Every September, world leaders speak at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) about the global issues they deem most important. These annual addresses are one of the most consistent records of foreign policy priorities, and researchers in international relations often use them to study how leaders frame alliances, adversaries, and global challenges.
The figure below shows how often Europe is mentioned in UNGA speeches by US presidents since the late 1940s, and with what tone. The bars represent the share of sentences about “Europe and European countries” in each year’s speech. Blue bars mark positive references, red bars mark negative ones, neutral sentences are omitted. The grey area in the background shows the overall length of each speech in number of sentences.
Trump’s 2025 address is an outlier. It was the longest one ever given by a US president at the UN General Assembly. Furthermore, there were more negative sentences about Europe than in any other year on record. By contrast, across most of the postwar period U.S. presidents tended to stress partnership with Europe, even during moments of disagreement. The 2025 speech therefore stands apart not only for its length but also for its negative tone on Europe.
Method in brief
To identify Europe-related content, each speech was broken down into individual sentences and then classified using a zero-shot language model with the label “Europe and European countries.” This was followed by a sentiment analysis model that distinguished positive from negative tone. The approach relies on widely used natural language processing tools but is fully reproducible: all data preparation, classification, and plotting code are available in my GitHub repository.
This post was originally published on Medium and can be found here.