Polls once showed America as Britain’s best friend. Now more Britons name it a threat than name China, and Green voters rank it above Russia. This isn’t a blip; it’s a full reassessment of the “special relationship”
The USA is now viewed by a growing share of Britons as a genuine threat to their country’s national interests, a shift so pronounced that Green Party voters rank America above Russia on the list of dangers facing Britain. New YouGov polling found 61 per cent of Green voters named the US as one of the three biggest threats to Britain’s national interests, compared with 58 per cent who chose Russia and just 21 per cent who picked China, according to a media report. This is not an isolated finding from one poll among one party’s supporters. It is the clearest signal yet of a broader, deepening reassessment running through British public opinion, one built around President Trump’s foreign policy, including the Iran war, trade disputes with allies, and repeated friction with NATO partners.
The numbers behind the shift
The scale of this change becomes clear once the wider polling record is laid out. YouGov found that 68 per cent of Britons now believe the United States has had a mostly or entirely negative impact on the world, up from 57 per cent just a few months earlier, according to the organisation’s own research. Only 10 per cent of respondents believe America currently has a mostly positive global influence. The sharpest jump came among Conservative voters, a group that has traditionally been far more sympathetic to Washington than Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green supporters, who were already overwhelmingly negative before this latest shift even began.
A separate YouGov survey released shortly before, marking 250 years since American independence, found 60 per cent of Britons now hold an unfavourable opinion of the United States, compared with an average of around 39 per cent during Joe Biden’s presidency, according to the same polling organisation. Notably, 35 per cent of respondents believe Trump has permanently changed American politics, suggesting many Britons see the current shifts in US policy as a lasting transformation rather than a temporary phase tied to one administration.
When “ally” stops being the obvious word
Perhaps the most striking shift concerns how Britons now categorise the relationship itself. Earlier YouGov research found that while a narrow majority of Britons still considered America either an ally or a friendly rival, that figure had fallen sharply from previous surveys, and the proportion describing the US as an unfriendly country, or even a hostile threat, reached its highest level since YouGov began asking the question back in 2019, according to the organisation’s research. Only 17 percent of Britons now identify the United States as Britain’s closest ally at all, a genuinely striking figure given how central that description has been to British foreign policy identity for the better part of a century.
A separate poll focused primarily on Britain’s relationship with China contained perhaps the most telling comparison of all. It found 23 percent of Britons consider the United States a major threat to the UK, almost identical to the 25 percent who identified China as a major threat, according to YouGov’s findings. Russia remained by far the greatest perceived security threat at 62 percent, but the fact that America has moved into roughly the same threat category as China illustrates just how far this shift has travelled, driven by disputes over NATO, tensions over Greenland, and broader unease about the direction of US foreign policy.
Iran is the issue driving it home
If one single event has crystallised this shift, it is the war with Iran. Separate polling by Public First found 53 per cent of Britons now regard the United States as a negative force in world affairs, a dramatic jump following the Trump administration’s military campaign against Iran and its intervention in Venezuela, according to a media report on the findings. Only 29 per cent of respondents viewed America positively. Analysts cited in that reporting argue the Iran war has become one of the defining issues damaging Britain’s perception of the United States, with the shift particularly pronounced among younger voters and supporters of centre-left parties.
Westminster is already adjusting its own assumptions
This shift in public sentiment has not gone unnoticed inside British policymaking circles. The House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee has reached a strikingly similar conclusion from a policy standpoint, arguing that Britain should no longer rely on sentimental assumptions about the special relationship with Washington, since American foreign policy has become increasingly transactional and unpredictable, according to the committee’s own report. While the committee still stresses that the United States remains Britain’s most important ally, it recommends that London strengthen its own strategic autonomy and deepen cooperation with European partners, specifically so Britain becomes less dependent on decisions made in Washington that it can no longer reliably predict.
A relationship being quietly renegotiated in public opinion
Taken together, these findings describe something considerably bigger than a single unfavourable poll. They describe a sustained, multi-survey shift in how the British public understands its most important alliance. Confidence in the United States has declined sharply since Trump’s return to office, driven substantially by the Iran war, disputes with allies, NATO tensions, and a growing sense that American foreign policy decisions have become genuinely difficult to predict from one month to the next.
Russia remains Britain’s principal security threat by a wide margin across nearly every survey. But the fact that America now sits close to China in threat perception among significant portions of the British public, and that Green voters rank the US above Russia entirely, marks a genuine break from the assumptions that have underpinned British foreign policy for generations. Whether this shift proves durable, or eases once the Iran war concludes and American politics moves past the current administration, remains genuinely uncertain. What is not uncertain is that both pollsters and policymakers in Britain are now treating the special relationship as something that needs actively renegotiating, rather than something that can simply be taken for granted.
