By Anne Applebaum
Monday, September 14, 2026
In the summer of 2025, the government of Brazil suddenly
found itself in a deep crisis. The Trump administration had unexpectedly
imposed 50 percent tariffs on the country’s products, threatening everyone from
coffee planters to shoe manufacturers. At the same time, the United States
canceled the visas of eight Brazilian supreme-court justices and placed
unprecedented financial and travel sanctions on a powerful justice and
his family.
Many things about this crisis were novel. For the first
time anyone could remember, an American administration had used tariffs not for
economic reasons but as a tool to influence the internal politics of a friendly
democracy. President Trump was publicly fulminating against what he called the
“WITCH HUNT” against Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who was
then on trial for plotting to carry out a coup after losing an election in
2022. Some of Bolsonaro’s followers had stormed Brazil’s Parliament and other
federal buildings, likely inspired by the actions of Trump supporters on
January 6, 2021. Steve Bannon, who called the Brazilian insurrectionists
“freedom fighters,” was one of many MAGA boosters who cheered them on. When
combined with local grievances, the language of American election denial was
right at home in Brazil.
The U.S. has used financial sanctions and visa bans in
the past—but only to punish dictators, criminals, and people accused of
grand-scale international corruption or brutal atrocities. Brazilian Justice
Alexandre de Moraes had never been credibly accused of any of this. But by the
Trump administration’s reckoning, he had two strikes against him: First, de
Moraes’s court was trying Bolsonaro; second, he had provoked the ire of Elon
Musk, Trump’s largest election donor. De Moraes “needs to leave,” Musk said, comparing
him to Voldemort, after de Moraes threatened to fine X and ordered it to
block accounts accused of spreading disinformation.
The crisis was novel in other ways too. In normal times,
the Brazilian government is reasonably well connected in Washington, regardless
of who runs either country. The tenth-largest economy in the world, Brazil
cooperates extensively with U.S. law enforcement and regional organizations.
Yet at this crucial moment, with billions of dollars in the balance and
Brazil’s sovereign democracy under attack, Brazilian officials suddenly found
that nobody in the Trump administration would speak to the formal
representatives of their left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Brazil’s ambassador to Washington found herself isolated. The foreign minister,
a diplomat who had known U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for decades, could
not get through to anyone. A junior official told me that even his
graduate-school classmate at the U.S. Treasury would not answer his calls.
The Brazilian finance minister at the time, Fernando
Haddad, finally managed to schedule a call with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott
Bessent. But two days before the meeting was to take place, the Treasury
Department canceled it—and then Bessent used the same time slot to meet with
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. The younger Bolsonaro—who lives
in Texas, has befriended Donald Trump Jr., and attends Conservative Political
Action Conference (CPAC) meetings—was flaunting his connections in Washington,
which were manifestly better than those of Lula’s administration.
That put the Brazilians in a strange position. “All the
official channels that we have, they just suddenly went out of touch,” the
junior official told me. “And what happened is that myriad informal actors just
started knocking at our doors. And that was interesting.”
Some of these visitors were types not previously known in
Washington: lobbyists advertising their relationships not with government
officials but with the people who hang around Mar-a-Lago, or with MAGA
influencers whose X accounts can attract the president’s attention. Others were
business operators offering government favors while seeking to make deals for
themselves: An investor who claimed to own a vacation home near Bessent’s
offered to arrange a meeting with the Treasury secretary in exchange for access
to crucial minerals for himself. The Brazilians declined that offer.
A truce was finally arranged, multiple people told me,
with the help of Joesley Batista, a billionaire whose meatpacking company does
business in both the U.S. and Brazil, and whose American subsidiary had donated
$5 million to Trump’s inauguration (more than the contributions of Amazon,
Meta, and Google combined). Batista had no official government role, but his
money may have given him the clout to influence Trump’s meetings with Lula at the
2025 United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, and at a summit in
Kuala Lumpur, where the two elderly populists, each with grievances against
their respective establishments, hit it off. The tariffs were reduced.
The détente was temporary. When I visited São Paulo and
Brasília this past spring, the State Department had just appointed a new senior
adviser on Brazil policy. Before working for the administration, Darren Beattie
founded Revolver News, a website that promoted the “Fedsurrection”
conspiracy—the belief that federal agents were behind the riots on January 6,
an obsession that would naturally appeal to Brazil’s election deniers and
displease the elected president. When Beattie asked to visit Brazil for a minerals
conference, the Brazilian government refused to grant him a visa, in part
because it suspected that his true purpose was to visit Jair Bolsonaro, then in
prison.
Among the journalists, analysts, and officials I met in
Brazil, the main topic of conversation was not whether the U.S. would
intervene in the country’s elections this fall but how. Flávio
Bolsonaro, another of the ex-president’s sons, is running for president, and
the Trump administration seems to be looking for ways to help. In June, when a
Brazilian court handed Flávio’s brother Eduardo a prison sentence for seeking
to get the U.S. to intervene in his father’s trial, Trump’s State Department
denounced the conviction as “lawfare.” In July, the administration planned to
send two envoys to Brazil to meet with election deniers and “investigate” the
Brazilian electoral system; their visa requests were also turned down. A Brazilian
public-policy professor told me he wouldn’t be surprised if American
social-media platforms quietly began to help Bolsonaro. These tech companies
have already shown that they will “flip ideology” to align with changes in the
American government. So why not in Brazil?
Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as
other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no
longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by
trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels.
Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues
both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors,
these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build
long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are
deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own
purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological
goals, because, suddenly, they can.
***
“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” Karl Marx
wrote. He was wrong about many things but not about this: In modern times,
every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics
of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the
French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their
Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by
other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy
movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East.
The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S.
federal government is no different. Wrongly described as “isolationists,” many
of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won
an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are
they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much
greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the
world.
Like earlier revolutionaries, they do not believe that
their opponents are legitimate rivals or, as John McCain once described Barack
Obama, decent
citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Their enemies are existential,
and they are international: super-spreaders of a
“wokeness” plague, or proponents of a fictitious “censorship-industrial complex,” or advocates of
“regulation” that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of
“mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced
aliens. To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their
Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they
don’t trust its practitioners.
Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic
states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America.
Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate
closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the
administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who
share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at
least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their
global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the
flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the
world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical,
and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the
people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering
that it no longer exists.
Like all revolutions, this one has many faces. The
Bolsheviks had an ideology, a plan to destroy the old social order and
establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. But a motley array of other
people—advocates of free love, avant-garde painters, grifters fleecing
ex-aristocrats—took advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas.
Different kinds of revolutionaries are now pushing the “Make America Great
Again” movement in different directions too.
Some are ideologues such as Bannon and Beattie, people
who believe that Western civilization is being destroyed by racial diversity,
secularism, and the commitment to human rights. “Competent white men must be in
charge if you want things to work,” Beattie once wrote on X. “Unfortunately, our entire
national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and
minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” Bannon first compared
himself to Lenin and talked about smashing the “administrative state” more than
a decade ago.
These ideas, once marginal, are now central to American
foreign policy. At last year’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President Vance assailed “the retreat of Europe from
some of its most fundamental values.” At this year’s Munich Security
Conference, Rubio said the same thing more politely. In the face of “an
unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our
societies,” Rubio, the son of immigrants, called on America and Europe to work
together in the name of our “shared history, Christian faith, culture,
heritage, language, ancestry.” He said nothing about a shared commitment to
democracy, transparency, or the rule of law.
The corollary to this thesis, expressed last year in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, is that
America has a special interest in the politics of the historically white,
Christian nations of Europe, and in promoting the far-right political leaders
and movements working to keep Europe white and Christian, even though most of
them are not currently in power. That document made it clear that although
America will no longer intervene to promote democracy at all, anywhere in the
world, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current
trajectory”—language that justifies direct U.S. intervention in European
politics to prevent what the document enigmatically calls “civilizational
erasure” and to help the allies of the ideologues take power. In “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” an essay
published on the State Department’s Substack, a 27-year-old Trump appointee
named Samuel Samson accused Europeans of waging “an aggressive campaign against
Western civilization.”
The fight against this existential threat is under way.
Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, told Congress
this year that America is now “fully utilizing all the tools at our
disposal—exchange programs, cultural heritage initiatives, micro-grants, and
more—to advance the President’s America First agenda.” In practice, this means
that the American government is using diplomatic pressure, visa bans, and
cultural funding to support political parties and leaders deemed to be “civilizational
allies” in its international struggle and to undermine its opponents, even when
those opponents are the leaders of legitimate governments that have
long-standing relationships with the U.S. Samson has held friendly private
meetings with far-right European leaders and party representatives, including
the Alternative for Germany (AfD); Rogers had a much less friendly meeting with representatives of an
actual European government. On a recent visit to the United Kingdom, Rogers
denounced what she described as a migrant-led crime wave and accused those
present of failing to contend with their country’s problems. In reality, British
crime levels have been falling, but genuine facts about Europe—a continent
where people live longer, have better health care, and are far less likely to
die in mass shootings than Americans—are rarely allowed to undermine the
narrative.
In its own hemisphere, the State Department is committed
to a more openly imperialist project. The National Security Strategy implies
that other governments in North and South America should capitulate to the
demands of American officials or companies, and that if they don’t, the U.S.
will work to change those governments. As in Europe, the Trump administration
will push hard to elect, and to keep in power, politicians who support American
dominance: We “will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political
parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy,” the
National Security Strategy declares. When Trump ordered U.S. Special Forces to
seize President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and his
administration exploited the country’s oil, that was understood by legitimate
democratic leaders in our hemisphere (which Maduro was not) as a warning: This
can happen to you.
For some regional politicians, this looks like an
opportunity. In October 2025, Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate,
suggested that the U.S. could expand its military attacks on small, allegedly
drug-carrying fishing boats. Wouldn’t the American military like to “spend a
few months” in Guanabara Bay, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, he asked,
“helping us fight these terrorist organizations?” When the U.S. State
Department duly designated two Brazilian crime syndicates as “terrorists” this
past spring, against the wishes of the Brazilian government, some wondered
whether the U.S. was preparing the justification for a future intervention.
***
Others have different, more immediate reasons for wanting
to “Make America Great Again.” These include executives from the oil-and-gas,
cryptocurrency, and rare-earth-mining industries, and above all big tech
companies. Their motivations differ from those of the ideologues, but they
share the belief that only power matters, and that only superior humans—richer,
more intelligent, usually male and white—should have it. “We live in a world in
which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything
else,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper
in January, “but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed
by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are
the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Miller’s words surely appealed to the business leaders who are delighted to see
the tools of American government and diplomacy being redeployed, not to build a
world that’s safe for democracy, or even safe for Americans, but to create a
world that’s profitable for them.
Many of the unconventional figures who now act in the
name of the U.S. are already working to make this dream real. In January, Steve
Witkoff, the real-estate dealer turned U.S. special envoy, told a roomful of
European presidents and prime ministers gathered in Paris to discuss support
for Ukraine that he was already negotiating energy and mineral deals for
American companies with Russia, to be implemented after the war. This surprised
many of the meeting’s attendees, whose main concern was bringing peace to
Ukraine. (A White House spokesperson denied that Witkoff made this statement.)
Witkoff also specifically mentioned the role that the U.S. investment company
BlackRock could play in the reconstruction of Ukraine, an unusual comment for a
peace negotiator. But maybe not a surprising one: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has
sat next to Jared Kushner while he negotiated with the Ukrainians, according to The New York Times.
Trump’s Board of Peace, the quasi-governmental
organization whose rules read like those of an exclusive golf club—Trump, as
chair, has the right to name his successor, select the board, and determine the
mission—presents the same dilemma: Is this organization, much of whose funding
is not transparent and comes from member states in the Persian Gulf, designed
to make peace, or make money? Does it represent the views of America, or of its
funders? In the name of rebuilding Gaza, the board, according to The Guardian, has sought to grant
itself the power to seize Palestinian land and buildings, perhaps paving the
way for American companies to enact the “New Gaza” plan, a redevelopment
project proposed by Kushner, a private citizen (and Trump’s son-in-law) who is
of course a board member, as well as Witkoff’s negotiating partner on Russia.
Other projects are more narrowly designed to benefit
family members and friends of the president. Last year Trump, along with
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, helped negotiate access to one of the
world’s largest untapped tungsten reserves, in Kazakhstan, for a low-profile
American mining company. The New York Times reported that the deal, which is supported by $1.6 billion
in federal financing, benefits Trump’s sons, who are partial owners of an
investment bank with a stake in the project. Lutnick’s sons oversee another
company, Cantor Fitzgerald, involved with the deal. (Trump’s sons have said
that they had no role in shaping the details of the deal. A spokesperson for
Cantor Fitzgerald told the Times that the company’s executives were not
involved in discussions of government funding.) But this is only one example:
Trump’s children are also negotiating private business deals in the Middle
East, Europe, and Asia, where local leaders have a clear interest in impressing
their father. According to The Washington Post, Trump’s sons have also invested in numerous defense-tech companies that have
received Pentagon contracts or other federal funding. “There are no conflicts
of interest,” a White House spokesperson told the Post when asked about
the report.
According to the Times, Trump himself earned an unprecedented $2.2 billion in the first year of
his second term, much of it from cryptocurrency projects. But he also enjoys
exercising power over other people, and uses the tools of government to do
that. His tariffs give him financial and personal leverage over foreign
leaders. His invasion of Venezuela gave him an apparent victory over an old
enemy, but also opaque control of Venezuela’s oil, which he has bragged about
repeatedly. His use of unconventional envoys helps him manage these various
interests, many of which would have in the past been considered immoral or
possibly illegal. Fiona Hill, a civil servant on the National Security Council
during Trump’s first term, told me that even then, the president was surrounded
by people who were “quasi-thinking that they were representing American
interests, but they were also representing their own.” He still is.
***
Sometimes, the goals of the civilizational warriors, the
oligarchs, and Trump directly align. Consider their joint war against the
European Union’s Digital Services Act, which regulates how social-media
companies, search engines, and other online organizations protect users’
rights, handle illegal content, and generally look after the public interest.
The State Department ideologues describe this law as “censorship” that is
damaging not only to Europeans but to Americans. At an event in Washington this
past spring, Sarah Rogers spoke of a “censorship class” that had allegedly been
active under the Biden administration before it “scuttled to Europe” after the
2024 election.
Although several lawsuits have sought to prove otherwise,
there is no evidence that the Biden administration silenced anybody.
Nevertheless, the State Department takes this “threat” so seriously that it has
imposed visa restrictions on Thierry Breton, a former EU
commissioner who is now a private citizen, for his role in creating the Digital
Services Act, as well as four other Europeans who campaigned for the law,
paradoxically curbing their freedom of speech. A German official told me that
Americans regularly bring up their objections to the act during bilateral
negotiations, even though the law—passed by the European Union, not Germany—has
been in effect since 2022.
The reality is that the Digital Services Act says nothing
about censorship, especially not of Americans. The law requires digital
platforms to protect minors, comply with European laws—laws that are made by
democratically elected legislatures and that, in Germany and elsewhere, forbid
Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial, as well as child pornography and
incitement of terrorism—and provide transparency about their use of algorithms.
Europeans don’t have the same speech laws as Americans, but they have the right
to enact and enforce their own laws, just as they have a right to different
food-safety or air-pollution laws. American companies operate all over the
world in accordance with the local laws. But in Europe, U.S. tech companies and
the U.S. administration are jointly seeking to change not just the laws, but
the political and legal order that wrote them. Different faces of the
revolution coincide conveniently here: The promotion of anti-European,
far-right political parties serves both the profit-making interests of the tech
companies and the ideological interests of the “free speech” defenders. Elon
Musk, for example, openly uses his social-media platform, his political
donations, and the clout that his companies give him inside the U.S. government
to oppose many forms of digital regulation, to push racist conspiracy theories,
and to promote the civilizational allies of the predator clan. He has
made video appearances at a far-right “Unite the Kingdom” rally—“Violence is
coming to you,” he told those gathered in London; “you either fight back or you
die”—and at a rally of the AfD, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency
classified as a right-wing extremist group. His platform has also been used to
promote fear and misinformation, even to fuel violence that could destabilize
sitting governments. After a stabbing in Southport, England, in 2024, viral
posts falsely claiming that the suspect was a Muslim and an undocumented
migrant spread rapidly to millions via X and other platforms, inflaming the
riots that ensued.
The promotion of foreign political parties for commercial
gain is not new. In 2018, Steve Bannon sent a message to Jeffrey Epstein, preserved in the Justice Department’s cache of Epstein files,
suggesting that the success of extremist European political parties would make
life easier for the cryptocurrency industry. In the message, Bannon described
himself as an adviser to Italian, German, and Swiss far-right political
parties, among others, as well as to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Britain’s Nigel
Farage. Anticipating a victory in the upcoming European parliamentary
elections, he told Epstein that “we can go from 92! seats to 200” and then
“shut down any crypto legislation or anything else we want.” “Roger that,”
Epstein responded.
Bannon, who by then had left the Trump administration,
was not publicly claiming to speak for America or its interests. But people
with views similar to Bannon’s are now speaking for America, and their impact
on the international system is as dramatic as the Bolsheviks’ once was. I don’t
mean that they will destroy the United Nations or the system of international
law that Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of policy, disdainfully
calls the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order”;
those things are already so weak that they have ceased to matter.
Rather, the change is inside the democratic world that
came into being after 1945, a world based not exclusively on law, but on a set
of mostly self-imposed restraints. Inside this sphere, American power was
largely derived from alliances that it refrained from exploiting. Long-term
relationships were held to be valuable, because you never knew when you might
need your allies. U.S. politicians did not execute American foreign policy, or
indeed domestic policy, in order to make money for themselves or their children
while they were still in office. These alliances achieved enormous success:
Although American policy in the Middle East has always been controversial and
the results of American military interventions around the world mixed at best,
America helped build eight decades of peace, prosperity, and eventually
democracy in Europe and much of Asia, creating markets for U.S. companies and
unprecedented support for U.S. power.
This world is fast disappearing. Instead, following the
president’s lead, different people inside and outside the administration are
seizing the revolutionary moment in order to win zero-sum victories. Countries
that hang back from this free-for-all know they will suffer. “If we’re not at
the table, we’re on the menu,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at
Davos earlier this year. He was right.
***
In May, the governor of Louisiana landed in Nuuk, the
capital of Greenland, declaring that he had come to “make a bunch of friends.”
Jeff Landry is Trump’s “special envoy” to Greenland, a title that comes with no
salary and no recognition from Denmark, of which Greenland is a semiautonomous
territory. Landry had nevertheless told Trump, on X, that “it’s an honor to serve you in this
volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”
Upon his arrival, Landry changed into camouflage pants,
as if he were preparing for combat. He attended a business conference to which
he had not been invited. He tried to hand out
MAGA hats, without much success. Although Louisiana is near the bottom of
all U.S. health-care rankings, and although Greenland has full access to a
state-funded national health service, Landry brought a doctor who seemed to be
there to discuss Greenlandic health care. On the day after Landry’s departure,
Greenlanders staged a large protest outside the new U.S. consulate, which they
had dubbed “Trump Tower.” After returning home, Landry nevertheless told Fox
News that the people he had met “want more U.S. involvement in Greenland.”
The visit was farcical, but no one in Denmark was
laughing. Ever since the surreal, shocking days in January 2026 when the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared
to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, the government
in Copenhagen has been watching the Americans who visit Nuuk, some for
business, some for politics, some for a strange mix of both. In August, for
example, an American oil company called Greenland Energy began bringing
equipment to drill for oil in a remote part of the island, although it had not
received formal permission to do so. Greenland Energy’s investors include Ken
Griffin, a major donor to the Republican Party. Dr. Phil, the former talk-show
host and prominent Trump supporter, has been commissioned to make a documentary
series about the project, designed to “capture the mission of these modern-day
wildcatters.” The company offered locals huge salaries—$185,000 annually, well
above the national average—and talked up the potential size of the oil deposit.
(Greenland Energy has said that it hasn’t officially started recruiting
employees, and that high salaries are standard for specialized security
guards.) A local leader told me that this talk of big money seemed ominous to
Greenlanders, and in several towns, people staged protests against the drilling
project. In mid-August, officials in Greenland formally postponed the drilling.
Larry Swets, the company’s executive chair, told Fortune
that the project is not related to American annexation. But two days after the
Greenlandic government warned that it had not given the company permission to
deliver equipment, Trump posted an AI-generated photograph of himself glowering
over a Greenlandic village beneath the headline “Hello, Greenland!” So is
Greenland Energy there for politics, for business, or both?
Equally hard to assess are the motives of Dryden Brown, a
co-founder of Praxis, which Brown has described as a “crypto-native country”
that has financial backing from, among others, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale
and Balaji Srinivasan, the author of The Network State: How to Start a New
Country, along with entities associated with Peter Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam
Altman. Brown visited Greenland just before the 2024 U.S. presidential election
to “try to buy it,” as he wrote on X. Praxis seeks to build a “digital
nation”—anyone can apply to join—and he wants, at some point, to build a city
in Greenland to house it. Maybe this was Brown’s own initiative. Maybe it was
Thiel’s. Or maybe the idea came from Ken Howery, now the U.S. ambassador to
Denmark, who co-founded PayPal with Thiel. Officially, Howery represents the
U.S. government, but he equally represents the tech oligarchy, whose influence
in this new world far exceeds that of mere government officials.
Lately, a more frequent visitor is Drew Horn, who
describes himself as an entrepreneur “focusing on critical minerals and
resource development.” With a Greenlandic business partner, a former politician
who once starred in a Danish TV series, Horn is planning to build a data center
in western Greenland, a daunting project that would require new port
facilities, the construction of an undersea cable, housing for imported
workers, and some bespoke engineering to prevent the center from sinking into
the permafrost. But Horn is also a former Trump national-security official,
according to The New Yorker, with links to at least one covert
operation: In 2020, a participant in a failed coup attempt in Venezuela named
Horn as one of his contacts, though Horn has denied all wrongdoing. He also denies playing any such
role in Greenland, writing an article for Britain’s The Spectator magazine
in May titled “No, I’m Not a CIA Spy in Greenland.” Still, he told Reuters in April that he maintains a “dialogue” with
White House officials. Does he still represent Trump? American oligarchs? Both?
Horn has also met several times with the leader of
Naleraq, Greenland’s populist pro-independence political party. At the time of
Landry’s visit in May, Julie Rademacher, a Danish Greenlandic politician whom
I’d met in Copenhagen, called me from Nuuk to describe the situation.
Rademacher said that ever since American business and political operators from
the Trump orbit had gotten involved in Greenland, Naleraq had become more
aggressive, initiating votes of no confidence in a Parliament that is historically
more decorous. Greenland does have long-standing grievances against Denmark. As
recently as 2022, the Danish and Greenlandic governments launched an
investigation into the Danish promotion of birth control in Greenland in the
1960s and ’70s, which included inserting IUDs into women without consent, a
practice that former Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte B. Egede has said
constituted “genocide.” Are Americans seeking to exploit that legacy?
Regardless of their opinion about Denmark, Greenlanders
are becoming aware of, and are unnerved by, this semi-covert, sometimes
glaringly obvious American pressure. The night after Landry’s visit, Rademacher
said, she had gone to a bar in Nuuk where people were openly carrying guns,
something she’d never seen before. The atmosphere on the island was becoming
unsettled, strange: Greenlanders knew that envoys from a predatory foreign
power were circulating among them, seeking minerals, money, attention, regime
change. “They are destroying the trust and the respect in society, in
institutions, but also in people,” she said. “They fuck with people’s brains.
It will be a fight for Greenlanders to keep their sanity.”
***
Like the assault on Greenland—and like so many other MAGA
trolling projects—the American assault on Canada began with what seemed like a
joke: Canada as the 51st state. But it was not a joke. Even before his second
inauguration, Trump declared on Truth Social that “many people in Canada LOVE
being the 51st State” and that “if Canada merged with the U.S. there would be
no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the
threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them.”
Never mind that U.S.-Canadian trade has been functioning
perfectly well for decades. Never mind that there are no Russian and Chinese
ships “constantly surrounding” Canada, just as there aren’t any surrounding
Greenland. Once he took office, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on Canadian
and Mexican goods and a 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy products, as
punishment, he claimed, for the failure to stop drugs and undocumented migrants
from entering the U.S. This, too, was unfair—hardly any drugs enter the U.S.
over the northern border—but Trump says many things that nobody is really
expected to believe.
In practice, these tariffs had another purpose: They
were, in the view of the Canadian government, the beginning of a campaign to
weaken the Canadian economy. Trump, Prime Minister Carney said, is “trying to
break us so the U.S. can own us.” As part of the negotiations to alleviate the
tariffs, Canada was forced to abandon the idea of taxing U.S. tech companies.
The tariffs did what they were supposed to do: In June, when Canada’s economy
began to slow down, Trump once again suggested that Canada would do better as
the “51st State!” In late July he tightened the screws again, announcing a new
round of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, from “wine to hockey
sticks to cement,” as an administration official put it. Ostensibly this was in
response to “discriminatory” Canadian trade practices—but those were introduced
only in response to Trump’s earlier round of tariffs.
As in Greenland, the economic campaign has been
accompanied by an unofficial influence campaign. Canadians listen to many of
the same podcasts and watch many of the same video clips as Americans, and
during the coronavirus pandemic, some American far-right podcasters sought to
reach new audiences by amplifying a Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine
mandates. Some probably did this because they agreed with the sentiment; others
may have done it for money, knowing that the internet rewards outrage. Since
2022, the truckers’ protest has morphed into a full-scale separatist movement
for the province of Alberta, and the podcasters have now picked up that cause
too. Marcus Kolga, who runs the Toronto-based foreign-disinformation-monitoring
group DisinfoWatch, says he has also identified Russian accounts pushing “a
sustained pattern of Alberta-focused content across the Pravda News Network,”
as well as on Russian-affiliated websites and social-media accounts.
Unlike American states, Canadian provinces are allowed to
hold referenda on their relationship to the union; Quebec has done so twice,
both times choosing the status quo. Alberta will hold a referendum on October
19, asking citizens whether the province should remain in Canada or begin the
legal process to hold a second referendum on separation. The road to secession
is complicated, and as of this summer those favoring a new relationship with
Ottawa did not seem to have anything close to a majority. But the movement has
momentum—for the first time, Alberta has a provincial government willing to allow a referendum on secession.
Americans did not create Alberta separatism, any more
than they created Bolsonarism in Brazil. Resentment of federal intervention in
the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta is old and deep. On a visit to Calgary back
in 2019, I encountered pro-oil, anti-environmentalist protesters carrying a
banner: We ❤ all 🍁 Pipelines. But American
involvement is not trivial, either. Taylor Owen, a Canadian scholar who tracks
nearly 600 U.S.-politics podcasts, told me that in the past, Canada was
mentioned only sporadically—someone would say something controversial, 24 hours
of debate would follow, and that would be it. That has changed, Owen said.
Discussions of Alberta are now continuous and repetitive, with podcasters
“either coordinating or just following each other.”
The net effect is that American podcasts are now
generating a significant volume of content about Alberta separatism. An episode
of Glenn Beck’s podcast featured Keith Wilson, an Alberta separatist who said
that the province has “far more shared values” with “the United States and
Americans than we do with these leftists in Ottawa.” Steve Bannon has described
“undefended northern territories of Canada” as susceptible to Russian and
Chinese invasion. Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, formerly of Tenet Media—an organization
that allegedly received significant funding from Russia in the run-up to the
2024 U.S. presidential election—have also joined the fray.
This is not solely a media project. On at least three
occasions, State Department officials have welcomed representatives of the
Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist group. The names of the American
officials present have not been published—Jeff Rath, one of the Alberta group’s
leaders, has said its American contacts “don’t want to be wasting their time
answering questions from the press.” The group reportedly requested a $500
billion loan for a future independent Albertan government. (Rath has denied this, but a co-founder of the group confirmed it to NBC News.) A State Department spokesperson
has said that its officials meet frequently with “civil society types” and has
not promised anything specific.
This behind-the-scenes conversation took on heavier
significance in January, when Scott Bessent appeared on a far-right podcast run
by the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and made a series of
statements seeming to endorse the separatist cause. Alberta, the Treasury
secretary told Posobiec, is a “natural partner for the U.S.” The province “is a
wealth of natural resources,” but the Canadian government “won’t let them build
a pipeline to the Pacific.”
Bessent didn’t mention specific U.S. oil-and-gas
interests, although there are many: ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, for
instance, have major interests in the Alberta oil sands. U.S. investors also
have big stakes in the Canadian companies that operate in Alberta. Bessent
noted coyly that he had heard a “rumor that they may have a referendum on
whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” but he stopped just short of
endorsing the effort.
At least one other official representative of the U.S.
government has gone beyond mere hints. Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to
Canada, this year invited Tamara Lich, a leader of the 2022 trucker protests,
to his Fourth of July party. Lich, who was tried and convicted
in connection with the protests and is still under house arrest, has shifted
her energies to Alberta separatism. She said that she attended the party after
obtaining permission from her probation officer, posted photographs of herself
with the ambassador, and thanked Hoekstra, Trump, and the “American people” for
their support.
Alberta is in the middle of Canada. If the province were
to detach itself, eastern Canada could be physically cut off from western
Canada, the country would lose a substantial portion of its oil and natural-gas
production, and the province’s important contributions to the national budget
would vanish. Canada might cease to be a viable country, especially if other
provinces started to question the union. That may be the point: In 1990, Pat
Buchanan, the intellectual grandfather of the MAGA movement, declared that if
Quebec ever broke off from Canada, America should “pick up the pieces.” This
now seems to be, if not the publicly stated U.S. policy toward Canada, then at
least the predator clan’s policy: pressure the economy, break up the
federation, pick up the pieces. And no, it is not a joke.
The idea that a dedicated group of Americans has a plan
to dismantle Canada, or that businessmen with opaque links to the U.S.
government might want to create political conditions for a U.S. takeover of
Greenland, may surprise Americans. It shouldn’t. Every single tactic used
against Brazil, Canada, or Denmark has also been deployed elsewhere—not to
support democracy, not to build American prosperity, but to spread the
illiberal revolution and make money for the predators who support it. Here is a
partial list.
Direct financial support for revolutionary allies.
About two weeks before a midterm election in Argentina, in October 2025, the
Trump administration announced a $20 billion bailout to rescue the Argentine
economy from a financial crisis. This was a straight-up bribe: If the country
did not vote for the party of Javier Milei, civilizational ally of the MAGA
movement, Trump would withdraw this support. Milei’s party won. Since then, the
Argentine president has backed the complete deregulation of AI. A few months
after the election, Peter Thiel temporarily moved his entire family to Buenos
Aires.
Political support for revolutionary allies and
illiberal parties. In Germany in February 2025, Vice President Vance went
out of his way to meet Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the AfD. On a visit to
Hungary in 2026, a few days before a national election, Vance endorsed Viktor
Orbán for reelection as prime minister; at a public event in Budapest, Vance called Trump
to confirm his endorsement too. Vance did not meet or mention the
opposition leader, Péter Magyar, who then won the election in a landslide.
During the Polish presidential-election campaign last year, Trump invited the
far-right nationalist candidate, Karol Nawrocki, to the White House, but not
his centrist opponent. Since then, Trump has repeatedly bragged about how he
“won” the election for Nawrocki.
On a trip to Washington earlier this year, a group of
German legislators, from various political parties, had scheduled meetings at
the Pentagon and State Department. According to a member of the German
Parliament, they were told that only representatives from the AfD and the
center-right Christian Democratic party could enter the buildings; members of
the Green Party and the Social Democratic Party were not allowed in.
Propaganda for revolutionary allies. The far-right
videosphere regularly makes itself available for foreigners who want to burnish
their revolutionary credentials at home. As a part of his 2025
presidential-election campaign in Romania, George Simion, the leader of the
Romanian far right who is frequently aligned with Russia and whose 2022 wedding
ceremony was modeled after that of a notorious interwar fascist, appeared on
podcasts with Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon, telling the
latter, “We totally bashed the globalists here in Romania.” Nayib Bukele,
the autocratic leader of El Salvador, went on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend
his own program of mass arrests and packed prisons. He spoke English, but a
version also appeared with Spanish subtitles for Salvadoran consumption. Orbán,
before losing his election, appeared with Carlson and invited him to a public
event in Hungary, to demonstrate to Hungarians that he had American support.
Rallies for revolutionary allies. Meetings of
CPAC, once a mainstream forum for U.S. conservatives, have now become a kind of
traveling road show that appears wherever sponsors can pay, offering visibility
and quasi-official American endorsements to the local far right. A rotating
team of international guests shows up: Bolsonaro, Simion, Bukele, Orbán, Milei,
and Weidel, as well as Geert Wilders of the Dutch far right and Santiago
Abascal of the Spanish far right. They join Americans such as Kristi Noem,
Senator Ted Cruz, and Trump’s consigliere Richard Grenell.
Repurposing humanitarian agencies to benefit
revolutionary allies. Discarding decades of human-rights standards and
refugee law, the Trump administration removed refugee-processing officials from
postings around the world and sent them to South Africa, where they are helping
allegedly repressed Afrikaners (who do not by any international standard
qualify as refugees). The officials did their job: From October 2025 through
June 2026, the U.S. accepted 7,727 “refugees” from South Africa—and three from
the rest of the world. An additional 10,000 white South Africans are on track
to be accepted soon. A government estimate puts the cost of processing them at
$100 million.
Following the destruction of USAID, Food for Peace—a
program that has fed more than 4 billion people over 70 years—was moved to the
Department of Agriculture, where its primary purpose will be not fighting
hunger around the world but subsidizing U.S. farmers. This year, it will
distribute food to countries that, for obscure reasons, don’t include those on the edge of famine, notably Sudan,
South Sudan, and Somalia—but will include El Salvador, whose leader is a friend
of the revolution.
Congressional networking with revolutionary allies.
In March, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson headlined an Alliance of Sovereign
Nations conference, hosted by Turning Point Action, bringing members of
Congress and the global far right together beneath the banner of the
organization created by the late Charlie Kirk. Among the attendees were Markus
Frohnmaier, an AfD leader with unusually close ties to Russia; leaders from
Georgia and Azerbaijan, repressive states with close ties to Russia; and Anna
Paulina Luna, the conference organizer, a Florida congresswoman with close ties
to Russia. George Simion was also there, having appeared earlier in the year as
a guest at a party at the Kennedy Center, where he cut a slice from a
red-white-and-blue cake shaped like Greenland.
Ending democracy promotion. All of the U.S.
government institutions created over decades to promote democratic ideas and
practices have now been weakened, dismantled, or rewired to promote the
revolution. USAID is gone; foreign broadcasters such as Voice of America and
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have barely survived; the State Department’s
annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, once considered a nonpartisan
source of information on human rights, now suggests that Germany is more
oppressive than El Salvador. Slowly, the money the U.S. spends on educational
and cultural programs, scholarships, and exchange-student programs—a
cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and soft power since the early 1960s—is
being repurposed. One example: 11 out of 12 members of the Fulbright exchange-student
program’s board resigned last year after the State Department canceled nearly
200 Fulbright scholarships for American academics approved by the board and put
other awards under review. One of the former board members told PBS that the
board feared that the department was trying to block politically incorrect projects. This
marked—“for the first time in 80 years,” he said—the “interjection of politics
into the selection process,” a “gross distortion” of the program.
Asked at an event about the Trump administration’s policy
toward cultural and academic grants more generally, Sarah Rogers, who runs
America’s public diplomacy, explained that “we would choose a winning applicant
for most of these grants based on how credibly we thought that person or
organization could advance American priorities.” But what are “American
priorities” if the American government is run by people who use its instruments
not on behalf of its citizens, but on behalf of themselves?
***
Revolutions inspire other revolutions—and
counterrevolutions. America is producing both. Slowly, politics around the
world are shifting as leaders copy Trump’s tactics, switch sides to curry
favor, develop a sudden interest in crypto—or else try hard to hedge against
the predatory American regime.
Although European nationalist parties have historically
favored a heavy role for the state—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was an excellent
example—many have now adopted a libertarian message, aligning themselves both
with Trump and with American and international companies that seek havens from
government regulation. Nigel Farage, the leader of the British far-right Reform
party, campaigned for Trump in 2024. Now his income streams look similar to
Trump’s. In 2024, he accepted a $6.7 million personal donation from a
Thailand-based crypto mogul, Christopher Harborne, allegedly for Farage’s
“security.” And George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster, also appears to have funded both Farage and, via donations made by Cottrell’s mother, Reform (even as a
Polymarket account in Cottrell’s name was receiving some $9 million in cryptocurrency from
unidentified sources). Previously better-known for promoting Brexit, Farage
began to lobby hard on crypto issues—for example, he opposed a Bank of England
cryptocurrency project that, as it happens, would damage Harborne’s business.
The revolution has also arrived in Poland, where the
previously domestic-facing nationalist right has developed links to both the
cryptocurrency industry and the Trump administration. A currency exchange
called Zondacrypto, now under investigation for allegedly swindling customers,
sponsored the CPAC event in Poland where Kristi Noem endorsed Karol Nawrocki
and reportedly made contributions to foundations created by right-wing
politicians. After Nawrocki won, he vetoed—three times—the centrist Polish government’s
attempts to enshrine consumer cryptocurrency protections into Polish law.
Echoing the language used in Trump’s Washington, Nawrocki’s justification for
vetoing referenced “freedom” and “innovation.” (Disclosure: My husband, Radek
Sikorski, is the foreign minister of Poland’s centrist government.)
In Latin America, hard-right politicians, some openly
imitating Trump’s language and style, and some with links to crypto or the
world of anonymous shell companies, are beginning to gain traction. Bukele, the
autocratic leader of El Salvador, anticipated the revolution. He declared
bitcoin legal tender in 2021, recruited an array of crypto-evangelists into his
administration, and built a parallel diplomatic corps that set up Salvadoran
bitcoin “embassies” in Texas and Switzerland. He also constructed a maximum-security
prison for alleged gang members, designed with performative cruelty. The Trump
administration sent alleged criminals there early in 2025. (Later
investigations would find that most had no criminal records.)
Other Latin American leaders are also drawing from the
Trump-Bukele playbook. Trump endorsed the new president of Colombia, Abelardo
de la Espriella, a businessman who once told Agence France-Presse that “people
who have created wealth during their lives should run the country”—a sentiment
that sounds familiar—and who wants to build “mega-prisons” too. Hours after his
inauguration, the U.S. offered him a $1 billion “security package,” even as his
predecessor, taking another page out of the American playbook, was making
accusations of a rigged election. Trump also backed José Antonio Kast, the new
president of Chile, who ran a campaign calling for tighter border controls and
mass deportations. During his first week in office, Kast negotiated a joint
statement with the U.S. on mining rare earth minerals that seems intended to
benefit private American mining interests.
Outside the democratic world, where kleptocracy has long
been the norm, no special changes are necessary to accommodate the new American
regime. Pragmatism reigns: If American-government decisions are now for sale,
then many will eagerly buy them. The Qataris did not give Trump a $400 million
jumbo jet merely out of friendship. The Saudi public-investment fund did not
commit $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s private-equity fund simply as a gesture of
goodwill. And Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama did not offer Kushner and Ivanka
Trump a piece of the country’s environmentally protected coastline to build a
luxury resort because he admires their design sense.
Sometimes, these kinds of contributions appear aimed at
achieving very specific results. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member
of the Emirati royal family, purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty
Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, for $500 million. A few
months later, the Trump administration agreed to let the UAE buy high-tech
chips whose export the Biden administration had restricted.
Most governments in the old democratic world cannot
compete in this race. Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and others can’t pay
off the American president by investing in his children’s companies, because
that would be illegal. Nor are they finding it easy to adjust to the new world
of quasi-official, quasi-private diplomacy.
Instead they are beginning to look elsewhere for
contacts, for technology, for trade. No one previously imagined that Canada
would find it necessary to sign a defense pact with the EU, let alone to
conduct defense-tech negotiations with Australia; it has now done both. The EU
has just arranged a free-trade agreement with India, something that few people
were interested in completing a few years ago, and another with Australia. In
the first half of 2026, no fewer than 26 world leaders visited China, including
the British, Spanish, German, and Canadian prime ministers. The French
government is slowly removing Windows, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom from its
computers, replacing them with open-source software or French-made
alternatives. Some German regional governments, as well as the Danish and Dutch
governments, are on a similar mission, as are some European banks and
universities. These changes are meant to be permanent. After all, even if a
Democrat wins the White House in 2028, the companies empowered by federal money
and the ideologues who have taken over institutions will continue to influence
Congress and voters. Now that Trump has shown that it can be done, future
presidents might also benefit from kleptocratic practices. “We cannot leave the
security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years,”
France’s Europe minister has said.
These shifts have been mocked and attacked by some,
including the Pentagon’s Elbridge Colby, who has argued that American allies
can’t replace the U.S. That may be true, in the short term. But if Colby or
anyone else believes that America’s old friends will not stop looking for other
options, then he has misunderstood the depth and profundity of the shift in
perceptions of America, not just in a few capital cities but in the heads and
hearts of people around the globe.
A trivial but revealing incident from this summer hints
at the extent of the change. Remember Trump’s phone call to Gianni Infantino,
the president of FIFA, the body that runs the World Cup? Folarin Balogun,
America’s star striker, had been given a red card, making him ineligible for
the team’s next game, against Belgium. Trump asked Infantino to review the ban.
FIFA lifted it. “I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete,” Trump
told reporters, “and I understand sports really well. Really well.” But Trump
did not understand sports, or sports fans. The outrage was immediate, visceral,
and international, not because of anything the U.S. team had done but because
the U.S. president had assumed he was allowed to break the rules, and because
so many Americans seemed to approve.
Few may care about the ins and outs of Brazilian politics
or understand the business dealings of World Liberty Financial. But many can
recognize cheating. The head of the Norwegian football association filed an
ethics complaint because “when you bend a rule like this, you’re on a slippery
slope that will put the whole game at risk.” The British journalist Hugo
Rifkind wrote that he was “startled and troubled to find myself heavily
invested in Belgium winning a football game.” I heard former Italian Prime Minister
Enrico Letta tell a large European audience that “Italians, French, and, yes,
even the Dutch” had all rooted for Belgium too. I spent a couple of hours
looking at commentary; hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of fans from
all over the world left angry comments on X, YouTube, Facebook. The story
resonated, not because this one World Cup match mattered, but because the
presumptuous disdain that America showed for everyone else was so familiar.
Maybe it resonated with the team too. When the U.S. lost
to Belgium—and lost badly—some wondered if Trump’s move had unsettled the
players. They surely knew that the world was rooting against them, and seemed
to have lost belief in themselves as a result. Other Americans may soon come to
the same conclusion. For decades, we have told ourselves that our country
represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies,
like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators
and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when
we realize that we no longer do?
