ifo Institute: The US and its Allies Agree on Less Under Trump

Since US President Donald Trump took office, the US and its allies have reached consensus less often than before. This is the result of the ifo Institute’s calculations after studying the voting behavior of the US and its allies in the UN General Assembly.

“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the degree of consensus between the US and other Western nations has dropped around 7 percentage points below where it was under former US presidents,” write ifo researchers Martin Mosler and Niklas Potrafke, Director of the ifo Center for Political Economy and Public Finance.

They differentiate their results by region. For example, the rate of consensus between the US and the other G7 countries fell from 64.0 percent before Trump took office to 56.8 percent. Consensus with NATO member states declined even more sharply – from 61.3 percent to 53.4 percent. The decline was less pronounced in relation to the OECD countries, dropping from 58.7 percent to 52.0 percent.

The US’s consensus rate with Germany fell from 64.7 percent to 53.6 percent and with the UK it decreased particularly sharply – namely by 14 points, from 74.1 percent to 60.2 percent. However, the rate of consensus with Israel rose from 81 percent to 93.2 percent.

“Differences in voting were particularly pronounced for NATO partners and for resolutions on issues regarding the Middle East,” Mosler and Potrafke write. “One might assume that left-wing governments would be less likely to agree with the United States. But our empirical results suggest otherwise.”