The Global Alignment Index: Tracking Support for U.S., Chinese, and Russian Leadership

The index reveals that, contrary to claims of declining U.S. influence relative to China in Southeast Asia and the BRICS, both had, on average, become more aligned with the United States over the last 16 years. In 2008, the average U.S.-China Alignment Score was -2.17 across Southeast Asia and -1.65 for the BRICS members, firmly in China’s corner. Since then, that score has trended modestly upward, particularly in Southeast Asia. In nearly half of the subsequent 16 years, the U.S.-China Alignment Score for Southeast Asia has fallen between -0.5 and 0.5—effectively a dead heat. The story is even better for the United States when compared to Russia, where both Southeast Asia and the BRICS have, in most years, fallen into this competitive range or modestly aligned with the United States. This is not a prediction for future alignment, especially given the policy changes introduced by the Trump administration. But it does indicate that Southeast Asia and the BRICS countries have recently been more aligned with U.S. preferences than is often acknowledged.

Finding 2: Public Versus Regime Alignment

The Global Alignment Index is created by combining measures of public and regime alignment. When the Alignment Scores are broken out into their constituent parts, as they are here for the average scores across Southeast Asia and the BRICS, a few lessons are evident. First, public and regime alignment tend to move in the same direction over time, though public opinion is slower to change year-over-year. More importantly, Southeast Asian and BRICS publics are, on average, considerably more aligned with the United States than are their governments. This strongly suggests that the United States would do better by continuing to support open societies in which public opinion can have a greater effect on state behavior. Abandoning support for civil society and good governance may be convenient in the short term, but it is likely to decrease rather than increase a given country’s alignment with the United States over time.

Finding 3: Country-Level Variation

These averages are useful, but they paper over variability across both Southeast Asia and the BRICS. In Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Vietnam are strongly aligned with the United States compared to China, as is Myanmar (though this represents just one side of the Burmese civil war; since the 2021 coup, its UN voting behavior has been determined by the resistance-aligned representative who occupies the country’s seat in the United Nations). Vietnam, however, has grown more aligned with Russia since 2022. Every other country in the region is more aligned with Washington than they were a decade and a half ago but are not consistently in the U.S. camp. Malaysia, Indonesia, and most worryingly, Singapore have moved into greater alignment with China since 2022. Russian global leadership appears much less attractive to most states than does China’s, but the two tend to move in the same direction year-over-year.

Among the BRICS, the direction of movement has mostly been toward the United States, closing the gap with China and Russia. But the BRICS show more variation than their Southeast Asian counterparts in their alignments with China versus Russia. India, for instance, has been modestly more aligned with the United States than China since 2020 but remains marginally favorable toward Russia. The opposite is true of Brazil, which recently has marginally favored China over the United States but is still slightly more aligned with the United States than with Russia.

Finding 4: Trade Does Not Increase Alignment

One of the most surprising findings of the index is that trade volumes have little impact on—and may even negatively affect—alignment. Over the period examined, both Southeast Asia and the BRICS have grown far more dependent on bilateral trade with China than with the United States. But those countries have, on average, grown less aligned with China over that time. This means that increasing reliance on trade with China has neither improved most publics’ views of Chinese global leadership nor led their governments to align with Chinese preferences at the United Nations.

Finding 5: The Impact of Events Is Hard to Measure

Foreign policy narratives often focus on major events and their perceived impacts; this includes the South China Sea island building and arbitration, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine. These obviously matter and may have reinforced longer-term trends in how countries and publics viewed Chinese and Russian revisionism or U.S. global leadership. But in most cases among the countries examined, it is hard to tell how much each development drove shifts in alignment. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea occurred during a period of upswing in both Southeast Asian and BRICS alignment with the United States over Russia. It may have helped keep that swing going, but it was already evident by 2013. Southeast Asian alignment with Washington over Beijing surged in the same period, 2013 to 2016, which coincided with the period of Chinese island-building and high-profile incidents in the South China Sea. That the surge happened in Southeast Asia but is not evident among the BRICS suggests that it was region-specific, and the South China Sea provides the best explanation. But that momentum dissipated in 2017, indicating that political shifts in Washington and perhaps Manila under Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte had a larger effect than ongoing maritime tensions.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, alignment with Washington over Beijing improved marginally across both Southeast Asia and the BRICS (there was no similar movement in the U.S.-Russia Score), which suggests that China’s behavior during the early pandemic harmed its standing. Alignment with Washington over both Beijing and Moscow continued to improve in 2021, contrary to narratives that the United States suffered for its slow provision of vaccines abroad and China’s comparative advantage in providing personal protective equipment and other support. The United States likely benefited from a change in leadership, which had far more effect than either country’s Covid-19 diplomacy.

The impact of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is more evident. It coincided with a substantial increase in alignment with the United States over Russia, and to a lesser degree over China. In fact, 2022 was the high-water mark for Southeast Asian and BRICS alignment with the United States over the period studied. But that dissipated quickly, with both Southeast Asian and BRICS averages swinging back toward favoring China and Russia as the war dragged on. The effect of Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza is murkier. It would have had little impact on the 2023 Alignment Scores, coming too late in the year to be reflected in either Gallup polling or most UN votes. But the 2024 scores suggest that the war did not have as much, if any, impact on average U.S. standing across Southeast Asia and the BRICS. Individual country scores suggest that perceived U.S. support for Israel extended the downturn in alignment with the United States in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, and to a lesser degree, Egypt, but not elsewhere.

Finding 6: U.S. Elections Matter, A Lot

The effect of changes in U.S. administrations is much clearer than that of individual events. Vladimir Putin has been in control of Russia for the entire period analyzed here, and Xi Jinping has been leading China since late 2012. The global aims of the Chinese and Russian governments have been consistent over time, while those of the United States have shifted between administrations. Averaging the scores for each administration is revealing. The data includes only the last year of the Bush administration, but the scores in that year are consistent with the widespread belief that U.S. standing abroad had reached a nadir by that point. Barack Obama’s first administration oversaw a modest improvement, which continued into his second administration. Alignment with the United States decreased considerably during the first Trump administration before recovering nearly to the levels of Obama 2.0 during Joe Biden’s presidency.

The tools of U.S. influence did not change markedly from administration to administration, suggesting that the Bush and Trump administrations were using those tools to advance norms that Southeast Asia and the BRICS, on balance, found less attractive than those favored by Obama and Biden. This suggests that the 2025 U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia Alignment Scores are likely to decrease.

Finding 7: BRICS Membership Does Not Change Alignment

Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia joined the BRICS in 2023 and 2024, and the grouping’s membership will likely continue to grow. This trend has policymakers in Washington worried, but that concern seems premature. The Alignment Scores of three original BRICS members—Brazil, India, and South Africa—show a mixed record since joining the organization. India has grown modestly more aligned with the United States compared to China over the last decade and a half, while South Africa has trended modestly toward China, and Brazil has ended up roughly where it started, despite swinging considerably from administration to administration. On the U.S.-Russia Score, all three original BRICS members were little changed between their dates of accession and 2024, though Brazil and South Africa have swung considerably more than India over that time. BRICS membership has not moved the members into greater alignment with China or Russia. That could change with the new members, but there is no evidence to support that yet.

Methodology

The U.S.-China Alignment Scores and U.S.-Russia Alignment Scores for each country are created from an average of two indicators: net approval ratings sourced from Gallup’s annual world poll and UN voting coincidence scores on key votes as identified by the U.S. Department of State in its annual Voting Practices in the United Nations report. These two indicators serve as proxies for public and elite, or regime, alignment, respectively.

Net approval ratings are derived from three questions in Gallup’s annual world poll:

1. Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?
2. Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of China?
3. Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of Russia?

Results from Gallup’s surveys are based on nationally representative, probability-based samples among the adult population aged 15 and older in each country. This report focuses on findings between 2008 and 2024. The authors first determined net approval for the United States, China, and Russia in each country by subtracting the percentage of respondents reporting disapproval from those reporting approval. By subtracting the China and Russia net approval scores from the U.S. net approval score, these provide a relative U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia indicator for each country. In years where these relative approval scores are positive, respondents are more supportive of U.S. global leadership than that of China or Russia. In years where the scores are negative, the inverse is true.

For UN voting coincidence statistics, this analysis focuses on contested General Assembly votes identified by the Department of State as “important” in the annual Voting Practices in the United Nations report. This analysis applies the methodology the State Department used from 2017 to 2021 to calculate voting coincidence across all years: It tallies one point for votes that are the same as those of the United States (or China or Russia), zero for those that are opposite, and half a point when one country, but not both, abstained on a resolution. The total number of points is then divided by the total number of votes excluding absences. Each country’s voting coincidence with China and Russia is subtracted from its voting coincidence with the United States to generate another relative U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia indicator.

These two indicators—of relative public approval and relative UN voting coincidence—are averaged to generate the U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia Alignment Scores used in the index. Those scores are presented on a scale of -5 to 5, with positive numbers signifying greater alignment with the United States and negative numbers signifying greater alignment with China or Russia. Any missing scores indicate that Gallup did not conduct surveys in the country that year.

For trade statistics, this analysis relies on the UN Comtrade database, using figures reported by the countries of analysis (i.e., Southeast Asian and BRICS countries). The trade percentage included in the chart above reflects the difference in how much a country traded with the United States and how much it traded with either China or Russia, expressed as a percentage of the country’s overall trade volume. In years where this trade percentage is positive, the country conducted more trade with the United States than with China or Russia, with the value of the percentage reflecting the size of the difference in this trade as a share of the country’s overall trade volume. In years where this percentage is negative, the inverse is true.

Gregory B. Poling is a senior fellow and director for the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Andreyka Natalegawa is an associate fellow for the CSIS Southeast Asia Program.

The authors would like to thank Lauren Mai, Japhet Quitzon, Gemma King, Sophia Datta, Hpone Thit Htoo, and Rocio Gatdula for their research support.

This commentary is made possible through the support of CSIS and the Japan External Trade Organization.