Counter/Consensus: Trump-Putin Alaska Meeting, Israel's Dropping Soft Power, and Trump's Politically Savvy Isolationism

1. Russia-U.S. Relations (Consensus)

I don’t think about you at all. Media coverage of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska last Friday indicated that Putin likely got what he wanted from the bilateral meeting on Ukraine, while Trump got very little. Putin did not agree to a ceasefire, and Trump has stepped back from demanding one in advance of formal talks. The United States did not impose “crushing sanctions” in light of Russia’s intransigence. And Putin was able to grandstand next to the U.S. president, positioning Russia as having reentered the club of great powers.

Our data on public opinion in both Russia and the United States supports this take. In Russia, views of the United States have tracked closely with Trump’s apparent sympathy for Moscow’s position on Ukraine. Net favorability toward the United States among Russian adults rose around 20 points after the Trump-Putin phone call in February, receded when Trump started talking tough earlier this summer, and spiked anew just after the Alaska summit. 

Americans are not following these developments nearly as closely. There has been a gradual but steady improvement in U.S. adults’ favorability toward Russia, likely helped by the changing narrative around Russian aggression on the political right, but there were not large swings around the major Putin-Trump meetings, neither in February nor more recently in Alaska. Furthermore, views of Russia have improved to hover around an uninspiring -40 points. 

While Putin capitalized on the summit to bolster his position internationally on Ukraine, the U.S. response has been tepid. This is in part due to inattention. While the special military operation in Ukraine is highly visible in Russia, it is not the political issue, or even the foreign policy issue, that U.S. adults are most concerned about. Still, mutual regard on both sides is at a high point, creating slightly more leeway for the leaders to address the crisis. 

Just as U.S. adults’ views of Russia have not massively budged, Americans are generally still favorably disposed towards Ukraine but without much movement in recent months, although favorability has declined since 2022-23. But as noted, this doesn’t translate into making Ukraine a key issue for most voters. Russians, meanwhile, have durably negative views of Ukraine (around -60) that haven’t shifted with the possibility of peace talks.

The data exposes an uncomfortable reality for Ukrainian officials watching from the sidelines: Their fate is being negotiated by a Russian leader riding high on renewed great power status and an American president whose public shows little sustained interest in the conflict despite being positively disposed toward Ukraine. And while Monday’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and European leaders reportedly went better than expected given his disastrous prior Oval Office meeting, Trump’s repeated tendency to engage with Putin bilaterally and to allow himself to be swayed by Putin’s version of events will be an ongoing cause for concern. 

2. Israeli Soft Power (Consensus)

Enemies in low places. If you’re wondering just how far Israel’s global standing has fallen amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, look no further: Israel is now tied with Iran for last place in our Global Soft Power Rankings. Global anger at Israel will be no surprise to regular readers of this briefing, since we have previously written about regional and global views of Israel deteriorating with the ongoing ground offensive in Gaza. 

But while it hardly seemed possible for public opinion of Israel globally to get worse, press reports of mass starvation and deaths at feeding stations, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements about fully occupying Gaza City, have pushed views of the U.S. ally even lower.

Meanwhile, despite headlines indicating that negative media about Gaza has partially broken through to the Israeli public, Israel’s self-image remains at a high ebb since the conflict with Hamas broke out, riding on apparent approval of the recent strikes on Iran. 

The disconnect between how Israelis view the conflict in Gaza and how the rest of the world views it is striking. Israel views itself primarily as the victim given the events of Oct. 7. The timing of Hamas releasing images of an emaciated hostage just as footage of Palestinian starvation hit international airwaves may have reinforced Israelis’ resistance to acknowledging their role in Gaza's humanitarian crisis. This helps explain why the Iranian attacks, and secondarily the attacks on Lebanese Hezbollah back in the fall of 2024, were such a balm: They recouched the Israeli military and intelligence apparatuses as being in a near-peer competition with hostile foreign powers, rather than being embroiled in a morally ambiguous anti-insurgency campaign.

Despite this, Israelis’ broadly pessimistic outlook leads us to predict that eventually, Israelis will face an internal reckoning, reconciling their self-image with their global image and unfolding events. But for now, we’re seeing no sign of it in our data.

3. U.S. Foreign Policy (Counter)

What’s in a name? Much ink has been spilled on whether U.S. President Donald Trump is an isolationist. Washington’s demands that its military allies make greater efforts to secure their own defense so the United States can scale back point in one direction. Proactive U.S. efforts to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities — and more recently, the U.S.-hosted Alaska summit to help end the war in Ukraine — point in the other.

As we noted earlier this week in the Q3 update of our U.S. Foreign Policy Tracker, Trump’s base clearly favors the former: Our U.S. Index of Isolationism, which measures the degree to which voters prefer isolationism across a variety of foreign policy issues (yellow line in chart below), continues to see the average Republican voter express broad support for isolationism. At first glance, this suggests Republican voters may be at odds with some of President Trump’s more recent foreign policy forays which one could struggle to frame as strictly isolationist — chief among them, Trump’s increasingly active efforts to end the war in Ukraine, on display at the aforementioned Alaska summit and during follow-on meetings in Washington. 

But trends in our data suggest a more nuanced interpretation. In particular, our Isolationism Index readings among Republican voters are down nearly 10 points from peak to trough (near where they currently sit), while our Engagement Index readings — which measure public interest in greater U.S. involvement in global affairs — are up by nearly 7 points (and currently hovering near a tracking high). While pro-isolationist sentiment remains in the lead by a wide margin, our view on these trends is that Republican voters may increasingly see greater U.S. engagement over the near term as the best way to limit it over the longer term. Put differently, some voters may simply feel that resolving existing conflicts to which Washington is already a party while avoiding new ones will facilitate greater U.S. isolationism going forward, relative to an alternative scenario in which such conflicts — like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — are allowed to fester for even longer owing to a lack of U.S. effort to resolve them now.

In contrast to ongoing debates about whether Trump is an isolationist, whether he has embraced a more unilateral foreign policy — which has seen the United States withdraw from multilateral fora like the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Paris Agreement, and the World Health Organization, among others — has been less hotly debated (the answer is consistently that he has). And yet on some fronts, such as this week’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, to which a host of European leaders were ultimately invited, hints of the administration’s openness to targeted multilateralism have been on display.

Here too, our data suggests that sentiment among Trump’s base is more aligned with the administration’s actions than not. On the one hand, Republican voters have quite consistently preferred to limit U.S. involvement in international organizations to current levels or otherwise reduce it (whereas Democrats prefer greater involvement by a wide margin).

But when we assess Republicans’ attitudes across a wider range of issue areas using our Index of U.S. Multilateralism — which takes into account not just voters’ views of international organizations, but also their views on coordinating with U.S. allies and partners to resolve economic and military disputes outside of those fora — support for multilateralism predominates.

This was not always so clearly the case, and the timing of the uptick in Republican voters’ enthusiasm for multilateralism — Q1 2025, coinciding with Trump’s inauguration — suggests Republicans are embracing Trump’s particular brand of multilateralism as opposed to embracing it more generally..

All that to say that while pundits may debate the exact contours of the Trump administration’s foreign policy in theory, Republican voters’ preferences are aligned with it in practice, however you want to call it.

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