Simon Anholt / Nov 2025
The Anholt Nation Brands Index began measuring the images of countries in 2005. I launched the study because nobody had ever previously attempted a systematic, global review of how general public opinion perceives different countries, despite the fact that a country’s image is a powerful predictor of its economic performance.
As I commented in a paper I wrote in 2000, countries with powerful and positive images find that almost everything they want to do on the international stage is easier and cheaper, whether it’s attracting tourists, investors, talent, or markets for their exported goods and services. Countries with weak or negative images, on the other hand, find that all of this is much harder and more expensive.
The questionnaire I used in 2005 was almost identical to today’s, based on my 1998 model, the Hexagon of Nation Brand, which identified six natural channels (governance, exports, tourism, investment and immigration, culture and people) through which countries build their images, either deliberately or more often accidentally.
We have just completed the thirtieth iteration of the study, and the results seem to get more interesting and provocative each year.
For the third year running, Germany and Japan hold the two top slots in the overall Nation Brands Index, and Italy has dropped from third to fourth (but with no loss of scores: it’s simply that Canada has performed more strongly and pushed Italy down by one place). It’s impossible not to reflect that these three countries formed the core Axis Powers in 1940, and subsequently acquired virtual pariah status in most of the rest of the world. Today, a mere three generations later, they seem well established as the most admired countries on the planet.
Few governments today have the patience to plan, or the mandate to act, on such timescales, but nonetheless it’s a striking reminder that country images can, and do, change greatly over time, with extensive consequences.
This year, the most dramatic changes to the NBI are in North America: the fall of the United States, and the somewhat more unexpected rise of Canada.
It’s worth repeating here what I stated in my report to last year’s NBI:
We are now in the seventh year since the United States last appeared in the NBI’s top slot: yet from the launch of the NBI in 2005 right through until 2016, America’s No. 1 position seemed like a permanent feature of the index. With every year that passes, it seems less and less likely that the US could ever regain this long-standing primacy in the future.
Given the pronounced negative impact on the global image of the United States following the first Trump presidency, the fact that the US should fall again during Trump’s second term comes as no great surprise: but its drop of seven places in the ranking is still shocking in a study noted for its extreme stability.
In fact, the first decile of the Nation Brands Index has consisted of the same ten countries every year since 2006, even if some of them have occasionally swapped places. 2025 has changed all this, as the United States finally drops out and Spain moves in.
Most people, as I have often commented, are rather unwilling to change their minds about other countries, and even though the United States is somewhat more volatile than most (perhaps because it’s one of the few foreign countries that people around the world regularly think about), seven places is a huge fall for just one year. China fell by eleven places following the pandemic, and the all-time record is held by Russia which lost thirty-one places following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The US itself previously fell from 1st to 6th between 2016 and 2017 and, until this year, had remained hovering around its “new neighbourhood” of seventh place.
The change in global perceptions of the USA becomes even plainer when one looks at mean favourability scores (this single-question datapoint is a straightforward affective response, whereas the overall NBI score is a composite of 20+ focused questions and is naturally more cognitive in nature). On the measure of simple favourability, the US has fallen from 14th place in 2024 to 23rd place in 2025 – an even more dramatic shift.
These days, we find it’s always worth checking for differences between respondents in G7 countries and BRICS+ countries, as their world-view is often strikingly different. Indeed, between 2024 and 2025 the United States only lost two places in the ranking (and its scores actually increased) in the perception of BRICS+ respondents, but during the same period our G7 respondents downgraded it by fully fifteen places. So it’s in the West that ‘Brand America’ has suffered the most acute damage, perhaps predictably, given that these are America’s traditional allies and trading partners.
America’s loss of its previously universal appeal is hardly surprising, given the policy choices made by the Trump administration during the first year of its second term. My 2014 driver analysis of the NBI database showed that, by a wide margin, the most powerful driver of a positive national image is the perception that a country contributes positively towards humanity and the planet, to the world outside its own borders: what I have dubbed a “good country”. America First is the diametric opposite of this approach, and the impact on America’s image of punitive tariffs, threats to annexe other countries, calculated insults to long-term allies and antipathy towards international institutions and the rule of law is plain to see.
All the available data suggests that a diminished reputation will, in time, produce diminished commercial, cultural and diplomatic returns, and the first signs of this impact on the U.S. economy are already visible. Trump’s acolytes and imitators around the world would do well to observe that, over time, aggressive nationalism carries an inevitable and potentially incalculable economic cost.
A Good Year for Canada
In the 2024 NBI, things didn’t look very positive for Canada, as our report stated:
Canada, a perennially popular country in the NBI, did worse than France, losing three places in 2024. But closer analysis shows that this was simply bad luck: it was the consequence of small increases in the scores in certain other countries and small declines in others that pushed Canada down in the rankings. For this reason, it can be overlooked unless it’s repeated next year and becomes a pattern: it reminds us that rankings, unlike scores, can be influenced by changes in the images of other countries.
In fact, far from suffering further decline, Canada has rebounded strongly in 2025, benefiting directly from the Trump effect.
And this connection isn’t speculative. The 2025 study includes new, open-ended questions asking respondents whether their overall opinions of other countries have changed over the last year, for better or for worse, and for what reasons.
A substantial 27.7% of respondents worldwide responded that their views of Canada had become more positive since 2024. Many praised Canada's high quality of life, including its social welfare system, educational resources and job opportunities, alongside its natural beauty and appeal as a travel destination. Canada's stance against Donald Trump was frequently mentioned, with many respondents expressing admiration for the country's courage, independence, and resolute political position during trade and political conflicts. Trump is specifically mentioned 67 times, which may not seem like a very large number, but one should bear in mind that people are here being asked why they changed their minds about Canada, not the United States.
Rather delightfully, the phrase most frequently used to describe Canada by respondents worldwide was ‘Good Country’.
So, it seems, the Trump effect not only punishes America but rewards its victims. Many years ago, I commented in an early NBI editorial that almost the only notion most people around the world have about Canada is that it’s not America. The images of the United States and Canada, I argued, were like two kids on a see-saw: whenever America was popular, Canada’s scores declined, and vice versa.
But this year, it seems that Canada has itself, as well as Donald Trump, to thank for its improved performance in the NBI.
The Mood of Humanity
For many years, we’ve noticed a curious phenomenon in the overall NBI results which we call the ‘mood of humanity’ (MOH): the broad, synchronised swing in national reputations that affects most countries in the Index simultaneously, apparently reflecting shared global sentiment rather than local events. This phenomenon has a much greater impact on country images than any effect which countries can produce themselves, with one exception: armed conflict, which produces truly dramatic downturns in the images of the countries involved, whether as aggressor or victim. Unfortunately, there have never been (at least since the NBI was first published) any examples of deliberate actions that have produced an equally dramatic upturn.
In two instances, synchronised global downturns in national image can confidently be attributed to global externalities: the global financial crisis in 2008-2009 and the Covid pandemic in 2020. In all other years, synchronised upward or downward trends are both visible and measurable, but so far impossible to explain.
2025 turned out to have been an “upswing” year for the NBI, which might seem surprising, given that armed conflict intensified and multiplied, geopolitical tensions increased, supply-chain stress and massive trade disruptions dominated the global economy, extreme weather events proliferated and most economists expect 2025 to be a weaker-than-average growth year.
Our investigations into the drivers of MOH continue, and if it’s a riddle that can be solved, we hope to solve it.
Rate of Change
If we compare the rate at which countries’ total NBI scores have risen since 2008 (all the countries measured since then have done, with the exception of Russia), a rather different pattern from the NBI ranking begins to emerge. All of the classically admired countries that, since 2005, have always clustered at the top of the ranking (these are all rich democracies, and with the exception of Japan, all in Western Europe or the Anglosphere), are actually to be found at the very bottom of the list of “brand growth”. The NBI Top 20 countries are basically grinding to a halt, with the notable exception of Japan which continues to pull away from the other countries at the top of the list. The fastest-growing country images are a completely different group, including South Korea (the absolute brand growth champion over the last 20 years), Colombia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and several other countries that we aren’t used to seeing at the top of any country rankings.
The consequence of these trends is that almost all the countries we measure are, year after year, bunching more and more closely together at the top of the scale. Thus, “nation branding” is becoming more and more competitive: traditionally esteemed countries like Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, France, the Netherlands, the UK and the Nordics shouldn’t take their excellent reputations for granted: they have basically stopped moving, and although their appeal is well established, in the longer term there may only be one way left for them to go.
The West vs. the Rest
As I mentioned in the case of the United States, comparing how people in “the West” and “the rest” perceive countries is always an illuminating exercise.
Particularly noticeable is the massive disparity between G7 and BRICS+ views of China. Last year, China was only the G7’s forty-third preferred country out of fifty, but the sixth favourite of BRICS+ respondents. This year China’s popularity has risen in both groups (no doubt filling the leadership void that America is creating), from 43rd to 39th among G7 respondents and from 6th to 2nd place among BRICS+ respondents, beaten only by Japan. From this new result, one could hypothesise that as much as 55% of the world’s population now regards China as its second most admired country on earth, and very significantly more attractive than the United States.
China, like America, obviously divides global opinion: but who doesn’t, these days? Last year, just three countries succeeded in appealing equally to the West and the Rest: Australia was ranked 10th, New Zealand 14th and Greece 23rd by both respondent groups. But this year, New Zealand is alone in not dividing global opinion, since views of Australia have dropped from 6th to 10th place in the views of BRICS+ respondents, while Greece has risen to 15th.
However, the clear winner when it comes to truly global appeal is Japan, ranked overall first in the 2024 NBI by both G7 and BRICS+ respondents. In 2025 it was again ranked first by BRICS+ respondents and second by G7 respondents (Canada was the G7’s most favoured nation in 2025, for reasons already discussed).
