The end of the US-led Western alliance
Will Europe finally stop hitting snooze on those wake-up calls?
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
Fucking hell, where to begin?
The week was so full of stupid, it’s hard to choose where to start.
We learned this week that Trump and his Doge Overlords fired employees from the National Nuclear Security Agency without realizing they oversee our nuclear weapons. Because we are ruled by fucking idiots. We also learned that the Doge web site basically is X repackaged, but can be defaced by 6th graders in their mom’s basement because it’s apparently not secure. But don’t point that out, because the Doge Nerd Reich has been snitching to Daddy Elon when anyone dares to stand up to them and tell the prepubescent minions they’re fucking up the computers.
We also had this (not surprising) revelation that Kash Patel, our new FBI director, accepted $25,000 from a Russian filmmaker to appear in a “documentary” that pushed the idea of a Deep State going after Trump and his minions. The filmmaker makes pro-Russia films—i.e. he runs Russian influence campaigns—financed by the Kremlin. I’ve written about him and his collaboration with Putin propagandist Oliver Stone here.
But don’t worry, folks. Ka$h doesn’t discriminate when it comes to Cash. It was also revealed that he holds between $1 million and $5 million in stock from the Chinese e-commerce company Shein. No conflict of interest there.
But these were only side shows.
For me, the first real “oh shit” moment was learning that Trump and New York Mayor Eric Adams had a quid pro quo, in which Trump ordered the Department of Justice to drop corruption charges on Adams (who accepted all kinds of shady foreign money for his personal use—allegedly) in return for Adams agreeing to help round up migrants in New York. The incident has led to the resignation of several DOJ prosecutors, who refused to drop the case. At one point, Emil Bove, DOJ’s Number 2, put all the prosecutors from the Public Integrity division in a room and told them someone had to sign off on dropping the charges. Those who didn’t sign could be fired. Those who did could be promoted. It is such naked corruption, it’s embarrassing that they don’t even attempt to cover it up. So lazy!
Then came Munich.
Oh, god. Munich.
For those of you not familiar with World War 2 history: Munich was the site where Neville Chamberlain famously signed away Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Hitler, who pinky promised he’d make no more territorial demands. The shameful episode became forever encapsulated in a single word: Appeasement.
This week, Trump announced that he planned to give Putin exactly the “Peace Plan” Putin needs in this moment: a reprieve in fighting that will allow Russia to regroup and rebuild. Our Master Negotiator’s Art of the Deal is apparently to announce he plans to give Putin everything he wants before negotiations even begin, including allowing Russia to keep Ukrainian land it has taken by force, not allowing Ukraine to join NATO, providing no security guarantees to Ukraine, and allowing Russia to rejoin the G7.
As
points out in this very good piece, Trump’s plan is worse than appeasement. It actively helps the bad guy.Then, in Munich, the actual city where this shameful appeasement occurred last time around, during the Munich Security Conference, VP JD Vance downplayed the threat to Europe from Russia and China and instead blamed Europe for supposedly not upholding its democratic values, such as free speech and will of the voters.
This, while Trump—who tried to overturn an election, going against the will of American voters—was quid pro quo-ing and doing corruption with Eric Adams, and also while he was blocking the Associated Press, pretty much the gold standard of journalism, from the Oval Office and Air Force One because they maintain the standard of calling it the Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of America. All of which sounds a little like government coercion infringing on free speech and not upholding our country’s democratic values. Then again, all these guys keep inverting truth, as I wrote about here.
In particular, Vance praised Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, a neo-Nazi party banned from the security conference because the country’s own security services have labeled it a domestic terrorist threat, a party which has been deeply infiltrated by Russia (see my stories here and here). Vance also criticized Germany’s other parties for refusing to form a coalition with the Nazi AfD party. Which is so surreal because it seems like Germany might know something about Nazis?? Super fun to recall, as well, that several AfD members were hanging out at Mar-a-Lago with Trump on election day.
Vance also scolded Romania for annulling elections that were clearly skewed by Russian interference. He went on to say that Europe doesn’t really deserve America’s security umbrella anymore.
Meanwhile, Trump spent the week praising Putin and Xi! Vance then told Ukraine’s Zelensky that he should make a deal with Putin, to which Zelensky replied frankly, “Putin is a liar.”
Zelensky was then strong armed by a group of US Congressmen trying to get him to sign a letter giving the US 50 percent of all of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. He politely declined.
At the same time, our “teetotaler” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth got booed in Germany and then went to Poland to say that the US might cut its military presence in Europe. At NATO, he implied that NATO could not beat Russia’s military. May I remind you here that Russia is currently the second strongest military in Russia (Ukraine being the first!) and Russia has one—one!—aircraft carrier which has been sitting in dry dock for years because it caught fire and a crane fell on it and even when it was in use it traveled with its own tugboats because it broke down all the fucking time. Meanwhile, Russian soldiers are taking taxis and donkeys to the front because they have no more vehicles and wounded soldiers on crutches are being sent to fight. But sure, NATO doesn’t stand a chance against this.
And to top it off, while all this was going on, Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter introduced legislation to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland” because apparently kindergartners now make legislation and name shit. I’m also really angry because how can I write satire after a real Congressman did something so fucking funny??
The Europeans were reportedly shocked by Vance’s aggressive speech and Trump’s clear signal he is siding with Putin, with many saying it was the wake up call that Europe needs to take responsibility for its own defense. Of course, Europe has been saying that for years, but apparently keeps hitting the snooze button on those wake-up calls. Maybe it will be different this time?
The problem with slippery slopes, as I say, is that often they become cliffs. I think this week was the tipping point. Since the end of World War 2, we’ve thrived and prospered in an international order in which the United States held outsized leverage. We were the superpower. And we used our position to lead an alliance of democratically-minded countries to help secure our values and bring relative peace and security. As of this week, we are entering a new world order, one in which the United States willingly gave up its seat at the head of the table and in fact upended the whole table and threw plates at everyone.
Look, I’m not naive. The US wasn’t perfect. But the idea of the American dream and the opportunities the country presented were still pretty attractive. I’ve been to enough countries around the world where I saw long lines for visas to the US, but not so much for, say, Saudi Arabia or Russia. We’ve been corrupt and hypocritical, but not to the extent of autocratic regimes. But that changed this week.
I think we have to ask:
Furthermore, Putin’s main objective has been to break the Western alliance (see Class 3 of my Foreign Influence Operations course) because he cannot compete against a unified West.
Whether Trump, Vance, et al. are doing this to help Putin, or whether that is just the coincidental outcome, the result is the same: Trump is breaking the Western alliance that Putin has been trying to destroy for years. It’s against our own interests (which is why Putin has been pushing for it!). And we are worse off for it.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
READ THESE TO UNDERSTAND THE GATHERING OF ANTI-DEMOCRATIC FORCES AND WHERE IT LEADS
Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes? (NYT)
To Obey Trump or Not to Obey (NYT)
EXCELLENT RESOURCES!
Just Security has launched WHAT JUST HAPPENED? as well as a litigation tracker to help readers keep up with the chaos
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
Spot on analysis. But what's really crazy about all this is that we are doing it to ourselves. We didn't lose a war, or go through a huge economic decline. Trump got in because most working-class White Americans are clueless bigots. And they, along with almost all the rest, don't give a rat's ass about the rest of the world. Hell, most of them couldn't find Greenland, the Gulf of Mexico or the Panama Canal on an unmarked map!
So the U.S. is at the beginning of a whole series of self-inflicted defeats in foreign policy that will completely destroy what was until now a pretty solid rules-based governance of the most advanced portions of the world - a rules-based system that has been central to our country's economic dominance and security since WWII. The international (dis)order is rolling back to what it was in the late 19'th century, but this time with nukes. This is not security. This is disaster!
Excellent analysis, especially the paragraph about slippery slopes becoming cliffs.