12 foreign ministries 203 countries Retrieved 2 September 2026

The world's governments cannot agree on how dangerous the world is

Twelve national foreign ministries publish travel advisories for the same planet, using broadly the same four-level scale. They are looking at identical facts. On 87% of countries they reach different conclusions — and on 15, one government says take normal precautions while another says do not travel.

Figure 1 — Divergence by country

Where the assessments split

Each country is shaded by the gap between its strictest and most lenient assessment on a 1–4 scale. Grey means fewer than eight governments publish a current rating. Hover any country for the full breakdown.

Levels apart

Insufficient data

Figure 2 — Caution by government

Some governments see a far more dangerous world than others

The share of the 203 compared countries each ministry places at every level. Taiwan rates 20% of the world "do not travel"; United Kingdom rates 5.9%.

Advisory level L1 Normal L2 Caution L3 Avoid non-essential L4 Do not travel

Right-hand figures are the mean advisory level and the number of the 203 countries that government rates. Rows marked * cover well under the full set — Japan, New Zealand and South Korea publish advisories only for destinations they consider elevated risk, so their published records are a self-selected sample and their percentages are not like-for-like with the rest.

Figure 3 — Maximum divergence

15 countries split the room completely

In each of these, at least one government advises normal precautions while another advises against all travel — the full width of the scale.

Country	Gap	Lowest — says normal precautions	Highest — says do not travel

Figure 4 — Consensus

And 26 where every government agrees

Unanimity is rarer than disagreement. These are the countries where all reporting governments land on precisely the same level.

Level	Countries in unanimous agreement

Method

How this was built, and what's wrong with it

Sources

Country-level advisories are scraped daily from the foreign ministries of the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Each ministry's own scale is normalised to a common 1–4: 1 normal precautions, 2 increased caution, 3 avoid non-essential travel, 4 do not travel.

Inclusion rules

A country appears only if at least eight governments publish a current rating for it.
A rating is excluded if it carries no publication date, or if it is more than 18 months old.
A rating is excluded if the government did not actually publish one. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan issue advisories only for destinations they consider elevated risk, so silence is their normal state for most of the world — counting that silence as an affirmative "this country is safe" would invent 129 assessments nobody made.
Only country-wide baselines are compared. Regional warnings — a single province, a border strip — are excluded, because treating them as country-wide is the single most common way this kind of comparison goes wrong.

Known problems with this data

These figures are not clean. Normalising twelve bureaucracies onto one scale is lossy, and the exclusions above remove real records:

Japan is absent from many comparisons: it publishes no date on roughly 39% of its records, and issues no advisory at all for most of the world. Both are now excluded rather than counted as level 1 — which is what previously had Japan appearing to call North Korea a normal-precautions destination.
New Zealand revises slowly — about half its assessments are more than 18 months old and fall outside the window.
France briefly rated Georgia "do not travel" here, because the scraper read a sentence about travel to Russia, printed on Georgia's page as border advice, as a country-wide judgment on Georgia. Found while building this map and since fixed — whole-country declarations are now checked against the country whose page they appear on. Exactly one country was affected; France's Georgia rating is level 2.
A government rating a country strictly is not necessarily disagreeing about conditions on the ground. It may reflect where it can actually offer consular help — which is a different fact, and one this chart cannot separate out.

Reading it fairly

A wide gap is an invitation to check both sources, not evidence that one is wrong. Governments write for their own citizens, weigh their own consular exposure, and revise on their own schedules. The gap is the interesting part precisely because no single advisory reveals it.

For any specific trip, the rating that governs your insurance and your consular support is the one issued by your own government. Read that one first.