Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is “a dictator without elections,” with only a 4 percent approval rating. The war in Ukraine is “madness” and “senseless.” Although it is true that Russia is currently “pounding” Ukraine, “probably anyone in that position would be doing that right now.” Kyiv is “more difficult, frankly, to deal with” than Moscow.

This Russian propaganda could be easily dismissed, were it not being verbalized by President Donald Trump. I was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019; I know that his view on Putin has remained constant for years. In saying recently that dealing with Putin is easier than with Zelensky and that Putin would be “more generous than he has to be,” Trump has simply reprised the sentiments of his first term. In July 2018, when leaving the White House for a NATO summit (where he almost withdrew America from the alliance), then later appointments with Prime Minister Theresa May in England and Putin in Finland (where he seemed to back Putin over U.S. intelligence), Trump said that his meeting with Putin “may be the easiest of them all. Who would think?” Obviously, only Trump.

But now he has turned U.S. policy on the Russo-Ukraine war 180 degrees. Instead of aiding a victimized country with enormous agricultural, mineral, and industrial resources in the heart of Europe, bordering on key NATO allies, a region whose stability and prosperity have been vital to American national security for eight decades, Trump now sides with the invader. Ukrainians are fighting and dying for their freedom and independence, as near neighbors such as Poland’s Lech Walesa fully appreciate. For most Americans, “freedom” and “independence” resonate, but not for Trump.

He has gone well beyond rhetoric. In a nationally televised display, he clashed with Zelensky face-to-face in the Oval Office, ironically a very Wilsonian act: open covenants openly destroyed. Trump suspended U.S. military aid to Ukraine, including vital intelligence, to make Zelensky bend his knee. Even when Trump “threatened” Russia with sanctions and tariffs, the threat was hollow. Russia is already evading a broad array of poorly enforced sanctions, and could evade more. On tariffs, U.S. imports from Russia in 2024 were a mere $3 billion, down almost 90 percent from 2021’s level, before Russia’s invasion, and trivial compared with $4.1 trillion in total 2024 imports.  

[Jonathan Chait: The real reason Trump berated Zelensky]

The Kremlin is delighted. Former President Dmitry Medvedev wrote on X: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud.”  

This is serious, and may be fatal for both Kyiv and NATO. Trump has sought for years to debilitate or destroy the alliance. He doesn’t like it; he doesn’t understand it; he frowns on its Brussels headquarters building; and, worst of all, it was deeply involved in not only Ukraine but Afghanistan, which he didn’t like either. Trump may ultimately want to withdraw from NATO, but in the near term, he can do serious-enough damage simply to render the alliance unworkable. Recent reports that Trump is considering defending only those NATO allies meeting the agreed defense-spending targets mirrors prior suggestions from his aides. This approach is devastating for the alliance.

What explains Trump’s approach to Ukraine and disdain for NATO? Trump does not have a philosophy or a national-security grand strategy. He does not do “policy” as Washington understands that term. His approach is personal, transactional, ad hoc, episodic, centering on one question: What benefits Donald Trump? In international affairs, Trump has suggested repeatedly that if he has good personal relations with a foreign head of state, then America ought to have good relations with that country. While personal relations have their place, hard men such as Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un are not distracted by emotions. Trump thinks that Putin is his friend. Putin sees Trump as an easy mark, pliable and manipulable.

Trump says he trusts that Putin wants peace and will honor his commitments, despite massive contrary evidence. Notwithstanding considerable efforts, Zelensky has never escaped the “perfect” phone call precipitating Trump’s first impeachment. Of course, that call turned on Trump’s now-familiar extortionist threat to withhold security assistance to Ukraine if Zelensky did not produce Hillary Clinton’s server and investigate other supposed anti-Trump activity in Ukraine aimed at thwarting his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

[Gal Beckerman: The key mismatch between Zelensky and Trump]

The entirely personal nature of Trump’s approach also manifests itself domestically. Trump is now reversing what Joe Biden did in Ukraine, just as in his first term, he reflexively reversed Barack Obama. Trump derided Obama for not providing lethal military assistance to Ukraine, so he did just that, sending missiles and more.

Ronald Reagan knew how to handle nations that might commit unprovoked aggression against U.S. interests. Trump clearly does not. This does not reflect differences in strategy, which Trump lacks. Instead, it’s another Trump reversal, this time of The Godfather’s famous line: It’s not business; it’s strictly personal.

Historians like to play a parlor game called periodization, in which they attempt to define an era, often by identifying it with the individual who most shaped the times: the Age of Jackson, the Age of Reagan. Usually, this exercise requires many decades of hindsight, but not so in the 21st century.

Over the past 25 years, the world has bent to the vision of one man. In the course of a generation, he not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own country, and in neighboring countries, but set in motion a chain of events that has shattered the transatlantic order that prevailed after World War II. In the global turn against democracy, he has played, at times, the role of figurehead, impish provocateur, and field marshal. We are living in the Age of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps, that fact helps explain why Donald Trump’s recent excoriation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office felt so profound. The moment encapsulated Putin’s ultimate victory, when the greatest impediment to the realization of the Russian president’s vision, the United States, became his most powerful ally. But Trump’s slavish devotion to the Russian leader—his willingness to help Putin achieve his maximalist goals—is merely the capstone of an era.

Nothing was preordained about Putin’s triumph. Twenty years ago, in fact, his regime looked like it might not survive. With the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian influence in its old Soviet satellites quickly withered. The threat was that democratic revolution would spread ever closer to the core of the old empire, Moscow, as it had in the dying days of communism. Indeed, as Putin prepared to return to Russia’s presidency in 2012, after a stint as prime minister, protests swelled in Moscow and spread to other Russian cities, and then kept flaring for more than a year.  

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Preserving his power, both at home and abroad, necessitated a new set of more aggressive tactics. Resorting to the old KGB playbook, which Putin internalized as a young officer in the Soviet spy agency, Russia began meddling in elections across Europe, illicitly financing favored candidates, exploiting social media to plant conspiracy theories, creating television networks and radio stations to carry his messaging into the American and European heartlands.

Just as the Soviet Union used the international communist movement to advance its goals, Putin collected his own loose network of admirers, which included the likes of the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who venerated Putin for waging a robust counteroffensive on behalf of traditional values, by claiming the mantle of anti-wokeness. The fact that so many Western elites abhorred him titillated these foreign fans.

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration

One of Putin’s core objectives was the protection of his own personal fortune, built on kickbacks and money quietly skimmed from public accounts. Protecting this ill-gotten money, and that of his inner circle, relies on secrecy, misdirection, and theft, all values anathema to democracy.

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

Kleptocrats, in the mold of Russian oligarchy, ardently desire to sock away their money in the relative safety and quiet anonymity of American real estate and banks. Not so long ago, a bipartisan consensus joined together to pass laws that would make it harder for foreign kleptocrats to abuse shell companies to move their cash to these shores. But, as one of his first orders of business, Trump has shredded those reforms. His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

As Putin has sought to impose his vision on the world, Ukraine has been the territory he most covets, but also the site of the fiercest resistance to him—a country that waged revolution to oust his cronies and that has resisted his military onslaught. Until last week, the United States served as the primary patron of this Ukrainian resistance. But the Trump administration has surrendered that role, thereby handing Russia incredible battlefield advantages. Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine's depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization's very survival.

[Garry Kasparov: The Putinization of America]

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Now, with a like-minded counterpart in the White House, he no longer needs to make a case against democracy to his own citizens. He can crow that the system is apparently so unappealing that even the United States is moving away from it.

EU leaders gather for an emergency defence summit in Brussels as future partnership with US remains uncertain.

The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.

Hungary recently escalated its efforts to stamp out pro-democracy groups and media organizations that rely on foreign funding by naming a government minister to investigate USAID’s activities. Today, that minister, András László, was received in Washington by Peter Marocco, the top American official disassembling the agency from the inside. The meeting, which was confirmed to me by a U.S. official and another person familiar with the gathering, reflects the convergence of interests between Budapest and Washington. Like the Trump administration, the Hungarian government has giddily embraced the idea that U.S. aid programs are not only wasteful and unnecessary but also criminal.

“The Hungarian government has decided to closely follow the politically corrupt USAID funding scandal revealed by DOGE and Elon Musk,” László, a member of the European Parliament from Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, wrote on social media last week. He added, “American and European patriots should work together to dismantle the globalist networks operated by Democrats.”

Before today’s meeting, Marocco ordered the termination of all USAID contracts in Hungary, according to the U.S. official I spoke with. Marocco also requested data from the agency’s staff about U.S. programs in Hungary stretching back years.

The goals of the Hungarian investigation, now furthered by U.S. officials, are wide-ranging. It aims to reveal the recipients of U.S. funds and, according to Hungarian right-wing media, “dismantle what officials describe as a deeply embedded international corruption network.” Musk, the billionaire DOGE co-founder who boasted last month of “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” has repeatedly referred to USAID’s work as “criminal,” without providing evidence. Since the inauguration, a DOGE team has embedded itself within USAID, gaining sweeping access to the agency’s payments system while thousands of USAID workers globally have been fired or placed on leave.

The State Department, USAID, and the Hungarian embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have scolded and spurned traditional European allies. For solidarity, they have looked instead to Hungary, which has embraced its role as Europe’s enfant terrible, seeking closer ties to Russia and flouting European Union rules (it recently refused to pay a 200-million-euro fine for failing to comply with the bloc’s asylum policies).

Orbán’s standoff with Brussels is one aspect of a larger effort to steer his country in a more nationalist, authoritarian direction. The prime minister and his allies have steadily gained control over the country’s media landscape as part of a years-long effort to limit dissent and consolidate power within government and across civil society. In the process, Budapest has cracked down on independent organizations reliant on foreign funding, painting them as enemies of the Hungarian state. The crackdown has included the ejection from the country of the Central European University, endowed by the billionaire financier George Soros.

These actions have endeared the Hungarian prime minister to Trump. Orbán traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, multiple times during the U.S. presidential campaign last year, and then again in December to meet with the president-elect.

Today’s meeting wasn’t Marocco’s first audience with Hungarian-government representatives since he became the director for foreign assistance at the State Department. Last month, he reportedly met with Tristan Azbej, a Hungarian official responsible for programs aiding persecuted Christians.

The same week, Orbán vowed in comments on state radio that his government was taking legal action to eradicate nongovernmental organizations and media outlets receiving funding from the U.S. and other foreign sources. He cheered Trump’s moves against USAID and promised that Budapest would examine “line by line” groups funded by the agency.

USAID has supported a wide range of independent media and literacy programs in countries worldwide. In 2023, the agency funded training and other support for 6,200 journalists and aided 707 nonstate media outlets, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press-advocacy group based in New York. The 2025 foreign-aid budget allocated $268.4 million for “independent media and the free flow of information.” Among the media organizations in Hungary that relied on USAID funding is the investigative news website Átlátszó, which received up to 15 percent of its budget from USAID, according to the Financial Times.

The Hungarian government, meanwhile, argues that foreign-funded media organizations are “used as political tools to manipulate public opinion.”

“Their mission?” wrote Orbán’s spokesperson, Zoltán Kovács, of USAID-funded outlets. “To promote a specific ideological agenda, one that aligns with left-liberal interests, supports mass migration, and undermines governments that refuse to toe the globalist line.”

László, the Hungarian official tasked with leading Hungary’s probe of USAID activities, said in a video on X last week that he would “reach out to our American friends to understand how U.S. taxpayers’ money finally ended up in political projects in Hungary.”

“I believe we can work together based on mutual interests,” he added.

Trump-administration officials appear to agree.

Hours after his election victory last Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), said on national television that he would try to “achieve independence from the U.S.A. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” Merz continued, but “it is clear that the Americans … are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

American security guarantees have protected the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Never since then has a chancellor of that country suggested that it emancipate itself from Washington. Not even France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has called for building a “sovereign Europe” capable of defending itself since he was first elected in 2017, could have put the imperative in starker terms. So who is the incoming German chancellor making this transformative demand?

Merz is a conservative by any measure—social, fiscal, political—and far from being the avatar of a freethinking new generation in Germany, he may wind up being the last chancellor to hail from the old one. But history has plans for him. He will likely step into the highest office of Europe’s biggest economy and most powerful state just as the United States, under Donald Trump, abandons its post–World War II role on the continent. Merz, with his right-wing instincts and establishment roots, will be guiding his country, maybe even the continent, through a period of epochal change.

Already, Merz has pledged to increase defense spending and put Paris, Warsaw, and London at the lead of a new policy to shore up Ukraine’s sovereignty and defend Europe from Russia with or without the United States. He has even sought to explore whether France and Britain might extend their nuclear umbrella to the rest of Europe, in place of American protection. At any other time, this agenda of European self-reliance might be a radical one. Now it’s a logical response to events.

When he takes office, most likely at the end of April and at the helm of a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Merz will not be riding a wave of enthusiasm. The CDU won just 28.6 percent of the vote in this election—almost eight points more than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the second-worst showing of the party’s history. And Merz has a personal reputation for being cocky, ambitious, and overly cerebral. He’s a politician with hard edges, and many Germans, especially women, find him hard to like.

[Read: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

At 6 foot 5, the incoming chancellor literally looks down on most people he talks with. He is also a self-made multimillionaire who describes himself as “upper middle class” yet flies his own private propeller plane. He is a former artilleryman in the Bundeswehr who likes authority and orderliness, and he has a taste for cashmere V-neck sweaters and checkered shirts. Once, when a TV crew was following him for a day, he admonished an employee to brush their hair.

The postwar generation to which Merz belongs has governed Germany for decades. Its men and women were raised amid the country’s immediate moral reckoning with the horrors of the Nazi Reich, and they have made this imperative central to their vision. Merz’s grandfather was a Nazi brownshirt and the mayor of Brilon, a picturesque town in the country’s west where Merz also grew up. Two generations later, Merz has watched the rise of the far-right AfD with profound concern, calling it a “disgrace for Germany.”  

Merz’s life in Brilon was economically comfortable but not always easy or orderly. As a child, he spent six months in a tuberculosis clinic run by nuns—an experience he has dryly described as “not nice at all.” His sister was killed in a car crash at age 21. And he was an impatient and irascible teenager who had to leave his local high school for disciplinary reasons, and whose grades were so bad that he had to repeat a year.

Merz’s political career has been similarly jagged; he has probably survived more defeats than any other living German politician. A former judge, he rose to prominence as a member of Parliament in the 1990s as the standard-bearer for the conservative camp within the CDU. Yet in 2000, Merz lost a bid for party leadership to an unassuming East German named Angela Merkel. Once she became chancellor, Merkel made a point of marginalizing her most threatening rival.

Merz left politics in 2009 to make money—lots of it. He joined a law firm in Düsseldorf and sat on the boards of many big corporations, including prestigious investment firms such as BlackRock Germany, of which he was chair, as well as run-of-the-mill companies such as the toilet-paper producer WEPA. Nine years would pass before he returned to politics. By then, in 2018, Merkel was engulfed in criticism for having let nearly a million refugees into Germany from the Syrian civil war. Within minutes of her announcement that she would step down from the CDU leadership, Merz had a statement ready announcing his candidacy. But the CDU didn’t choose him—at least, not at first. Twice, it picked centrists in the mold of Merkel. But the party kept losing electoral ground. Finally, in 2022, its members saw fit to give Merz a chance to revive the CDU by shifting it to the right.

[Read: MAGA has found a new model]

Merz favored a politics of law and order and a relatively hard line on immigration. He has at one point even advocated declaring a state of emergency in order to push migrants back from Germany’s borders, something European Union law would otherwise prohibit. Only weeks ago, he passed a parliamentary motion calling for placing undocumented migrants awaiting deportation in closed facilities. This proposal got through only because it won the votes of the AfD. Merz had earlier promised never to work with the far-right party. Now he told critics that if the AfD wanted to vote for his proposal, he could hardly prevent it.

Some of Merz’s rhetoric around immigration sounds a lot like that of the populist right. He once called Ukrainian war refugees “social-welfare tourists”—though he later apologized for it. He has also designated the sons of migrants who fail to respect female schoolteachers “little pashas.” If all this was meant to reduce the AfD’s appeal by moving the CDU to the right, however, it was a failure. His tough talk did not prevent the AfD from capturing almost 21 percent of the vote this year—double what it got in 2021.

Merz’s economic views may be the ones most starkly challenged by the geopolitical moment he finds himself in. To wrest European security from the North American framework will require new investments, new programs, and, almost inevitably, big spending. Merz brings to this task the instincts of a free-marketeer impatient with government outlay and bureaucracy. In the 2000s, he promised that if he became finance minister, he’d make the income-tax form, which in Germany runs to dozens of pages, fit on a beer tap. In 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, Merz published a book arguing that Germany should cut back its welfare state, deregulate its economy, and encourage people to buy more stocks instead of letting their savings languish in bank accounts. Germany’s economy has stagnated for the past five years, and most of Merz’s solutions to that seem to come at the expense of workers or the environment: reducing unemployment benefits, creating incentives for Germans to work longer hours, and rolling back climate regulation. With the auto industry in crisis, he advocates removing the EU ban on internal-combustion-engine cars that is supposed to begin in 2035.

But conservative economic orthodoxies may soon run up against other priorities, some of them every bit as close to Merz’s core. Like most German politicians of the immediate postwar generation, Merz is a Europeanist. He sees the EU not as a constraint but as a conviction. He is an ardent supporter of Ukraine, having criticized his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, for backing Kyiv too timidly and walking in lockstep with President Joe Biden instead of choosing a more assertive course with Paris and London. Scholz once marketed himself as a “peace chancellor,” to which Merz quipped: “Peace you can find in any cemetery. It is our freedom that we must defend.”

[Read: Is it time to bury Merkel’s legacy?]

Merz wants Europe to become sovereign and free of foreign interference because he believes that the new administration in Washington, like Moscow, seeks to divide and undermine democracy in Europe. The White House, like the Kremlin, seems intent on intervening in elections on behalf of the far right, and on forcing Brussels to walk back regulations on Big Tech that might curtail disinformation and hate speech. Countering this agenda, when it was only a Russian one, was well in line with conservative German values. On Sunday, the chancellor-in-waiting said: “I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America. Just look at the recent interventions in the German election campaign by Mr. Elon Musk … the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

Merz’s conservatism may be what allows him to shepherd Europe through a historic transformation. Just as the anti-communist hard-liner Richard Nixon was uniquely situated to establish American relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and just as the left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was best placed to cut back Germany’s welfare state in the 2000s, Merz, with his stodgy, center-right credentials and postwar pedigree, may be just the leader to get Germans and Europeans to spend big for their emancipation from the United States.

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