The Global Alignment Index: Tracking Support for U.S., Chinese, and Russian Leadership

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In an article for the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), Gregory B. Poling and Andreyka Natalegawa developed a Global Alignment Index that assesses countries on their relative alignment with the United States, China, and Russia. These scores are constructed using UN voting behavior and Gallup public opinion surveys of support for U.S., Chinese, and Russian global leadership from 2008 to 2024.

The United States and like-minded democracies are engaged in a systemic competition for global leadership. They are pitted against an increasingly coordinated authoritarian club that includes Iran, North Korea, and especially China and Russia. The military, economic, and technological aspects of that competition garner intense interest from policymakers and the wider public. But at its heart, this is a normative struggle over the international system—whether the rules-based order crafted by the United States and democratic partners will adapt and endure or be replaced, at least in part, by norms more amenable to the ambitions of China and Russia.

The struggle over the way the system works cannot be won just in Washington, Brussels, or Tokyo, where allies have traditionally been in agreement. It will be determined among those states belonging neither to the U.S. alliance network nor the revisionist constellation of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Those states, often lumped together as the “Global South” or “Nonaligned World,” represent roughly five billion of the world’s eight billion citizens. But few of them are actually “nonaligned.” They have normative preferences and act on them, supporting those rules and institutions that are most attractive to their public and elites. In an increasingly multipolar world, the support of the global majority will be necessary for the success of most rules and institutions.

With deft policy and a willingness to give “nonaligned” partners the space to disagree when they need to, the United States can ensure it wins more arguments than it loses. But to succeed, Washington will need to advance norms that the global majority can get behind and be more discerning in the use of national power, investing in programs that can most efficiently persuade the fence sitters. The United States will not be able to do everything everywhere. Instead, it will have to compete with China and Russia amid relative resource scarcity, without the tools of U.S. soft power dismantled by the Trump administration. U.S. policymakers, therefore, need a more rigorous way to measure the scale and drivers of changes in global alignment over time.