So, a missile falls on a German city and kills a lot of people, and the Russians say, 'Oh, we're sorry. That was an accident.' What does NATO do? Those are the kinds of things that Europe is anticipating. And would the US intervene in those circumstances? Pretty hard to say. The United States is not a reliable partner, and therefore Europeans need to rely on themselves.
I am here with Anne Applebaum, and it's great to see you again.
Um, I must confess, I bring you on because, you know, you're one of the great observers of the unraveling of America and our stature on the world stage. But also, um, I really always have a covert agenda, hoping you will perform psychic surgery on a few primary relationships in my life, where I just... I've got some very close friends who have been unconcerned all the while about what is happening in America, and I have not gotten through to them, and I keep hoping you will. Um, you're really the... you're really the first person on a team of who I'm drafting again covertly. I'm making it explicit now, but you're performing the work of important relationships in my life. So, uh...
Um, and I'm sure this is true for many people in the audience as well. Though I wanted to use your recent Atlantic cover story as a jumping-off point, where you discuss how American foreign policy has become an instrument of corruption in a way that we really haven't seen. And there's this ideological and even, in your terms, revolutionary agenda to spread this kind of, you know, graft and lawlessness beyond our border, and to make common cause with authoritarian regimes that already operate this way. What do most people, do you think, not understand about the level of corruption we're seeing in the second Trump term?
So, first of all, I think people don't understand the degree to which, as you say, this is a revolutionary project. That means that there is a team of people. It's not Trump himself. Trump has his own agenda, his own narcissistic agenda, his desire to win at all costs, and so on. But there's a group of people around him who are very happy to destroy existing institutions and bureaucracies and customs and to replace them with themselves, essentially. And in the case of foreign policy, what this looks like is clearing away diplomacy, removing experts, removing ways of doing business that Americans have stuck to for the last 70, 80, 90, maybe 100 years, and instead substituting business people, friends of friends of the president, in some cases ideologues, and letting them be the voice and the face of America. And the reason I compare it to a revolution is that when you have a revolution, there's always an ideological component, right? There's a big idea. And then the people bearing the big idea knock things down, but then lots of other people come in after them and alongside them. And in the case of this American Revolution, we have different kinds of ideologues. We have people who believe in their version of what they would call Western civilization or white supremacy. There are Christian nationalists who want to replace the American state, secular state, with a Christian state. There are people who want to destroy what they call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the American government. And then there are people who want to take advantage of the vacuum and make money out of it. And I think the consistency of it and the frequency of the patterns, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Latin America, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in Asia, is pretty overwhelming. And a lot of it gets reported. You know, there are stories here and there, but it's very rarely put together and explained as a pattern.
So, just for example, you know, it's pretty clear that the Trump administration, inside the State Department, elsewhere in the government, have people who are interested in building ties between the US government and the far right, especially in Europe, because they care a lot about what they would call European civilization. And it also happens that a lot of the far-right parties are parties who are so-called enemies of regulation or libertarians, and that means those are political parties who oppose regulation. And so therefore, you often have cryptocurrency companies supporting them because they don't want to be regulated, or tech companies supporting them who don't want to be regulated. And so you have a team, really, of ideologues plus tech plus crypto working together, for example, to support the AfD in Germany, the far-right party, or the far right in France or in Poland or Romania. And this is now, you know, this is American foreign policy. You would have more and better and closer relations between many people in the Trump administration and opposition parties, because these are, for the moment, opposition parties in Europe whom they would like to help have come to power rather than with the governments themselves. And that's pretty new. You know, you can say America has done terrible things in its foreign policy over the last many decades, but supporting far-right political movements in Europe in order to overthrow existing governments, in order maybe to take apart the European Union, which is seen by some American companies as a hassle, this is a new way of operating on the world stage. And so pay attention to the details, because it's in the details that you understand the story.
Well, I think I can forgive many people for being confused about a lot of this, because, I mean, so for instance, when you talk about support for the far right, or let's say the AfD in Germany, I can imagine there are gradations of this kind of ideological capture, and some of which I think I'm in touch with personally. Obviously, I have no fondness for the far right anywhere, but I understand the quote civilizational concerns when you look at the problem of Islamism and unchecked immigration. You know, the level of anti-Semitism... I mean, it's hard to imagine that the far right in the end is a friend to the Jews, but this anti-Semitism on the left and the kind of the so-called red-green alliance, the leftist-Islamist alliance that we've seen. Perhaps we'll come back to that at the end of this conversation. I can see how there are people who don't see the risk of a group like the AfD just deciding that, well, there's nobody else to do the job of defending Western civilization and open societies, you know, liberal values, free speech, etc., from their genuine enemies. And so, you know, yeah, there might be some aspects of this that we don't want to support, but if we can cut a few regulations as well, that's all to the good. You know, I'm not a Nazi. These guys aren't Nazis. What's the problem here? We're just recognizing that there are very few voices left of center who are willing to do this particular job.
So that's, first of all, not exactly true. And I don't know, you probably don't want to break it down country by country, but I live in Poland part of the time, and the Polish government, which is a centrist, center-right government — actually, at the moment, it's a coalition between, I would say, the center-left and center-right — has been stricter on immigration than the previous government, which was a far-right government, or a nationalist government as it would have defined itself. In most European countries right now, there are one or two exceptions, you have a very clear change of emphasis and policy. So it's not true that borders are open. It's not true that people are flooding in. It's not true that civilization is in danger in the way that the ideologues would have you believe. On the contrary, the problem with the far-right parties — I mean, again, they're different in each country and they have different roles and so on — but if you just stick to the AfD, the AfD is a pro-Russian party. It's openly and aggressively pro-Russian. It does have neo-Nazis in its team of members of parliament. It does seek to change the nature of the modern German state. It would pull Germany out of the European Union, as it says it would. This would cause profound economic chaos and disorder. You know, it looks to me, from the... I've been following it for a long time, it's a party that's really interested in undermining Europe, in removing the judicial and the legal boundaries that have made Germany such an important stabilizing influence in Europe over the last many decades. So, you know, it's also a strange position for the US government, which is on the one hand calling on Europeans to defend themselves, calling for the rearmament of Germany, which has begun. And so there's a strange question: so you're going to rearm Germany, okay? And then you're going to hand Germany over to a political party that talks about Western Poland as German territory, and you're going to hand it over to a party that doesn't want to use the weapons to fight Russia. So who else is it going to use them to fight? It's a peculiar group of people.
So it's a, you know, when you delve into the... when you get away from the stereotypes and you delve into who the people are, what exactly we're doing, why exactly we're supporting them, it all looks a lot uglier. But of course, it was not the only argument of my article. The other part of the argument was that the use of many of this, you know, there's a kind of ideological hard line, but there are also ways in which US companies, and especially companies close to Trump, are using American foreign policy to do business. And I think that's part of the story in Europe as well.
Well, in your response there, you turned up yet more evidence of how hard this is to parse. I mean, to take the rearmament of Germany. I mean, one of the only silver linings anyone has conceded to the chaos that Trump has introduced on the world stage and the unraveling of the world order as a result has been that Europe has acknowledged that it should take responsibility for its own defense. Right? That this relying entirely on the US was untenable. We had a massive free-rider problem, and it's all to the good that Europe is rearming. And yet now you've shown, you know, a possible negative implication of that. How would you assess just that piece on its own?
