A study by the firm Reputation Lab polled people in 60 major countries, and found that the United States has a very bad reputation. The U.S. ranking fell from what was already a low rank of 30 out of 60 in 2024 to an even worse 48th place in 2025.
A clear demonstration of the political isolation of the U.S. government can be seen in votes at the United Nations.
The vast majority of countries on Earth voted at the UN General Assembly on 29 October to demand an end to the illegal U.S. blockade of Cuba, which has been maintained in blatant violation of international law for more than six decades.
165 countries, representing 85.5% of the UN’s 193 member states, voted in support of a resolution that emphasized the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”.
Just seven nations, or 3.6% of the total, opposed the measure. These included the U.S. and Israel–which vote against the resolution every single year–as well as Argentina, Hungary, Paraguay, North Macedonia, and Ukraine.
Another 12 countries, or 6.2% of UN member states, abstained. These were Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Czechia, Ecuador, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Poland, and Romania.
The vote would have been 166 in favor, given that Venezuela expressed strong support for the resolution. However, the South American nation lost its voting rights, because it has not been able to pay the fees it owes to the UN, due to illegal, unilateral U.S. sanctions and an embargo that have prevented Venezuela from accessing its foreign reserves and blocked it from the U.S.-dominated financial system.
The UN General Assembly has held a vote on a similar resolution practically every year since 1992. Nearly all countries on Earth usually support the measure.
The United States has ignored these overwhelming UN votes for more than three decades.
In 2024, support for the resolution was even more overwhelming, with 187 votes in favor, and just two against (the U.S. and Israel), with one abstention (Moldova).
Trump administration fails to pressure most countries to support the blockade of Cuba
Although it seems like the U.S. got a few more countries to join it in voting against the resolution in 2025, this was in fact a big diplomatic loss for the Trump administration, symbolically showing how isolated the United States is on the global stage.
The Trump administration put a lot of energy and resources into pressuring countries around the world to vote against the resolution.
Reuters reported that the State Department, under the leadership of neoconservative war hawk Marco Rubio, ordered U.S. diplomats in dozens of foreign countries to try to force their host nations to follow Washington at the UN.
This effort ultimately failed. Just six countries went along with the Trump administration.
As Reuters put it, “US fails to make big dent in UN vote calling for end to Cuba embargo”.
This issue is a particular obsession of Marco Rubio, the second-most powerful person in the U.S. government, who is simultaneously serving as both secretary of state and national security advisor.
Rubio’s parents were immigrants from Cuba, although he has repeatedly lied about their life story. Rubio long claimed that his parents fled communism. That is not true. They actually moved to the United States in 1956, years before the victory of the socialist revolution in 1959.
Bloomberg noted, “President Donald Trump’s administration mobilized U.S. diplomats this year to push hard against the symbolic vote decrying the trade embargo”.
The U.S. government did have some success in convincing several Eastern and Central European countries to abstain in the vote, in protest of Cuba’s alliance with Russia. Representatives of these governments falsely accused Cuba of sending troops to fight in Ukraine. This is not true. There are reportedly Cuban volunteers who have joined Russian forces in the proxy war against US/NATO-backed Ukrainian forces, but they were not sent by the Cuban government; they went of their own accord, seeking an opportunity to fight against the U.S. empire that has long oppressed them.
Goal of U.S. embargo against Cuba: “hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government”
The United States has waged a brutal economic war against Cuba for roughly 65 years.
The Associated Press noted that, “Of Cuba’s nearly 10 million residents, 80% have spent their entire lives under sanctions, which increased significantly during Trump’s first term, continued under his successor, President Joe Biden, and were tightened again after Trump returned to office this year”.
Less than two weeks after Trump returned to office as U.S. president in January 2025, Marco Rubio published a press release announcing that he was “restoring a tough U.S.-Cuba policy”, by further tightening the suffocating blockade.
In June, Trump signed an executive order boasting of increasing harsh U.S. punitive measures aimed at destabilizing what he called Cuba’s “Communist regime”.
U.S. government officials have admitted that the goal of the U.S. sanctions and embargo is “to weaken the economic life of Cuba” and “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”, through “economic dissatisfaction and hardship”.
In a 1960 State Department cable published by the Office of the Historian, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Lester D. Mallory, wrote the following (emphasis added):
CIA terrorist war on Cuba
In addition to the economic war, the United States has waged a terrorist war against Cuba for decades.
The CIA and other U.S. agencies tried to assassinate Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro at least 638 times, according to official documents.
In 1961, the CIA launched a failed assault on Cuba, known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The U.S. also planned to use terrorist tactics to violently overthrow Cuba’s government, in a shadowy scheme called Operation Northwoods.
In a 2001 report titled “U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba”, ABC News reported the following (emphasis added):
