By Anne Applebaum
Sunday, November 01, 2026
At a dinner in Athens in March, Kimberly Guilfoyle, then
the U.S. ambassador to Greece, made a statement that elegantly combined
arrogance with menace. According to The Wall Street Journal and
the Financial Times, Guilfoyle referred to the troubles of Romania’s
governing coalition and, with Greek politicians in the room, took
credit for its impending collapse: “We can do that to any country we want,”
she said. “We can do that here.”
Guilfoyle was subsequently disgraced for a different
reason: The Journal also
obtained screenshots of messages she had sent to a Republican donor, asking
him to deposit $100,000 in her American Express account. She and her lawyer
denied everything, including the dinner conversation, but the screenshots were
too much even for the Trump administration. She resigned.
If Americans were more exercised by her apparent greed,
Europeans were appalled by her political boasts. Guilfoyle did seem to think
she could influence the coalition politics of democratically elected European
governments, all of them U.S. allies and members of NATO. More to the point,
she isn’t the only Trump-administration official who has tried to do exactly
that.
Americans once promoted democracy in Europe as a
political system, and under that general understanding accepted all elected
politicians of the center-left and center-right as legitimate. This
administration and its adjacent business elite are now pursuing a different
policy. In some cases, they promote the interests of parties that they believe
to be ideologically aligned with the MAGA movement, including some that are
openly pro-Russian. Other European political figures seem to have gained
Washington’s blessing (or are trying to gain it) because they can promote
commercial interests favored by someone close to the administration. In at
least three cases, Americans have reportedly tried to persuade elected European
leaders to dump their current coalition partners in favor of new ones more to
the White House’s liking.
The clearest case is in Poland. I am married to Polish
Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, whose political party is the largest member of
the current ruling coalition. But I am not revealing any special information;
Polish media, including far-right media, have widely reported that President
Trump strongly hinted to the leader of one of the coalition’s two other parties
that he should switch sides.
The politician in question is Defense Minister Wladyslaw
Kosiniak-Kamysz, the leader of the small, agrarian Polish People’s Party. He
was in Washington, D.C., in the spring to attend a Medal of Honor ceremony for
an American soldier who had saved the life of a Polish soldier in Afghanistan.
Just after the event, which was organized by Polish activists with MAGA
contacts, Kosiniak-Kamysz was taken aside by the president, who reportedly told
him that he would be much better regarded in Washington if he left the
government coalition: He should do a deal with Polish-nationalist and far-right
parties instead. He didn’t follow Trump’s advice. (The Atlantic
requested comment about the incident from the White House but has not yet
received a response.)
This was not the first time the Trump administration had
made its sympathies in Poland clear. During the Polish presidential-election
campaign last year, the far-right candidate Karol Nawrocki visited Washington,
where Trump endorsed his bid. After Nawrocki won, Trump repeatedly took credit
for the victory, just as he and his entourage have taken credit for electoral
victories in Latin America. Nevertheless, this latest story feels different. An
American president asking a politician in an allied foreign country to change
coalitions? Nothing like it has happened in Poland since the days when Soviet
leaders decided which Polish Communists should rule.
***
Guilfoyle doesn’t have Trump’s power, but as his
ambassador, she seemed unusually versed in the internal details of Romanian
politics, even though she was posted to Athens. At the end of March, she
appeared on a panel at a business conference in Bucharest and spoke about the “vertical
gas corridor,” a pipeline system linking Greece, Romania, Ukraine, and other
countries in southeastern Europe. Although she had no previous background in
gas infrastructure, she became an enthusiast during her stay at the U.S.
embassy in Greece. Indeed, Christos Marafatsos, a lobbyist for Aktor Group, a
Greek company with interests in the pipeline system, frequently traveled with
Guilfoyle, so much so, according to the Journal, that “some foreign
officials mistook him for her chief of staff.” The CEO of Aktor was also at the
Bucharest event, speaking just after Guilfoyle.
And during her event, Guilfoyle advocated for not just
the construction of the infrastructure, but also the purchase of American
liquefied natural gas; Aktor has an interest in both matters. Ilie Bolojan, the
Romanian prime minister at the time, was a supporter of the pipeline project,
he recently confirmed. But he was not interested in locking Romania into a
gas-purchase contract, both because the price was not competitive and because
Romania is gearing up to export its own gas.
Others were. On the same trip, Guilfoyle was also seen
(and filmed) having dinner at an expensive restaurant in Bucharest with one of
Bolojan’s coalition partners, Sorin Grindeanu, the leader of the Romanian
Social Democratic Party, and several other Romanian politicians. One of those
present, a former energy minister, was interested in buying American LNG
and reportedly wrote to the prime minister and the president, calling for
exactly that.
Over the next couple of months, Grindeanu’s Social
Democrats would leave the ruling coalition and then join the Romanian far-right
party in supporting a vote of no confidence in Bolojan’s liberal-centrist
government, forcing him to resign. Grindeanu has denied
emphatically that Guilfoyle or any other American influenced his decision.
The leader of the Romanian far right, George Simion, a pro-Russian politician
who has sought to build relations with MAGA influencers close to Trump,
described himself as a “good friend” of Guilfoyle but also denied that she had
affected the decision. Still, it’s not hard to see why some Romanians think she
did.
One notable feature of the Romanian government’s collapse
was its orchestration by two political parties, one ostensibly on the
center-left, the other of the far right. By working together, they broke a
so-called firewall, a long-standing determination to exclude political parties
and leaders sympathetic to fascism from mainstream politics. The same firewall
exists in Germany, where the conservative Christian Democratic Union runs the
government with the center-left Social Democrats as a junior partner. Some
German politicians believe that the Trump administration wants the CDU to break
the firewall and form a coalition with the far-right AfD (Alternative for
Germany) instead. AfD is openly pro-Russian, and some of its politicians have
had neo-Nazi affiliations. For many Christian Democrats, members of a
conservative party founded in the postwar era as a bulwark against extremism,
joining with AfD is an almost unimaginable break with their values.
Rather than approaching CDU leaders directly, Trump has
used his Truth Social account to promote AfD, publicly cheering the party’s
victory in recent regional elections: “THEY ARE ON THE RISE,” he wrote, “and
not going to take it anymore!” Elon Musk, the administration’s close ally and
the Republican Party’s most significant donor, virtually attended an AfD event
before the most recent Bundestag election. Because Musk’s X algorithm gives
enormous weight to posts from his account, this amounted to a large, free
promotion for AfD.
Several German politicians mentioned another incident, on
which I have previously
reported. Earlier this year, a group of legislators from various political
parties came to Washington and arranged meetings at the Pentagon and State
Department. According to a senior member of the CDU, they were told that only
representatives from AfD and the CDU could enter the buildings; members of the
Social Democratic Party, who are part of the government coalition, were not
allowed. Neither were others. The CDU members declined to go at all. The party
leadership understood the gesture as a message to them: The only partner we
recognize is AfD.
***
This gesture demonstrated what is probably the Trump
administration’s authentic contempt for German democracy. But it also revealed
a deep contradiction in U.S. foreign policy. On the one hand, American
officials encourage Europeans to build up their own military forces. Speaking
at NATO headquarters last summer, Elbridge Colby, an undersecretary of defense,
said
that in the future, American allies should be “taking primary responsibility
for Europe's conventional defense.” Germany, Poland, and Romania are all
countries that have taken this request seriously.
But on the other hand, the same administration is
directly promoting the fortunes of political parties and leaders who oppose
defense spending, who favor Russia, or who do not promise to defend Europe or
respect European borders. Alice Weidel, AfD’s co-leader, opposes
offering military aid to Ukraine and also argues against defense cooperation
with other European countries. The party’s co-chair Tino Chrupalla has called
for the expulsion of American troops from Germany. George Simion, the leader of
the Romanian far right, has in the past advocated for the restoration of
Romania’s pre-1940 borders, including territory now in Ukraine. The Polish far
right has lately begun repeating anti-European and anti-Ukrainian narratives of
a kind that are now popular in both Washington and Moscow, undermining support
for a unified European defense.
In effect, the administration is promoting European
rearmament and European defense cooperation while simultaneously promoting
politicians who oppose rearmament or defense cooperation. Across democratic
Europe, the public and the politicians are confused. Once, Europeans generally
believed that America promoted democracy—the political system, not particular
parties—and staunchly opposed Russia and other authoritarian regimes. Now, it
seems, Trump-administration officials have flipped the script. Some of them,
like Guilfoyle, seem more interested in commercial deals than in security.
Others seem to be pursuing dangerous goals. Does America want Europeans to
build large armies—and then to break up European institutions and hand those
armies over to nationalists? That policy was tried in the 20th century. It
failed quite dramatically.
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