Since the end of the second world war, liberal democracies have stuck together – led by the US. On the opposite side have been authoritarian states, led mainly by the Soviet Union, followed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, by Russia and China.
But all this is rapidly changing. Russia and China have morphed into oligarchies, run by small groups of extraordinarily wealthy people.
The US has been moving from a democracy to an oligarchy as well – and is doing so at lightning speed under Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
The new poles are coming to be global democracies versus a global oligarchy. The United States is emerging on the side of global oligarchy.
Trump’s remarks late on Tuesday – siding fully with Russia’s narrative of blaming Ukraine for the war there – signals more clearly than any other recent statement that the US is prepared to jettison its European allies and switch sides to embrace Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Earlier on Tuesday, senior American and Russian officials agreed not only to seek to end the war in Ukraine, but also, in the words of the secretary of state Marco Rubio, to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians”, both geopolitically and economically.
Trump’s phone call with Putin last week also reflected Putin’s view of the world – that Russia and the US are “two great nations” that should not only negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly but also together address even weightier global affairs.
Just after the call, Trump posted that he and Putin had “reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many! We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”
The phone call occurred on the same day, not incidentally, that Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would not support Ukraine’s desire for Nato membership.
And on the same day, the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, widely seen as sympathetic to Putin, as the next director of national intelligence.
At last week’s Munich security conference, JD Vance – the man who refuses to say that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election – accused Europe of abandoning the values of democracy by excluding the far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from government.
Vance’s bizarre comments came just days before Germany’s general election. He had earlier met the AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel.
The AfD is a rightwing extremist party. In 2017, Björn Höcke, an AfD party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, complained that Germans were “the only people in the world who’ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital” – Höcke was referring to the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust – and that Germany needed “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance”.
In 2018, the AfD party leader Alexander Gauland dismissed “Hitler and the Nazis” as “just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history”.
In 2023, AfD politicians met with other far-right extremists to discuss an “overall concept, in the sense of a master plan” for the “remigration” of “migrants” to their countries of ethnic origin – no matter whether those migrants were asylum seekers, permanent residents or German citizens.
The AfD wants to end German military aid to Ukraine and restart the Nord Stream pipelines through which Russia used to supply Germany with natural gas.
So what is Vance doing embracing the AfD? Why has Musk also promoted the AfD on his X platform?
There should be no doubt about what is happening. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime wants to empower the nationalist far-right in Europe in order to divide European democracies and weaken the western alliance.
This potentially emboldens further Russian military incursions like the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine.
It strengthens the global oligarchy. Commentators in Moscow are claiming that the American-led effort to isolate Russia over Ukraine has ended and are celebrating Trump’s support for Russia’s narrative about who started the war in Ukraine.
After Trump’s phone call with Putin, Russia’s main stock market index jumped 5%, to its highest point since last summer, and the ruble gained against the dollar to its strongest level since September.
The Trump-Vance-Musk regime is not only undermining democracy in the US. It is also laying the foundation for undermining democracies around the world.
It is making the world safe for oligarchy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
