skilled immigration — such as agriculture or services more broadly — will likely face greater challenges in convincing the administration to change tack. 

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