Back in 2014, in an era that is barely recognizable from today’s vintage point, I gave a TED talk in Berlin introducing the first edition of the Good Country Index (GCI). The GCI is an attempt to measure how much each country on earth contributes to humanity and the planet: the good it exports outside its own borders, balanced against the harm it exports, or the extent to which it is a free rider on the international system.
This felt like a worthwhile exercise because almost all the existing country rankings and indicators measured the domestic features of countries, evaluating countries as if they were all separate islands in a vast planetary ocean. This didn’t make sense to me, given that we are faced by an array of common, interlinked, borderless challenges that includes climate change, pandemics, war, poverty, migration, and nuclear proliferation, to name only the most obvious examples. None of these challenges can be resolved by any single state or organization; as Benjamin Franklin remarked, unless we hang together, we will assuredly hang separately.
I had another reason to be interested in the good or bad behaviors of state actors. Each year since 2005 I had been running a poll, the Anholt Nation Brands Index (NBI), which tracks international popular perceptions of 50 or 60 countries, in minute detail. A simple pattern had emerged from the nearly one billion datapoints that the NBI had collected since its launch: The better a country’s “brand image,” the more foreign investment, tourists, business visitors, international events, trade, talent, media attention, diplomatic and cultural exchanges it receives; the more products and services it can export at higher margins. A good image, it turns out, even makes the country safer.
Just as in the corporate sector, a powerful brand is one of the most valuable assets a country can possess, but note: By “brand” I do not mean a logo or slogan; indeed this effect has little or nothing to do with marketing or messaging, and everything to do with identity, culture, purpose, values, and above all behavior. This is grand strategy, not communications.
More surprising was the discovery that the countries with the best images aren’t necessarily the biggest, richest, strongest, or most beautiful: They are the ones that are perceived to contribute most to humanity and the planet; the ones that manage to look after their own people and their own territory without neglecting their wider obligations. Again, just as in the corporate sector, a reputation for social responsibility turbocharges performance: Doing well and doing good, it seems, are intimately related.
This two-part formula is what I called the “Good Country Equation” in my 2020 book of the same name. Harmonizing one’s domestic and international responsibilities, I argued, is the gold standard of good governance for the 21st century.
The video of my Berlin talk received a lot of international attention, not least because it was Ireland that ranked first in the list that year: the country which, per head of population, did the most good and least harm to the world outside its own borders. Over the past 11 years, the video has been downloaded nearly 13 million times, making it the all-time most watched TED talk in the governance category. Clearly, some people out there are attracted by the idea of a world that works together.
The Good Country Index and the Nation Brands Index have continued to run each year, and the very strong correlation between the two has never faltered over the intervening decade.
A New Order Emerges
But meanwhile, outside in the real world, the mood of humanity, the prevailing style of governance, and the delicate web of international relations was undergoing an extraordinary series of upheavals and reversals. In his second term as US president, Donald Trump has continued to enact and promote a brash new global credo which holds that might is right, that the only duty of leaders is to protect their own countries’ narrow self-interest, that foreigners should be repelled at the border, that climate change and the other global challenges are “fake news,” and that the whole idea of a collaborative, rules-based international order is something to be jeered at.
Through his words and deeds, and his Teflon-coated impunity, Trump has granted permission to every would-be autocrat on the planet to do as they will, without consequences. His gift to the world is the shocking revelation that people in power can lie and get away with it, as long as they have an unshakeable belief in their own supremacy, and build an efficient mechanism that constantly stirs up an awful, generalized confusion between truth and falsehood. Thus, the tyrant tills the soil of society, and there he puts down his roots.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that even in those moments when a global consensus on the common good of humanity seemed most robust, we were only ever separated from the dark night of chaos by an assortment of unspoken conventions, unwritten rules, and “gentlemen’s agreements” barely thicker than a cigarette paper. This was as much the case within countries as between them.
It's an understatement to say that in such an altered world, the Good Country philosophy might sound seriously tone-deaf. The sometimes strikes me as possible that Donald Trump (or perhaps one of the people who do his thinking for him) has actually read everything I’ve ever written about what makes countries successful and has deliberately, systematically done the exact opposite.
My life’s work, to put it more dramatically, appeared to be in ruins.
This cataclysmic change happened because Trump and his growing band of emulators around the planet have simply granted everyone permission to say and do what they had long believed in, or wanted to believe. They weren’t suddenly converted from one worldview to another: The social penalties and intellectual obstacles to certain seductively easy attitudes, behaviors, and language were suddenly removed. Take climate change, immigration, or vaccines: People could now safely switch to an easier or more comforting belief or worldview than the difficult, painful one they were expected to espouse before Trump let them off the hook, without fear of criticism or ostracism.
People were granted a kind of instant infantilism: Every mistake you make can be blamed on someone else; anything anybody else says that you find difficult or unpleasant can be erased by calling it lies; any intellectual challenge can be defeated with brute force; and any time you change your mind you can simply deny you ever said anything different.
This is the pure essence of populism: Offer adults the prospect of thinking and behaving like children and your landslide is all but guaranteed.
The End of Soft Power?
A few overexcited commentators have opined that the age of soft power is now over. This is plainly nonsense: human nature will always prefer to be charmed than coerced into new behaviors, and for those who wish to drive change, both approaches will always have their advantages and drawbacks. The essentially meritocratic nature of soft power—that it permits smaller and weaker nations to achieve some of their goals despite not possessing force of arms or economic might—will always exist. It’s the one factor that should prevent the world descending into a full-scale Trumpian dystopia where the vast majority of nations are in thrall to a handful of larger, stronger, wealthier nations.
I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the term “soft power.” The distinction between coercive and attractive power is both valid and important, but both sides of political scientist Joseph Nye’s model are ultimately “hard” in the sense that they are both framed as ways for one country to achieve ascendancy over another. Whether you fire rockets at people, or lavish cultural relations on them, the purpose is always assumed to be fundamentally competitive: It’s all about getting your own way. Surely that doesn’t have to be the purpose and endpoint of all international relations; surely life on earth is a team sport, not a winner-takes-all sprint to the finishing line.
Having said all this, the Good Country philosophy was never intended to be altruistic: The idea of one nation sacrificing its own interests for those of another is of course a non-starter and would contradict the fundamental duty of democratically elected leaders (and indeed unelected leaders), that of prioritizing the needs of their citizens. No statement from the elected leader of America could be more banal than “America First”: The problem is the implication that everyone else must come last.
My finding—that more principled international behavior creates a better national image which leads to more profitable international engagements—was intended as just one example of the kind of enlightened self-interest that I hoped would power the model. Now, we urgently need more real-world proofs that harmonizing one’s domestic and international obligations, done properly, can produce better outcomes, not weak compromises.
As a policy advisor to some 60 countries over the last 20 years I’ve had many opportunities to watch genuinely collaborative policy ideas move from concept to execution, and I’ve seen how well they can work. Consulting, comparing, and collaborating with other countries, sometimes in deliberately random constellations, even when making purely domestic policy, can free policymakers from endlessly recycling the same tired old remedies. Thinking and working globally refreshes the strategic process to an extent which surprises everyone who tries it: It’s a pure example of what philosopher Edward de Bono called “lateral thinking,” although perhaps in this context we should call it “multilateral thinking.”
We must learn to think of foreigners as a wider circle of potential collaborators, beneficiaries or victims of our everyday decisions, and other countries as recipients of our good deeds and our detritus. The traditional configuration of most governments is based on the idea that foreigners are either customers to be marketed to (trade, tourism, investment) or enemies to be liquidated (foreign affairs, intelligence, security). This view is both impoverished and impoverishing.
Who Cares What the World Thinks?
Of course, the immediate response of nationalists, localists, and nativists to this kind of talk is that they don’t care what foreigners think about them, that it’s better to be feared than admired, or even trusted. A quasi-psychopathic perception among many hardline nationalists that foreigners, unlike one’s own citizens or rather voters, simply aren’t complete human beings, seriously hardens this view: The views of worthless people are worthless.
Yet it’s difficult to imagine that such a view could be vindicated in the long term: People who fear or dislike a country and its regime are highly unlikely to reward it with their time, money, trust, and talent; they’re unlikely to visit a country that persecutes foreigners with acts of performative cruelty; they’re unlikely to pay good money to study in a country that hounds universities and students who dare to question its leader’s peculiar ideology. And this is quite aside from the fact that autarky is, even for very large economies and geographies, still an act of economic, political, and security self-harm notwithstanding the current retreat from full-throttle globalization.
The latest data from the 2025 Anholt Nation Brands Index already shows that international goodwill towards the United States has fallen further than any country we’ve ever measured, apart from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and China after the pandemic (for which it was widely held responsible). Time will tell how soon and how much this catastrophic loss of American prestige will translate into measurable economic damage—especially given a chief executive with a nasty habit of suppressing discouraging data and terminating the people who provide it—but the early indications are popping up here, there, and everywhere.
Can we get back, one day, to where we were before Trump? Would we even want to? It is just possible that the thermonuclear impact of Trump’s second presidency might eventually prove to have cleared the ground for something more constructive than we had before him (even if the reputation of the United States itself might remain radioactive for generations).
Trump certainly didn’t invent the dissatisfaction that brought him to power: He has simply noticed and harnessed it to obtain the wealth and power he craves to feed his monstrous ego. Much of that dissatisfaction stemmed from the failures and injustices of mismanaged globalization, and perhaps one day we will argue that it needed something close to complete dismantling before a better, fairer international system could be built in its place. And perhaps indeed this could only be carried out with a measure of brutality: “reform of the multilateral institutions” had become a very long-running and extremely unfunny joke.
By attacking the international norms and systems it worked so hard to build, the United States has thrown away the keys to its own car, and may find it no longer has much freedom of movement. China is bending to pick up the keys, and is already viewed by many as the natural successor to the retreating superpower: the only reliable superpartner; indeed, the only adult in the room.
Hope Springs Eternal
Despite the gloomy prognostics, the Nation Brands Index does offer one tantalizingly positive sign. If you draw a simple line chart showing how the images of all the countries we’ve measured have risen and fallen over the 20-year period, a rather surprising pattern emerges: Their images are all steadily improving, year after year. Russia alone has a worse image today than it did when we first measured it in 2008. The “mood of humanity” does vacillate a bit from year to year: Some years, everybody seems to approve of all other countries a bit more; other years, a bit less. But the trend is unmistakably upwards.
I’ve always hypothesized that this odd phenomenon is a natural consequence of globalization. Each new generation of humans emerges into a more connected, more interdependent world, and accepts more fully and naturally that it shares the planet with many other races and nations. And through a well-noted process of evolution, familiarity breeds trust.
The Good Country never was, and never should become, a counter-ideology: a “liberal backlash against a rising tide of conservatism,” or any such kind of facile tribalism. Polarization, and the relentless creation of false or oversimplified ideological oppositions, is the root of so many of humanity’s problems today. Any approach that seeks to help one side win or the other side lose simply compounds the problem.
As I’ve often said, the nationalist or globalist or conservative or liberal person that contemporary society demands you spend all your waking hours attacking or ridiculing on social media, is not in fact an alien from another planet. If you think hard and honestly enough about what they believe in, you’ll probably find that they’re just you on a different day.
Party politics is froth, nothing other than the vanity of tiny differences. It makes fools of us by drawing perpetual antagonistic momentum from the core characteristics of two human types: those who derive hope and energy from looking outwards and forwards, and those who derive comfort and strength from looking inwards and backwards.
It would be a great new freedom for modern societies, perhaps especially in the West, if we could all be granted permission not to hold strong opinions on every topic in the world. In fact, a shortage of opinions is often a sign of wisdom. Most human quandaries are far too complex to admit of a simple solution, and tackling them without nuance (as social media is programmed to do) is a recipe for dangerous misunderstandings. The humility and maturity to acknowledge that we know very little about the world, and to spend more of our efforts trying to understand things rather than simply shout down those who don’t share our ill-founded, second-hand beliefs, would go a long way toward repairing our fissiparous societies.
And what of our leaders? It seems incredible to me that after so many centuries repeatedly enduring the incalculable misery caused to humanity by sociopathic despots, we have still never figured out a way of preventing such men and women from rising to positions of uncontrollable power.
Let’s be clear: humans cannot be our enemies unless they are brainwashed into it. Autocrats know how to rally their supporters against a “common enemy,” but the only truly common enemies that the whole of humanity appears to recognize are the alien invaders of science fiction. Only when we stumble out of the cinema, blinking in the daylight, do we realize that for a wonderful brief moment we were—all of us, irrespective of race, color, creed, or religion—rooting for the humans.
The stupid thing is that we do have real, present, common enemies that threaten the whole of humanity, if only we can make the tiny effort of imagination necessary to recognize them as such: climate change, pandemics, war, intolerance, poverty, hunger, ignorance, nuclear proliferation. This is not fiction; outside there is no daylight, only the endless darkness of annihilation.
“Unity First” was always the Good Country’s simple message, and I believe that it is still a good one.
Simon Anholt is an independent policy advisor specializing in the image and reputation of countries, regions, and cities.
