Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo
Activists wearing masks of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin protest the support of the U.S. and Russia for Germany’s far-right AfD party in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, February 20, 2025.
Despite some notable bumps in the road, it’s fair to characterize American foreign policy since roughly 1933 as pro-democracy. The nearly simultaneous ascent of Franklin Roosevelt here and Adolf Hitler in Germany in that year meant that the basic thrust of U.S. foreign policy would be anti-despotic, even though the arena in which those values underpinned our policy was primarily Europe, and not always even there, as America’s refusal to engage in the Spanish Civil War made lamentably clear.
After 1945, fascism didn’t pose a significant threat to non-Iberian Europe, but the Soviet model of communism surely did, and our alliance with Europe’s democracies was the basis of our foreign policy. The competition with Russia even compelled us to become more democratic at home, as we could hardly win the allegiance of the Global South so long as our domestic South was governed on overtly racist lines.
Generations of American children have been schooled in democratic values, and when the U.S. has appeared to deviate from those values, its domestic critics have invariably contrasted our conduct with those values we profess to uphold. The left has made this point when we’ve (all too frequently) supported right-wing autocrats in the developing world; the right has made this point in opposing communism, though the right usually labels anything even slightly social democratic as communist, too, though social democracy is actually a profoundly democratic condition.
In any event, all that is now old news. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve now changed sides. Democracy is out; autocracy is in, though President Trump has made this switch on what we might term semi- or sub-ideological grounds.
Our official alliance with KGB veteran and critic-assassin Vladimir Putin, at the expense of the people of Ukraine, has so dominated the news of the past 24 hours that we may already be overlooking how completely it fits with the rest of Trump’s emerging foreign policy. There’s Vice President Vance’s embrace in the run-up to Germany’s upcoming elections of the AfD, the xenophobic German party with neo-Nazi roots and a continuing neo-Nazi presence in its ranks. There’s Trump’s obsession with creating conflicts in which America can dominate every other nation (Canada, Ukraine, Europe except Hungary, etc.) whose adherence to democratic norms makes them inherently weak and suspiciously feminized.
For that matter, Trump has continually supported AfD-type social forces here in the USA: the “good people on both sides” at Charlottesville, which meant the Klan; the January 6th insurrectionists; the Proud Boys he told to “stand by”; and, among figures in our history, the Confederate generals whose names he wants to reaffix to the bases of the very army they fought against. Fort Bragg, Fort Bedford Forrest, Fort Putin, Fort Beria, Fort Himmler, here we come.
In terming this Big F---in’ Switch to be semi- or sub-ideological, I mean only that it reflects aspects of Trump’s personality as much as it does a forthright preference for intolerant, anti-liberal autocracy. The current heads of government whom Trump admires are all autocrats—Putin, Xi, Korea’s Kim Jong Un—who violently suppress their critics. And just as Putin is to be admired for ordering the murder of his leading domestic opponents, so Volodymyr Zelensky is to be reviled for having rebuffed Trump’s request to concoct some criminal allegations against the Biden family. Whereas the violent suppression that Xi engages in can be called upon by Chinese leaders because it’s hardwired into the kind of one-party rule that characterizes Leninist (though now semi-capitalist) China, the violent suppression that Trump has as his ideal is not hardwired into the American system. Rather, it’s an aspect of his insecure, narcissistic, thuggish personality, which sees every situation that involves him as one that he must win, preferably by humiliating and harming the loser. His is a personality that is inherently constrained by the laws and norms of liberal democracy, and freed by their being supplanted by autocratic rule.
So much, then, for America as the city on a hill, as the last best hope of humankind, as the anchor, however imperfect and intermittent, of an alliance of democracies. We are now the shithole country that has emerged, fully formed, from the mind of Donald Trump.
