interesting article - not a small sample size (26,000) and not some Rando on twitter with an extreme view.
https://ecfr.eu/publication/how-trump-is-making-china-great-again-and-what-it-means-for-europe/Donald Trump did not go into politics to make China great again. But that is what the latest poll of global public opinion from the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests he has done in the eyes of the world.
A year on from Trump’s return, in countries across the globe, many people believe China is on the verge of becoming even more powerful. Even before Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela, his aggressive “America First” approach was driving people closer to China. Paradoxically, his disavowal of the liberal international order may have given people licence to build stronger links to Beijing, since they no longer feel the need to fall in line with a US-led alliance system. Meanwhile, “the West” seems to be a spent geopolitical force for the foreseeable future. America’s traditional enemies fear it less than they once did—while allies now worry about falling victim to a predatory US.
This splitting of the West is most visible in Europe, and in what others think of Europe. Russians now regard the EU as more of an enemy than they do the US; and Ukrainians look more to Brussels than to Washington for succour.
Most Europeans no longer consider America a reliable ally, and they are keen to rearm. These are the main findings of a new poll of 25,949 respondents across 21 countries conducted in November 2025—one year after Trump’s triumphant victory in the last presidential election—for ECFR and Oxford University’s Europe in a Changing World research project, the fourth in a series of such global surveys. While the data predate Trump’s operation in Venezuela, many of the trends identified here seem to prefigure it, and one imagines they might even be reinforced by thisintervention.
The world appears to be becoming more open to China; or at least not fear it—an evolution that is in keeping with dominant Chinese interpretations of global geopolitics. As ECFR set out in The Idea of China last year, Xi Jinping and others believe the world is experiencing “great changes unseen in a century”, entailing (although not confined to) a power shift from West to East. One way the Chinese are dealing with this—and with America’s hegemony—is to work with other countries to “democratise international relations” by giving non-Western countries more of a voice. In a global order in which (as this year’s survey shows) publics feel their countries are freer than ever to choose their friends, the results of the poll will be music to the ears of decision-makers in Beijing. For decision-makers in Europe, however, the question is how to live in the truly multipolar world many Europeans have long dreamed of, but perhaps never imagined would take shape in quite this way. They also worry the Venezuela intervention legitimises the idea of China and Russia having their own spheres of influence.
