Spain

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war” but which side is America now on?

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 16, 2025

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It’s heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It’s horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.

NATO watches as Trump invites Putin to “visit” Washington

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 12, 2025

Yesterday afternoon, in a bizarre performance, President Donald Trump hosted reporters in the Oval Office, the formal working space of the President of the United States. As Trump sat quietly behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States as a symbol of international friendship, billionaire Elon Musk held center stage. Musk talked to the reporters, wearing a jacket over a T-shirt, and a “Make America Great Again” ball cap—a likely violation of the Hatch Act, which Trump’s people routinely ignore—while his young son X wandered around the room, at one point exchanging a look with a downcast Trump that observers immediately captioned: “You’re sitting in my daddy’s chair.”

The event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in charge of the U.S. government. The executive order, titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” provides for an operative from DOGE to be assigned to every agency, where that operative will be in charge of all hiring and firing. It also puts downsizing in DOGE’s hands and establishes that only one new employee can be hired to replace four who leave.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that these operatives report to Musk, who is “clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.”

Trump said that Musk had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” but in fact they have produced no evidence of such waste. Today Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said Congress has had no information from Musk or DOGE, and when asked to produce evidence of fraud, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt simply listed things that seemed to be “against the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.”

As both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported today, the big winner from all the cuts to the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that were scrutinizing his businesses.

On the floor of Congress today, Moskowitz pointed out that Musk’s claims to have uncovered waste, fraud, and abuse present a problem for Congress. Led by House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Republicans have not yet managed to fund the government for 2025, but rather than trying to pass the 12 appropriations bills necessary before the March 14 deadline for a government shutdown, Johnson is hoping to pass a continuing resolution that will extend funding as a comprehensive package. Moskowitz pointed out that if, in fact, the government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress should debate each appropriations bill in detail rather than use a continuing resolution that would perpetuate what the Republicans say is billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Long gone is any pretense that the administration will work to lower prices for ordinary Americans. The Consumer Price Index report out today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that inflation surged in January, gaining a half a point as the cost of gas, rents, and groceries went up. Egg prices rose 15.2%. On Monday, Trump levied a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, raising concerns that prices for cars and trucks, as well as appliances and rebar for construction, will also rise.

Today Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) published an op-ed in the Louisville Courier Journal warning that “Kentuckians can’t afford the high cost of Trump’s tariffs,” which could cost the average Kentucky resident $1,200 a year. “[P]reserving the long-term prosperity of American industry and workers requires working with our allies, not against them,” McConnell wrote, and he called for “strengthen[ing] our friendships abroad.”

Trump responded to today’s report by posting on social media: “BIDEN INFLATION UP!”

The Republicans submitted their budget resolution for funding the government today. It called for cuts of $2 trillion to mandatory spending, a category that includes Social Security and Medicare. Two Republican lawmakers told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico that Republicans expect to cut food aid for more than 40 million low-income Americans; Hill’s colleague Grace Yarrow reports the House Agriculture Committee is eyeing about $150 billion in cuts to supplemental nutrition programs. The proposal also calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and an increase of $4 trillion in the debt ceiling.

Today saw a landmark shift in the foreign policy of the United States. Since World War II, the U.S. has stood behind the international organizations that worked to stabilize the globe by creating spaces for countries to work out their differences without resorting to war. Among the principles of those organizations was that bigger countries couldn’t simply take over other, smaller countries, and one of the ways countries enforced that principle was through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the collective security agreement in which signatories agreed that an attack on one would be an attack on all.

In 2016, Trump’s people weakened the U.S. stance against Russia’s incursions on Ukraine by softening the language of that year’s Republican platform, and Russia worked to help Trump get elected, apparently because Putin believed Trump would look the other way as Russia took not only Ukraine’s Crimea but also significant territory in eastern Ukraine. Then, in his first term in office, Trump often took Putin’s side and threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO.

President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to strengthen NATO and pulled together a strong coalition to back Ukraine when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. But when he took office just three weeks ago, Trump alarmed observers by suddenly talking about taking over other countries like Panama and Canada, and Denmark’s territory of Greenland. Such moves would directly undermine the post–World War II international organizations the U.S. has always championed. They would destroy NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian organization that protects North America from aerospace threats, and would also rip apart the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that has joined Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since World War II.

Today it appears Trump is making good on this threat to turn away from the longstanding policy of the U.S. and toward the foreign policy advocated by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Trump has been talking about demanding $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for continued U.S. support, but today, at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group put together under Biden to coordinate assistance to Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested a new U.S. position. Hegseth echoed Putin’s demands, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus giving up two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders. He wanted, he said, to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

Trump’s social media account—it did not sound like his own words—posted today that he “just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia…. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” thus offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine. And, the post said, they had agreed to start negotiations over Ukraine, although it also specified they had not included Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their talk. The post said that Trump “feel[s] strongly, [the talks] will be successful.”

The Russian government’s readout of the call added that “bilateral economic relations between Russia and the United States were also brought up during the conversation,” language that almost certainly means Putin wants Trump to lift the economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine that have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy.

The Trump administration also swapped U.S. teacher Marc Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a kingpin of Russian cybercrime who operated one of the world’s largest currency exchanges, facilitating drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering. When announcing Fogel’s release, Trump was asked if Russia had given anything in exchange. He answered: “Not much, no. They were very nice. We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually.” Russia refused to include Fogel, who was wrongfully detained in 2021, in the large prisoner swap of June 2024.

Today, the Senate approved Tulsi Gabbard, who has often made comments sympathetic to Russia and who has defended former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia after the Syrian people ousted him, as the U.S. director of national intelligence. All Democrats voted against Gabbard and all Republicans voted in favor of her, with the important exception of Senator Mitch McConnell, who said: “The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.”

Tonight, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom released a joint statement vowing to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and making it clear that “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.”