And who’s not happy? MAGA and Putinland. There’s a reason for that: They want to break up the EU.
In a fascinating twist of post-communist history, Romania has become the latest battleground in the titanic struggle between liberal democracy – the system of government that we thought won the Cold War – and the Russia-led forces that want to turn back the clock. What’s new is that the United States government is squarely on the side of the enemies of democracy.
Most of the attention, of course, has been on President Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine: after the Feb. 28 ambush of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, he moved swiftly to cut off military aid and then intelligence-sharing, and Elon Musk, who manifests as Trump’s main lieutenant, suggested on X that he might cut off critical satellite comms via his Starlink.
The immediate goal appears to be forcing Zelensky into ending the war on Vladimir Putin’s terms, so upcoming US-Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia are set to be unpleasant. But the real prize seems to be the weakening of the entire European project which the US helped prop up, which has spread democracy and wealth, and which has largely kept the peace on the continent since World Way II.
The development that makes this (even more) clear involves Romania’s abortive presidential election, whose first round in November Putin is believed to have corrupted in ways eerily similar to Moscow’s past interferences in Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election.
Romanian intelligence accuses Russia of staging an illegal massive social media bot campaign which propelled the far-right pro-Putin candidate Calin Georgescu from nowhere to first place. On the campaign trail, Georgescu had hinted broadly that Romania should be aligned with Moscow – even through Romania was enslaved and ruined by Russian-imposed communism until 1989.
Romania swiftly annulled the first round and delayed the second, which had been scheduled for December. A court this weekend banned Georgescu from running. This amounts to the only decisive pushback anywhere against the Putin machine’s abuse of social media to twist political outcomes in Russia’s favor worldwide. Georgescu’s challenge to the Constitutional Court was rejected Tuesday — and that would appear to be the end of his candidacy.
Trumpland has exploded with anger, much of it retweeted and amplified by Musk. “How can a judge end democracy in Romania?” he demanded in one tweet. “This comes from NATO/EU imho,” says a tweet in a thread he retweeted, filled with vitriol at the supposed thwarting of democracy. It aligned perfectly with Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich Conference castigation of Europeans for stifling free speech last month, before he met with Germany’s own far-right leader.
This is not about Romania or Germany.
On a philosophical level lies a dispute over the meaning of democracy. Liberal democracy includes minority rights and guaranteed freedoms, separation of powers and a check on the executive. The version preferred by Trump and other elected autocrats – from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan – is closer to a dictatorship of whatever majority one might rig up.
The European project is decisively inclined toward liberalism and progressive values – lessons that its academic, business and strategy elites have taken from the two world wars that Europe sparked last century. However some may mock the EU for bureaucracy and overregulation, it does stand for the Enlightenment values that Trump disdains: liberal democracy, the primacy of science and rational discourse, human rights and rule of law.
So on a geostrategic level, Trump and his fellow travelers both disdain Europe’s fealty to liberal values and want to weaken it for reasons of empire. Like Putin, Trump prefer the EU weakened, broken into a collection of small, competing nations rather than a powerful bloc that rivals the U.S. and far outstrips Russia in population and economic strength. If the EU fractures, Russia suddenly becomes larger than any of its individual nations, shifting the global balance in Putin’s favor.
That is why Trump-aligned forces are working overtime to empower Euroskeptics across the continent, from France’s Marine Le Pen to Georgescu. Brexit, they hope, is just the start.
The facts are undeniable: Trump, Vance, their whisperer Steve Bannon and their trumpet Tucker Carlson all idolize Orban, the EU’s most persistent internal saboteur and ally of Putin. They would dearly love to see Romania led by Georgescu – who is expected to undermine not only the EU but NATO, especially as alliance member Romania is a key conduit for Ukraine aid.
This may be more than a shocking preference for Putin and his ways. Trump’s emerging foreign policy vision, much like Putin’s and in accord with his own cynical utilitarianism, envisions a world of spheres of influence, where America, Russia, and China carve up global power at the expense of Europe. The next victim could very well be Taiwan; if China seizes it, expect Trump to sell it out in exchange for a deal with Beijing on access to the island’s semiconductor industry.
Although widely telegraphed, as was much of Trump’s agenda, this betrayal is shocking for Europeans: For nearly 80 years, the US saw European unity as essential for global stability, security, and prosperity. That pillar of U.S. foreign policy is being demolished in real-time. The message the Europeans are perceiving is chilling. The same Romanians who, when I covered the country as an AP correspondent three decades ago, viewed America as a beacon of freedom, now see it as something much closer to an enemy, or at least the ally of their main enemy.
In the short term, the Europeans will seek to diminish their dependence on Washington and will invest more in defense and technology, and these are good things.
In the longer term, this outrage may and should affect US politics. The Republican Party, which was once the party of Reagan, NATO, and robust global American leadership, is now engaged in a systematic effort to undermine the very alliances that ensured peace and stability.
While this has support in the MAGA base, most Americans didn’t vote for it. Traditional conservatives who are now a GOP minority believe in a strong, unified Europe as a strategic partner, not in global dictatorship. Trump accuses Zelensky of risking World War III by pushing back on Putin’s naked aggression; that’s truer of a White House that’s abandoning its allies. If MAGA has resilience beyond Trump, Americans must rethink their two-party idea, and create a centrist one. The MAGA-led GOP is neither willing or able to lead the free world.
US restores military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after it agrees to ceasefire proposal
