Three-quarters of Germans ‘don’t trust America’, 41% of Britons ‘the superpower America has bad intentions’
Following a poll showing that three-quarters of Germans ‘don’t trust America’, 41% of Britons said ‘the superpower America has bad intentions’, indicating a sharp deterioration in European distrust of the United States.
The surge in skepticism toward one of Germany’s oldest allies is even greater than during Trump’s first term, with the percentage of Germans who distrust the United States jumping from 19% to 29%.
British investors poured 1.8 billion pounds ($2.3 billion) into North American stock markets, mostly US-focused funds, in the weeks leading up to Trump’s trade tariff announcement last week, and while US stocks had already fallen since the start of the year before Trump’s tariff announcement last Wednesday, that decline turned into a sharp decline in the following days as investors dumped stocks, Reuters reported on the 9th.
The fund network Calastone said on the 8th that the British investment was “the third best month in the 10-year data set as investors attempted to ‘buy the dip’ following the weakness of US stocks at the beginning of the year,” and that “the seasonal transition to the UK stock market in March each year, and the fact that the UK’s tax year ends on April 5, helped to strengthen the buying trend in March.”
According to a poll conducted by ARD’s DeutschlandTrend on February 26, even before Trump’s recent tariffs, 70% of Germans feared that Trump’s trade policies would harm their economy.
Sixteen percent of German respondents said that the US was still a reliable partner, down 38 percentage points from the October survey. The ARD-DeutschlandTREND poll found that three-quarters of Germans in particular believe that Germany can no longer trust the United States.
ARD reported the results of the poll under the title “A Massive Slump in America’s Reputation” and stated that “The US administration’s foreign policy tone has had a huge impact on the character of exploratory talks and the views of German citizens and the US president on the US” and that “One in two Germans said that their opinion of Trump has worsened since he took office, while only one in seven are sympathetic to the US president, while at the same time the US reputation is falling and reaching a new low in the ARD-DeutschlandTREND poll.”
The poll found that only one in six voters said that the US is a reliable partner for Germany, while three-quarters of respondents believe that NATO members cannot currently rely on US protection.
Germans do not question NATO itself, but the idea of Europe becoming more independent from the military alliance resonates with one in two, ARD said.
ARD cited the “sudden change in US aid to Ukraine” as the main reason for the deterioration of Germans’ reputation toward the US, stating that “the US U-turn policy toward Ukraine is the main reason for the decline in US reputation among Germans.”
Six out of ten Germans believe that the idea of Europe compensating for the lack of US aid is unrealistic, and they believe that this is because European countries are not in a position to do so.
Regarding the possibility of “creating a Ukrainian peacekeeping force after the ceasefire” in the ceasefire negotiations with Russia, ARD stated that “joining the Bundeswehr is as popular as being rejected among Germans at present.”
According to a poll conducted by the polling organization Ipsos in April, 41% of Britons believe that the US uses its influence as a superpower for “bad” rather than “good” purposes.
This figure is up from 16% when the same question was asked a year ago. The percentage of British respondents who say they no longer have a “special relationship” with the United States has doubled in a year.
About 40% of British respondents said they “do not believe in a special relationship” with the United States, compared with just 30% who said they do.
“There’s definitely been a shift,” Gideon Skinner, Ipsos’ senior director of politics and head of polling, told The Washington Post. “It’s not a majority, but we’re definitely seeing more negative views of the United States overall.”
The Ipsos poll was conducted between April 4 and 7 among 1,008 British adults, using a voluntary online survey panel tailored to demographics.
“We have always thought that we could trust the U.S. as a partner, and especially the older generation, people who grew up after World War II, they feel a tremendous sense of loss,” Claudia Schmucker, director of the Center for Geoeconomics at the German Council for Foreign Relations, told the Post.
“They never expected that the U.S. would turn its back on Europe.” Schmucker said the U.S. “has a lot of hatred for Europe,” and that the recent leak of “private conversations” involving Trump’s senior team about the U.S. airstrikes in Yemen “shows that the growing contempt seems to go both ways.” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made a series of hateful remarks about Europe’s “free riding,” and Vice President Vance has visited Europe to criticize the idea of “bailing out” the continent again.
“America is going through an image crisis,” James Kirkham, a London-based brand consultant, told the Washington Post. “British and European people who grew up seeing the U.S. as a beacon of freedom and a trusted ally have been shocked by Trump’s ‘America First’ policies and the stories of immigrants being deported, either intentionally or accidentally, or being blocked from entering the country. People are being deported outright. What’s the next red line?”