Perspective: MAGA, MEGA and Moldova
February 28, 2025
“We’re in a new world right? the idea of American being a stable, call it what you like, leader of the free world, or biggest liberal democracy, that’s gone. They are actively trying to disrupt and tear down that world.
They see themselves as having won a revolution in America, and they see part of their roll as fomenting that revolution across Europe.”
Those words were spoken by British MP Mike Martin on the foreign policy podcast “Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell” earlier this week. What stuck in my mind was the word “revolution.” Donald Trump narrowly won the election in November and power transferred peacefully from one administration to the next last month. By a conventional definition nothing in that seems like a revolution. So why is that a word that keeps coming up in discussions I have with fellow Americans?
I believe Martin was speaking to 2 important realities. First, that the new Trump administration *believes* that they are enacting a sort of revolution in American politics and life, and secondly that this revolution is ideological in nature.
Already the aftershocks of policies being made in DC are being felt around the world. USAID is gone. The United States has forced Europe to consider a world without NATO. France is discussing stationing nuclear weapons in Germany as part of a new European nuclear umbrella. These are only a few of the events of the last weeks and individually they would have been unthinkable only months ago. Collectively these changes are almost incomprehensible.
All of this has led to a scramble to try and figure out what on earth the triumvirate of Trump, Musk and Vance really want. What are they trying to do? How do we deal with the Americans?
There have been many theories - and they have all gone up in flames. Here are just a few that were making the rounds after the election but before Trump took office:
We lived through 1 Trump administration, things will be the same - I won’t even bother addressing this one except to say that January 6th should have made it imminently clear that this was not going to be true.
Trump is transactional - He likes deals, right? Ukraine thought so. That’s why Zelenskyy included cooperation on mining and natural resources as part of his 10 point peace plan. He thought it would make Trump feel like he was getting something in return. But then Trump demanded 50% of Ukraine’s natural resources in exchange for… nothing. No deals, no transactions just extortion.
Trump is isolationist - America first and no foreign wars. That was Trump on the campaign trail. Now we talk about Panama, Greenland and Gaza as Trump says that he wants to “possess” them. His most recent ludicrous video about Gaza, well… boggles the mind.
Don’t take him literally, he’s playing 4-D chess - Time and again Trump’s intellectual zambonis try and explain what he *really* means and time and again Trump does exactly what he said he would do.
With all of the dominant theories breaking down in real time it’s worth talking about something else. An idea that’s almost become a dirty word in our times - ideology. In his speech in Munich J.D. Vance shocked European leaders when he said the following:
“…the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within…”
Nothing about this speech is realpolitik. There was no demand to increase defense spending or hit some new specific target. There was no concrete discussion of the war in Ukraine. This speech was deeply ideological and for people not steeped in the MAGA movement very confusing as well.
Since this speech Vance and Musk have engaged in unprecedented interference in German elections by backing the AfD. The US voted in the UN General Assembly against a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this vote, America joined Russia, North Korea, Belarus and a handful of other rogue states. Even Iran and China chose to abstain rather than endorse Russia’s version of events. Moldova joined almost all EU countries and Ukraine in condemning the invasion.
Today I’m going to look at ideology as one of the drivers of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and what that means for Europe generally, and Moldova specifically. We’re going to start with USAID and talk about why the agency was summarily executed on Trump’s first week. People often talk about how Musk killed the agency - but he didn’t. It was Peter Marocco and understanding his motivations is a first step to understanding the ideology behind what is happening.