In the opening minutes of the new reality show Paul American, Jake Paul torches a fat wad of $100 bills. The jacked and tatted YouTuber turned boxer flirts with the camera as he shoots promos for, in a meta twist, the show you’re already watching. (The money is fake.) Jake and his older brother, Logan, a YouTuber turned pro wrestler, are the stars and executive producers of the cocksure Max series chronicling their family’s exploits. “Like if the Kardashians were combat fighters—that’s really what we have here,” is how Jake puts it during a pitch meeting. Against a backdrop of podcasts, private jets, McMansions, and shameless shilling (body spray and energy drinks), the brothers steamroll their way through daily life.

The series is a slick attempt by two giants of the so-called manosphere—the loose network of podcasts and YouTube channels by, for, and about testosterone-laced males—to conquer the cultural mainstream. And yet, in setting out to build their macho fantasy, the Pauls may have also revealed the manosphere’s intellectual limits. Paul American shows Jake, 28, and Logan, 29, discovering that a crucial part of a hetero male’s existence is learning to live with his female equal.

Logan’s fiancée is the Danish supermodel Nina Agdal, and Jake recently proposed to Jutta Leerdam, a Dutch Olympic speed skater. In capturing their relationship dynamics on camera, the show demonstrates that not even the most successful “alpha male” self-promoters can live in a world entirely of their own making. So much of today’s manosphere revolves around the repellent misogyny of influencers such as Andrew Tate, but the first four episodes of Paul American may unwittingly leave viewers with the idea that having a strong, freethinking woman in your life is the best thing that can happen to you.

The Pauls, who have 150 million online followers across all their platforms, have spent the bulk of their lives on a never-ending quest for virality. Last year, Donald Trump was a guest on Logan’s podcast, Impaulsive—months before Trump went on Joe Rogan’s and Theo Von’s shows—and both brothers attended the president’s inauguration. The internet-culture writer Taylor Lorenz, who has chronicled the Pauls’ rise to fame, told me that a decade ago, they seemed like “silly, young frat-bro-type guys” but that they have since been “radicalized to the right” and embraced by “the Trump movement.” The first episode of the Max show contains a clip from last year in which the president hands Logan an autographed red TRUMP hat.

Most of the time, though, the politics are merely implicit: The Pauls come off as content creators first, athletes second, ideologues a distant third. Jake is a new boxer who last fall fought Mike Tyson, a former champ now in his late 50s; Logan is beholden to the scripted outcomes of World Wrestling Entertainment. But those gigs feel more like side hustles, even if their reality show would like you to believe otherwise. The Pauls are the heirs to MTV’s Jackass, and they built their influence empire by filming their antics for their YouTube channels. One such stunt was Logan setting a mattress ablaze and chucking it into a swimming pool; more disturbing was his infamous journey into Japan’s “suicide forest,” in which he filmed a dead body and received widespread condemnation.

Like Trump, though, the Pauls have muscled through every controversy—bravado they seem to have inherited from their father, Greg. “Cancel culture can suck my ass,” Greg tells the camera, while flashing the middle finger with both hands.

As children of divorce, the brothers sometimes tiptoe around their short-fused father. Jake occasionally speaks of unspecified traumas. Logan is more direct: “Yeah, man, my dad was physical with us.” (“I think I was a great dad,” Greg responds in the next clip.) In one episode, during a family meeting, Logan refers to his dad as a liability for the show; Greg, incensed, tells his son to “shut the fuck up” and “jokes” about punching him in the face. Some of these moments are uncomfortable, while others feel like pro-wrestling kayfabe. (“We’re gonna have to manufacture some drama for sure,” Logan tells Jake after their show is green-lit.)

[Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Their mother, Pam, is generally portrayed in a more sympathetic light but can seem overwhelmed by her sons’ celebrity. “Why would they listen to me?” Pam asks at one point. “They’re making lots more money than I ever made. What am I gonna do?” Still, she never doubted that her boys’ natural athleticism would lead them to lives of distinction; she once believed that Jake, for example, would go into the NFL or become a Navy SEAL. Greg, in contrast, scoffed that if his sons couldn’t become mainstream entertainers, they’d end up doing porn. The sons still act as if they crave his approval.

In this absence of model parenting, Jake and Logan’s significant others, Jutta and Nina, come to resemble surrogate moms. Each woman keeps her respective Paul in check, even challenges him. In one memorable scene, aboard a private jet, Jutta implores Jake to be his “real” self. “Remember how that was?” she asks pointedly. She’s the most blunt family member at the aforementioned meeting. She won’t uproot her life—she lives and trains in the Netherlands, while he does so in Puerto Rico—and steadfastly refuses to act as Jake’s arm candy. And Jake is visibly his best self around her.

Even the distinctly conservative world of the Pauls has to make room for women’s agency. “The trad wife is not the only model of right-wing femininity,” the feminist writer Jill Filipovic told me. Each brother’s partner telegraphs that she’d be just fine if she had never ventured into the Paul mediaverse.

Nina, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, had previously made cameos in fast-food commercials and on HBO’s bro-fantasy comedy Entourage, but, it seems, she had no plan to become a reality-TV star. In a poignant scene, Nina talks about the cyberbullying and online sexual harassment she’s received from one of Logan’s rivals, an experience that seems to have both shaken and awakened her. The season turns on Nina’s becoming pregnant with her and Logan’s first child—and her ambivalence over turning their baby into content, after her experience of online abuse. He wanted a boy, but Nina’s carrying a girl. In a moment of reflection, Logan admits, “It almost felt maybe like life karma for the way I’ve treated women.”

At times, Paul American reminds me of The Osbournes—the classic MTV reality series about how fame and fortune unbalance a family—except with blond 20-somethings at the center, instead of an aging British heavy-metal god. That show, from the early 2000s, was fundamentally wholesome; the members of the Osbourne family all appeared to love one another despite profanity flying around the house all day. If there’s any comparably wholesome side to Paul American, it’s that even two man-children can stumble into understanding how their own self-aggrandizement affects the women around them.

One suspect arrested after attack near the central Dam Square in the capital of the Netherlands.

For President Donald Trump, last month’s spat at the White House with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was “great television.” To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945.

Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own. Perhaps the most candid response came from the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that “the free world needs a new leader.”

There is plenty of good sense in the EU taking a resolute stand. The need for “strategic autonomy” is not only the preoccupation of French President Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc’s codified global strategy since 2016 as well. Now Trump is fulminating against the EU, claiming that it was “formed in order to screw the United States,” and European autonomy has become an urgent priority.

But to reduce this moment to a Euro-American clash, let alone to resort to clichés about the supposedly essential qualities of Europe and the United States, would be a fundamental mistake. The current rift is part of a broader battle for the soul of the West. On one side are those who believe that Western countries should continue to be characterized by open societies, Enlightenment values, pluralism, and liberal democracy, as they mostly have been for the past few decades. The most notable opposition to this status quo comes from ultranationalists who believe that the West has gone too far in its espousal of progress and liberalism, and that it must revert to a civilizational ethos centered around Christianity—one that is more traditional and less libertine, less feminist, and less internationalist (or “globalist,” as they like to call it). As a shorthand, I call them anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries.

Both sides have long had partisans in both America and Europe. For about a decade, the standard-bearer for the nationalist right has been Viktor Orbán, the self-styled “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary. Orbán’s fellow anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries have grown in political relevance and popularity across the EU, though they are still relatively marginal. For inspiration, they look to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose national chauvinism, banning of “gender ideology” and “gay propaganda,” and revisionism against the world order fit well with their agenda.

[Michael McFaul: The tragic success of global Putinism]

The European far right traditionally fulminated against Atlanticism, decrying the United States as the fulcrum of a global liberal order from which Europeans must de-link. But the immense influence of anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries over Trump, especially evident in his second administration, has turned the tables. The world’s mightiest country is now an ally for Europe’s far right. Trump’s first term also encouraged these elements, but its direction wasn’t always stable or clear.

This time around, some of the most influential figures in Trump’s court have commitments to the anti-liberal counterrevolution: Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. One common theme among these men is their championing of Orbán’s Hungary. In 2022, Carlson made a documentary about the country, portraying Orbán as leading “the fight for civilization” against the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Don Jr. made a well-publicized trip to Budapest last year and spared no words in praising Orbán’s Hungary as “one of the last beacons of hope in Europe.”

[Zack Beauchamp: Make America Hungary again]

American proponents of Orbán often praise his hard-line policies on migration and refugees, but this is a red herring. Politicians across the political spectrum in Europe have taken anti-migration positions of various kinds. The admiration for Orbán comes from his unapologetic assault on the liberal values that have defined the West for generations. In a now-famous speech in Romania in 2014, Orbán espoused his anti-liberalism in detail and attacked the United States in terms that have become familiar on the American right: “The strength of American soft power is in decline, and liberal values today embody corruption, sex, and violence and, as such, discredit America and American modernization.”

Orbán’s critique is not of any one policy but of something fundamental about the soul of the West. And it reflects a view that has found fuller expression in the words of the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, a treasured guest on Carlson’s show last year. Dugin sees a dichotomy between liberalism and its enemies that goes back to antiquity. For him, Putin’s Russia represents the “eternal Rome,” a land-based empire of conservative virtue, set against the liberal West’s “eternal Carthage,” a maritime empire of circulation and exchange. Dugin rails against the European Enlightenment, the intellectual root of modern rationalism and liberalism, and defines himself in the lineage of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home. The billionaire Peter Thiel has been compared to Dugin by the latter’s biographer. As early as 2007, Thiel offered a sweeping critique of Western enlightened thought, inveighing against both Karl Marx and Adam Smith for giving primacy to earthly human needs. Instead, he advocated for “an older Western tradition” that wasn’t afraid to “seek glory in the name of God or country.” Thiel argued that the Enlightenment was a “very long intellectual slumber and amnesia,” from which the West should reawaken into something more like the medieval age. He criticized George W. Bush’s administration for fighting the War on Terror in the name of democratic values and suggested instead an explicitly anti-Islamic campaign in the tradition of the Crusades. Thiel evinced an affinity for the German jurist Carl Schmitt—one of the Nazi luminaries, along with Heidegger, of the anti-liberal counterrevolution.

Since 2019, Thiel has been a major supporter of the national conservative movement that has helped give an intellectual identity to Trumpism. Vice President Vance is a prominent figure in that movement. As early as 2021, Vance warned about a “civilizational crisis” in the West and claimed that “every single major cultural institution” in the U.S. had been “lost.” Earlier this month, when asked about European-American ties, he praised Europe as the “cradle of the Western civilization,” with which the United States has “religious bonds” and “cultural bonds,” before stating that Europe was “at risk of civilizational suicide.”

Vance’s answer is notable not just for what it states but for what it omits. The actually existing transatlantic relationship has long been based on a common espousal of liberal democracy, built on the legacy of defeating fascism in World War II. But for Vance, the proper foundation for Euro-Atlantic ties should instead be Christian faith.

The postwar order we have known was the product of a broad alliance that brought together socialists and liberals against fascism. This order dismantled colonial empires; it conceived of new institutions, such as the United Nations, to foster international dialogue in place of aggression, and new covenants, such as the International Bill of Human Rights, to codify both the civil rights advocated by liberals and socioeconomic rights advocated by socialists.

Unsurprisingly, the anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries of today have no sympathy for this legacy. In fact, historical revisionism about World War II is an important feature of their movement. For years, the European far right has engaged in various forms of Holocaust relativization or outright denial. Last year, Carlson hosted the Holocaust-denying podcaster Darryl Cooper and introduced him as America’s “best” historian. Not only did Cooper make denialist claims about the Holocaust—he criticized the post-1945 order as making it “effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

These are not isolated ideas but a political campaign, with proponents on both sides of the Atlantic, against the post-1945 order and the broader Enlightenment tradition. Its proponents reject the full spectrum of European and American liberal thought, from left to right, and hark back to a West defined by their reading of Christianity and traditional values.

The anti-liberals are a growing force in European politics. Last year, Orbán’s Fidesz party helped establish Patriots for Europe (PfE), the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, with which 86 of 720 MEPs identify. Its most notable member is France’s National Rally, a once-marginal party that is now the main opposition force in the EU’s second-largest economy. The bloc’s other member parties are currently parts of governments in the Netherlands and Italy. The Trump administration has given these far-right entities new momentum. Elon Musk openly supports not just Orbán’s sister parties, such as Spain’s Vox, but even Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was deemed too extremist for PfE and instead joined the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations, whose member parties are even more explicitly pro-Putin, anti-NATO, and anti-American.  

Such extreme parties are still relatively marginal in European politics. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, at least 20 are currently led by mainstream liberals, centrist conservatives, or Socialists. For now, thinkers spanning a wide spectrum—the American center-right political theorist Francis Fukuyama, say, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek—can still share in the view of Europe as a bastion of Enlightenment values worth preserving.

To uphold the best of this European tradition now will require more from liberals than just a defense of the old continent against the new. Much as their anti-liberal rivals have done, Western liberals will have to forge transatlantic links and demonstrate their willingness to fight for their values. Broad fronts and global alliances made the post-1945 order. To keep it will require nothing less.

Counterfeit oxycodone circulating in the Netherlands poses serious health risks, authorities said.

For three years, I was President Barack Obama’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He’s a transactional leader.” I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s thinking and intentions.

I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He’s been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don’t define the whole of his project.

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

For too long, we in the West have underestimated Putin’s global ideological vision as an animating force for his foreign-policy agenda. The tragic consequence is that today Putinism is advancing across Europe and the United States.

In the beginning, Putin was an accidental leader. After Russia’s 1998 financial crash, its president, Boris Yeltsin, and the oligarchs around him scrambled to find a viable candidate to run against the Communists in the 2000 presidential election. They settled on an obscure KGB agent, selecting Putin to become first prime minister in August 1999, then acting president at the end of 1999, and then the ruling elite’s choice to succeed Yeltsin in the March 2000 election. Voters ratified Yeltsin’s pick, not the other way around.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

At the time, Putin was not anti-Western. He had not joined forces with the neo-imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Rather, he had spent the ’90s working as a mid-level bureaucrat for pro-democratic, pro-Western politicians, first Sobchak in St. Petersburg and later Yeltsin in Moscow. So the failure to anticipate his pivot away from these people and ideas is understandable.

But Putin made his disdain for democracy clear early in his rule. (I wrote about his autocratic proclivities just three weeks before Russia’s 2000 election.) On other issues, he initially signaled continuity with the Yeltsin era. For instance, Putin expressed pro-Western positions, adopted free-market policies, cut corporate and income taxes, and even suggested that Russia should join NATO: “Why not?” Putin answered when asked this in 2000. “I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Putin fully embraced President George W. Bush’s idea of a global war on terror and even helped the U.S. open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to support its war effort in Afghanistan.

Over time, however, Putin became less enamored with free markets and relations with the West. He began to gradually reassert state control over Russia’s economy and media. In 2003, for instance, he arrested Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and handed Khodorkovsky’s oil company to one of his KGB comrades, Igor Sechin, because Khodorkovsky was becoming too active in supporting the political opposition. By 2003, all of Russia’s independent television networks—TVS, TV6, and NTV—were either shut down or had become state channels.

Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin berated the U.S. for interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in the service of its own ideas. He asserted, “One state and, of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule. Sure enough, in 2011, what happened in Georgia and Ukraine seemed poised to occur in Russia too. That December, Russia held a parliamentary election that was falsified in Putin’s favor, in the manner usual at the time. On this occasion, however, Russia’s election observers documented the irregularities, and political opposition leaders mobilized the biggest nationwide demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, Russian protesters chanted for free and fair elections—also for “Russia without Putin.”

[Read: The Putinization of America]

Putin was frightened, and so he pushed back hard. He blamed President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and me (I arrived as the U.S. ambassador in 2012, right as these demonstrations were taking place) for fomenting regime change against him and his government. He told his citizens that the U.S. sought the destruction of Russia as a country and was using “fifth column” agents such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov (both later allegedly assassinated by Putin’s regime) as domestic agents to achieve these goals.

After his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin used ever more coercive methods to weaken opposition leaders, civil society, and independent media. In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To justify this clampdown, Putin has evoked the defense of Russian sovereignty and conservative Christian values against the decadent liberal West. Not unlike other populists, he blamed international forces for Russia’s economic woes, but his real bread-and-butter issues were cultural clashes. He devoted obsessive attention to issues of sexual orientation, blaming the West for promoting homosexuality, LGBTQ identities, and other ideas he considers deviant and antithetical to Russian culture and traditions. As he bluntly claimed at the annual forum held by the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, “Many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world. He wants to return to a 19th-century-style world, in which a handful of great powers dominate their spheres of influence unconstrained by multilateral institutions, international laws, or global norms. If the Cold War’s central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states.

After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world. To do so he invested heavily in several instruments of influence and used them in support of largely far-right movements across the West.

He allocated considerable resources to Russian state media operating abroad, including the flagship television network Russia Today, the Sputnik news agency, and armies of propagandists across all social-media platforms. Russia’s ideological efforts in this domain were so effective in Romania’s 2024 presidential election, for instance, that an obscure far-right presidential candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, came out of nowhere and won the first round. The violation of Romanian sovereignty was assessed by intelligence services to be so acute that the country’s supreme court felt compelled to cancel the second round of the election.

Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church’s aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States. In 2013, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage traveled to Moscow, where he gave a speech opposing the adoption of children by same-sex couples—something Putin sharply limited by law that same year, leading the American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark on his radio show, “I have to tell you that it freaks me out that Vladimir Putin is saying things I agree with.” In 2015, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who praised Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.”

At the same time, Putin cultivated ties with illiberal populists across Europe. He shared with these leaders a rejection of liberalism, a commitment to traditional values, an embrace of national and ethnic identities, and a disdain for alleged constraints on sovereignty—whether those of the European Union on its members or of American “imperialism” on Russia. Putin’s closest ideological ally in Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—the only EU leader who did not condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and who subsequently tried to block EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. No European leader has done more to weaken the EU than Orbán, and weakening the EU is precisely what Putin wants.    

In France, Putin has nurtured a relationship with the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, providing financial assistance for her 2017 presidential campaign and meeting her at the Kremlin that year in a public show of support. In turn, Le Pen enthused, “The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.” In Italy, Putin has nurtured personal relations with the illiberal nationalist leader Matteo Salvini. Secret audio recordings revealed that Salvini’s Lega Nord allegedly participated in backroom deals with Russian operatives to receive funds from a Russian state-owned company. The United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage is a longtime Kremlin favorite thanks to his disdain for the EU; Putin’s government supported Farage’s Brexit campaign.

Shared anti-liberal and culturally reactionary values have also undergirded Putin’s relationships with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and nationalist-conservative-party leaders in Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany. More proximately, Putin has supported the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko for decades, helping his autocratic partner hang onto power despite mass demonstrations following a fraudulent election in 2020. In Georgia, Putin has linked up with the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose political party, Georgian Dream, has undermined democratic institutions and suspended the country’s accession talks with the European Union for four years. In Ukraine, of course, Putin’s man was Viktor Yanukovych, who also tried to turn his country away from European ties and ideas, only to lose power to a popular uprising in 2014.

For the past decade, however, Putin’s most important target for ideological promotion was not Europe but the United States. He courted like-minded conservatives within the U.S. as a strategy for dividing and thereby weakening Russia’s foremost enemy. The conservative populist Pat Buchanan was an early darling of the Russian right. More recently, several major MAGA influencers, including Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, have embraced the militant Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin as an ideological hero. Dugin is now a regular guest on American conservative podcasts, whose hosts frequently amplify their common ideas on social media. When Elon Musk publicly stated on X at the beginning of the month that the U.S. should quit NATO and the United Nations, Dugin echoed him. American and Russian nationalists share many common enemies these days, including the “globalists,” the “neocons,” the “gays,” and the “woke.”

Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian cyberintelligence officers stole thousands of emails and documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. They then publicized this content to embarrass the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and help the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump. Kremlin surrogates, in both traditional media and social media, campaigned in support of Trump and against Clinton. The extent to which these Russian efforts affected the outcome of that election is hard to measure. That Putin tried is clear.

During his first term as president, Trump made his support for Putin, his ideas, and his style of rule explicit. He never once criticized the Russian dictator over his human-rights record or anything else, but instead praised him as a strong leader. Unlike previous presidents, Trump did not publicly meet with Russian human-rights activists or opposition figures, and he paid zero attention to the Russian-supported war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and continued throughout his term. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a cease-fire with Putin in 2019, Europeans were at the table, but Trump’s team was absent. Most shockingly, at a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian dictator against his own intelligence community and would not acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also refused to debrief his senior staff after his one-on-one with Putin at that summit; one official characterized his attitude as suggesting,“This is between me and my friend.”

Trump did not succeed in enacting Putin’s full ideological agenda during that first term, however. Some of Trump’s senior national-security officials slowed or even altogether stopped the president from achieving the objectives he and Putin shared—for instance, ending NATO. In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national-security team, the first Trump administration at times pursued confrontational policies toward Russia, including expelling its diplomats with ties to intelligence, sanctioning its companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. Putin blamed the American “deep state” for Trump’s failure to deliver. Trump sometimes hinted that he agreed.

After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe. They each admire the other’s “strong” leaders. Russian nationalists have pushed for the destruction of the alleged American deep state; Elon Musk and his aides express agreement and are attempting to do just that.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Trump has now made the restoration of his personal relationship with Putin a top foreign-policy priority; negotiating an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is a secondary or tertiary concern. How else to explain why Trump has delivered to Putin multiple concessions without asking for anything in return?

After just a few weeks in office, the list of Trump’s concessions to Russia is truly extraordinary. It includes (1) intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been discontinued; (2) USAID assistance for Ukraine, including funding to repair its energy grid and for anti-corruption programs, has been discontinued; (3) U.S. funding for Russian civil society and independent media operating in exile has been stopped; (4) diplomatic relations with Moscow have been restored, beginning with a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago; and (5) in radical reversal of past policy, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and a handful of other rogue autocracies against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Trump has insisted that (6) Ukraine cannot join NATO; (7) Zelensky must give up territory to Russia; (8) no new military aid for Ukraine will be made available, even previously appropriated funding; (9) U.S. forces deployed in Europe might be reduced and will not participate in any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine; and (10) sanctions on Russia could be lifted, although Trump suddenly reversed himself last week when he said he was “strongly considering” new sanctions and tariffs.

To use Trump’s favorite metaphor for dealmaking, these are not clever “cards” played to shape a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has secured nothing for either the United States or Ukraine by playing them. Instead, the concessions are meant to rekindle a personal relationship between Trump and Putin, anchored by a shared ideology. In all of American history, I cannot think of a more radical change in U.S. foreign policy in such a short period of time.

Many Russians reject Putinism. They remain liberal internationalists, not illiberal nationalists. However, these Russians have no ability to influence politics in Putin’s dictatorship. Many of them now live abroad.

Many Americans likewise reject Trump’s ideological mind meld with Putin. I am one of them; most Americans seem to share my view. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of Americans do not trust Putin, and only 9 percent do. Unlike Russians, Americans still live in a democracy and therefore have the ability to influence their country’s foreign policy. The question moving forward is whether this overwhelming majority of Americans cares enough about this issue to try to do something about it, to try to slow Trump’s historic pivot of putting America on the side of the autocrats and against the democrats. To date, the answer is unclear.

The same question can be posed worldwide. Putinism resonates with millions in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. In Europe and the United States, Putin’s illiberal orthodox populism is more attractive than Xi Jinping Thought, which has some tepid followers in the developing world but very few fans in the developed world. For years, American national-security experts have rightly focused on addressing the rising threat from China, but wrongly neglected the threat from Russia, including this ideological menace.

In our new era of great-power competition between dictators and democrats, Russia is the generally junior partner to China in the axis of autocracies, except when it comes to the appeal of its style of governance. Xi, after all, has courted no ideological allies as powerful as the current president of the United States of America. And yet, the supporters of Putinism are not the majority anywhere—not even in Hungary.  

Right now, the transnational movement of illiberal nationalism is more organized, united, and strategic in its collective actions than the liberal democratic movement. But those in Europe and the United States who support liberal democracy should remember that they far outnumber those who embrace illiberal autocracy, and that they have a history of victory over the forces that oppose them. During the Cold War, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, civil-society organizations, and even religious leaders forged transnational ties in defense of democratic ideas—remember the AFL-CIO’s embrace of Poland’s Solidarity movement? The global anti-apartheid movement? We can do these things again now.  

This is not the first time in history, or even in the past century, that democratic ideas appeared to wane as autocratic ideas appeared to surge. That happened in the 1930s. It happened again in the 1970s, when Marxist-Leninist regimes were seizing power in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, and the practice of American democracy at home was inspiring few worldwide, thanks to the violent suppression of protesters, the assassinations of political figures, and the resignation of President Nixon.

The world democratic movement eventually recovered from those dark periods. It has to find its nerve and recover now. The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

Femke Bol leads the Netherlands team to gold in the 4x400m mixed relay on the opening night of the European Indoor Athletics Championships in Apeldoorn.