The Menacing MAGA Way to Remake European Politics
· The Atlantic
At a dinner in Athens in March, Kimberly Guilfoyle, then the U.S. ambassador to Greece, made a statement that elegantly combined arrogance with menace. According to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, Guilfoyle referred to the troubles of Romania’s governing coalition and, with Greek politicians in the room, took credit for its impending collapse: “We can do that to any country we want,” she said. “We can do that here.”
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Guilfoyle was subsequently disgraced for a different reason: The Journal also obtained screenshots of messages she had sent to a Republican donor, asking him to deposit $100,000 in her American Express account. She and her lawyer denied everything, including the dinner conversation, but the screenshots were too much even for the Trump administration. She resigned.
If Americans were more exercised by her apparent greed, Europeans were appalled by her political boasts. Guilfoyle did seem to think she could influence the coalition politics of democratically elected European governments, all of them U.S. allies and members of NATO. More to the point, she isn’t the only Trump-administration official who has tried to do exactly that.
Americans once promoted democracy in Europe as a political system, and under that general understanding accepted all elected politicians of the center-left and center-right as legitimate. This administration and its adjacent business elite are now pursuing a different policy. In some cases, they promote the interests of parties that they believe to be ideologically aligned with the MAGA movement, including some that are openly pro-Russian. Other European political figures seem to have gained Washington’s blessing (or are trying to gain it) because they can promote commercial interests favored by someone close to the administration. In at least three cases, Americans have reportedly tried to persuade elected European leaders to dump their current coalition partners in favor of new ones more to the White House’s liking.
[Tom Nichols: Kimberly Guilfoyle broke Trump’s most important rule]
The clearest case is in Poland. I am married to Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, whose political party is the largest member of the current ruling coalition. But I am not revealing any special information; Polish media, including far-right media, have widely reported that President Trump strongly hinted to the leader of one of the coalition’s two other parties that he should switch sides.
The politician in question is Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, the leader of the small, agrarian Polish People’s Party. He was in Washington, D.C., in the spring to attend a Medal of Honor ceremony for an American soldier who had saved the life of a Polish soldier in Afghanistan. Just after the event, which was organized by Polish activists with MAGA contacts, Kosiniak-Kamysz was taken aside by the president, who reportedly told him that he would be much better regarded in Washington if he left the government coalition: He should do a deal with Polish-nationalist and far-right parties instead. He didn’t follow Trump’s advice. (The Atlantic requested comment about the incident from the White House but has not yet received a response.)
This was not the first time the Trump administration had made its sympathies in Poland clear. During the Polish presidential-election campaign last year, the far-right candidate Karol Nawrocki visited Washington, where Trump endorsed his bid. After Nawrocki won, Trump repeatedly took credit for the victory, just as he and his entourage have taken credit for electoral victories in Latin America. Nevertheless, this latest story feels different. An American president asking a politician in an allied foreign country to change coalitions? Nothing like it has happened in Poland since the days when Soviet leaders decided which Polish Communists should rule.
Guilfoyle doesn’t have Trump’s power, but as his ambassador, she seemed unusually versed in the internal details of Romanian politics, even though she was posted to Athens. At the end of March, she appeared on a panel at a business conference in Bucharest and spoke about the “vertical gas corridor,” a pipeline system linking Greece, Romania, Ukraine, and other countries in southeastern Europe. Although she had no previous background in gas infrastructure, she became an enthusiast during her stay at the U.S. embassy in Greece. Indeed, Christos Marafatsos, a lobbyist for Aktor Group, a Greek company with interests in the pipeline system, frequently traveled with Guilfoyle, so much so, according to the Journal, that “some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff.” The CEO of Aktor was also at the Bucharest event, speaking just after Guilfoyle.
And during her event, Guilfoyle advocated for not just the construction of the infrastructure, but also the purchase of American liquefied natural gas; Aktor has an interest in both matters. Ilie Bolojan, the Romanian prime minister at the time, was a supporter of the pipeline project, he recently confirmed. But he was not interested in locking Romania into a gas-purchase contract, both because the price was not competitive and because Romania is gearing up to export its own gas.
Others were. On the same trip, Guilfoyle was also seen (and filmed) having dinner at an expensive restaurant in Bucharest with one of Bolojan’s coalition partners, Sorin Grindeanu, the leader of the Romanian Social Democratic Party, and several other Romanian politicians. One of those present, a former energy minister, was interested in buying American LNG and reportedly wrote to the prime minister and the president, calling for exactly that.
Over the next couple of months, Grindeanu’s Social Democrats would leave the ruling coalition and then join the Romanian far-right party in supporting a vote of no confidence in Bolojan’s liberal-centrist government, forcing him to resign. Grindeanu has denied emphatically that Guilfoyle or any other American influenced his decision. The leader of the Romanian far right, George Simion, a pro-Russian politician who has sought to build relations with MAGA influencers close to Trump, described himself as a “good friend” of Guilfoyle but also denied that she had affected the decision. Still, it’s not hard to see why some Romanians think she did.
One notable feature of the Romanian government’s collapse was its orchestration by two political parties, one ostensibly on the center-left, the other of the far right. By working together, they broke a so-called firewall, a long-standing determination to exclude political parties and leaders sympathetic to fascism from mainstream politics. The same firewall exists in Germany, where the conservative Christian Democratic Union runs the government with the center-left Social Democrats as a junior partner. Some German politicians believe that the Trump administration wants the CDU to break the firewall and form a coalition with the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) instead. AfD is openly pro-Russian, and some of its politicians have had neo-Nazi affiliations. For many Christian Democrats, members of a conservative party founded in the postwar era as a bulwark against extremism, joining with AfD is an almost unimaginable break with their values.
[Anne Applebaum: MAGA is making the world safe for corruption]
Rather than approaching CDU leaders directly, Trump has used his Truth Social account to promote AfD, publicly cheering the party’s victory in recent regional elections: “THEY ARE ON THE RISE,” he wrote, “and not going to take it anymore!” Elon Musk, the administration’s close ally and the Republican Party’s most significant donor, virtually attended an AfD event before the most recent Bundestag election. Because Musk’s X algorithm gives enormous weight to posts from his account, this amounted to a large, free promotion for AfD.
Several German politicians mentioned another incident, on which I have previously reported. Earlier this year, a group of legislators from various political parties came to Washington and arranged meetings at the Pentagon and State Department. According to a senior member of the CDU, they were told that only representatives from AfD and the CDU could enter the buildings; members of the Social Democratic Party, who are part of the government coalition, were not allowed. Neither were others. The CDU members declined to go at all. The party leadership understood the gesture as a message to them: The only partner we recognize is AfD.
This gesture demonstrated what is probably the Trump administration’s authentic contempt for German democracy. But it also revealed a deep contradiction in U.S. foreign policy. On the one hand, American officials encourage Europeans to build up their own military forces. Speaking at NATO headquarters last summer, Elbridge Colby, an undersecretary of defense, said that in the future, American allies should be “taking primary responsibility for Europe's conventional defense.” Germany, Poland, and Romania are all countries that have taken this request seriously.
But on the other hand, the same administration is directly promoting the fortunes of political parties and leaders who oppose defense spending, who favor Russia, or who do not promise to defend Europe or respect European borders. Alice Weidel, AfD’s co-leader, opposes offering military aid to Ukraine and also argues against defense cooperation with other European countries. The party’s co-chair Tino Chrupalla has called for the expulsion of American troops from Germany. George Simion, the leader of the Romanian far right, has in the past advocated for the restoration of Romania’s pre-1940 borders, including territory now in Ukraine. The Polish far right has lately begun repeating anti-European and anti-Ukrainian narratives of a kind that are now popular in both Washington and Moscow, undermining support for a unified European defense.
In effect, the administration is promoting European rearmament and European defense cooperation while simultaneously promoting politicians who oppose rearmament or defense cooperation. Across democratic Europe, the public and the politicians are confused. Once, Europeans generally believed that America promoted democracy—the political system, not particular parties—and staunchly opposed Russia and other authoritarian regimes. Now, it seems, Trump-administration officials have flipped the script. Some of them, like Guilfoyle, seem more interested in commercial deals than in security. Others seem to be pursuing dangerous goals. Does America want Europeans to build large armies—and then to break up European institutions and hand those armies over to nationalists? That policy was tried in the 20th century. It failed quite dramatically.