The Guardian has posted a beautiful data journalism piece based on a report from Focaldata showing that since Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency countries are voting less often with the United States and more often with China in the United Nations General Assembly. The article interprets these trends as evidence that “the world is moving closer to China.” Its visuals reinforce this narrative, with red arrows pointing away from the United States and toward Beijing across much of the globe.
But there is another, more plausible interpretation: The world is not moving away from the United States. The United States is moving away from the world.
Simple agreement rates cannot tell us who changed when countries’ voting alignment declines. If two countries vote together less often than before, either one, or both, could have shifted positions. To understand what is happening, we need to examine how individual countries’ voting behavior changes over time.
The answer is pretty clear: Most countries changed their voting behavior very little and the U.S. changed a lot. Here is how I know. For years I have maintained a widely used database of U.N. ideal points from the entire history of U.N. voting. One thing I check is whether countries change their vote from one year to the next on the same resolution.
Two countries stand out for vote switching in 2025: Argentina under President Javier Milei and the United States under President Donald Trump.The U.S. switched on 12 votes, more than it has ever done in a single year. By contrast in his first term, Trump switched on just 4 votes in 2018 and 3 in 2019 (5 of these votes were reversed by the Biden administration in 2021).
By contrast, 104 countries, including the U.S. main allies, did not change their voting behavior at all on repeated resolutions. Most other nations changed one or two votes. Thus, the radical changes documented in the Guardian article are not because the U.S. allies are moving towards China but because the U.S. is moving away from everyone else.
Many of the votes where the U.S has changed were related to (nuclear) arms control, development aid, and human rights. For example, the U.S. voted against resolutions for the “Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order” and the “Eradication of rural poverty” due to “problematic language.” But the U.S. has also taken positions on new resolutions that have isolated it from the rest of the world, such as voting with Russia, Belarus and North Korea against declaring Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine war.
I use the information about identical resolutions as a kind of glue to identify changes in positions, known as “ideal points,” over time. Think of this as analogous to estimates of how liberal or conservative members of Congress are. The change in 2025 is quite dramatic, as my latest figure below shows. The U.S. voting record in the United Nations is so anomalous that the model wants to push the U.S. ideal points all the way into outer space. Israel and Argentina are the closest followers. Some other countries, like Board of Peace members Hungary and Paraguay, have also shifted towards the U.S. However, most other countries have pretty much stayed where they were.
The implication is straightforward. What looks like a global drift away from the United States is, in large part, the consequence of the United States redefining its own position relative to longstanding international norms and coalitions.
In other words, U.S. allies are not collectively moving toward China. The United States is moving away from them.
