The Warmest — and Coldest — Country Relationships on WorldRelat Right Now
2026-09-19 · by Jordi Fuster
WorldRelat's influence ranking measures how much a country shows up in documented bilateral coverage. That's a different question from how well, on average, a country gets along with everyone else it's paired with — and averaging every country's own set of relationship scores produces a genuinely different list.
The method
For every country with at least 20 documented bilateral relationships (136 countries clear that bar), we averaged its sentiment score across every one of those relationships. A country that shows up rarely, or only in relationships that happen to be extreme in one direction, gets excluded — this needs enough relationships for the average to actually mean something.
The warmest average relationships
The United States comes out on top, averaging 7.41 across 206 documented relationships — a genuinely large sample carrying a genuinely high average. The United Kingdom follows closely at 7.35 across 174 relationships. Croatia is the surprise in third place, at 7.20. Rounding out the top ten: India (6.86), Luxembourg (6.85), Barbados (6.83), Slovenia (6.76), Cyprus (6.74), Indonesia (6.74) and Estonia (6.74).
The coldest average relationships
At the other end: Syria averages 4.87 across 75 relationships, the lowest of any country meeting our sample threshold. Yemen (5.01), Libya (5.09), Venezuela (5.12) and Iraq (5.13) fill out the bottom five. North Korea (5.14), Ethiopia (5.28), Russia (5.28), Israel (5.37) and Sudan (5.39) round out the bottom ten. Worth noting: even the "coldest" country on this list, Syria, still averages above the exact midpoint of a 0–10 scale — a reminder that most of any country's 200-odd bilateral relationships are, in absolute terms, unremarkable rather than hostile. It only takes a cluster of genuinely bad ones to pull a country's average down relative to its peers.
Why this isn't the same as "most peaceful"
It's tempting to read this ranking as "most/least peaceful countries," but that's not quite what it measures. A country with very few genuinely hostile relationships, surrounded mostly by cordial ones, will score well here even if it isn't a major diplomatic actor at all. Conversely, a country like Israel or Russia can be deeply consequential on the world stage — and simultaneously post a lower average, simply because a handful of its highest-profile relationships happen to be openly adversarial. What this ranking actually captures is closer to "how uniformly good are a country's documented relationships," not the state of global peace as a whole — for that broader read, see the peace indicator trend we track separately, which looks at overall sentiment across every relationship on the site rather than country-by-country averages.