In the end, Vučić surprised everyone — with an early concession. “It is clear,” he said, as he took meekly to the podium at SNS headquarters, “that we have lost these elections.” The most powerful man in Serbia for 14 years, a leader who had carefully cultivated a strongman image, stepped down without even a hint of resistance. What made his acknowledgment of defeat even more miraculous was who he lost to: the Student List (SL), a new outfit that emerged out of two years of mass protests. Every one of SL’s 250 candidates had been selected through decentralized student plenums; none was a professional politician. Among them were academics, doctors, lawyers, artists, and athletes. For political novices, the scale of victory amounted to an electoral coup. According to CRTA, an independent pollster, Student List received 52.45% of the vote, while Vučić’s “United Serbia” list received just 39.2%. At just under 70%, turnout was the highest it has been in decades.

Vučić’s defeat sent thousands of people streaming onto the streets across Serbia. Belgrade’s Slavija Square, a traffic roundabout with a large fountain in the middle, became a spontaneous meeting point for mass celebrations. With all traffic stopped, revelers commandeered trams, climbed on top of bus shelters and the rooftops of buildings, and danced the kolo, a traditional folk dance. More than one stranger collapsed sobbing into my arms. It was a multigenerational celebration: university students brought their parents, and toddlers perched on shoulders. Some waved red football flares and set off deafening fireworks. Countless members of the crowd kept repeating “14 years” in a daze and in disbelief. Others chanted “pobeda!” — “victory!”. Some removed chairs from “Ćaciland”, a pro-Vučić encampment across the street from the parliament building, which had become a symbol of the confrontation between the student movement and the government. 

“We’re celebrating our freedom for the first time in 30 years, not 14 years, but 30 years,” Katarina, covered in pins and other Student List regalia, explained to me amid the cacophony. The “30 years” refers to a widely held belief that after the revolution that brought down Slobodan Milošević on 5 October 2000, not nearly enough changed. In Serbia, some even like to say “there was no October 6th”, meaning there was no real reckoning with the past or the atavistic authoritarian strain in society. Following Milošević’s fall, Serbia never underwent a thorough transitional justice process, leaving broad swaths of the security sector unreformed and former ministers like Vučić free to again take power. Student List has vowed to remedy this, and to undertake a rigorous purge that will hold former SNS officials accountable.

It’s about time. Past protest movements against Vučić had always generated excitement, only to peter out within a few months. But the student-led protests never slowed down. The trigger for the two years of unrest was grief, which quickly transmuted into rage. On 1 November 2024, a train-station canopy collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people. Many believed a recent renovation of the canopy had been hindered by corruption. The slogan of the ensuing protests was “corruption kills”, and their symbol was a bloody red handprint. The canopy renovation reportedly cost more than five times as much as the original estimate said it would, and the main project was awarded without a conventional public tender. For many in Serbia, indeed, the canopy collapse was symbolic of a deteriorating country. Under Vučić, critics say, Serbia has become a place where building contracts are awarded based on personal connections; where state institutions are staffed and stripped for parts by regime loyalists; and where health and safety are barely an afterthought.

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Indeed, the Vučić government’s corruption scandals have been legion. In April 2016, masked men demolished buildings in Belgrade’s Savamala district near the planned luxury development Belgrade Waterfront in the middle of the night. The buildings had been blocking construction of the Emirati-funded development, which was part of a deal overseen by Vučić. For years, many have believed that he or someone in his inner circle had ordered it, and on the eve of the election, the former Belgrade chief of municipal police confirmed it. Vučić is also widely said to have a close working relationship with violent football fans and organized crime.

Little wonder, then, that some of the student protests were attended by more than 300,000 people, by far the largest since Milošević’s fall. With little access to the Vučić-dominated media, the students managed to find new ways to boost their visibility. They blockaded the faculties of universities, resulting in nearly six months of disruption to academic life. Hoping to gain the attention of EU officials, who for years regarded good relations with the strongman as a necessary evil for maintaining regional stability and keeping more dangerous ultranationalists under control, some students rode from Serbia to Strasbourg and Brussels on bikes. And, during countless street protests, they held silent vigil while standing in the street, always for exactly 16 minutes — one for each life lost in the canopy collapse.

During the past two years of protest, Vučić attempted to stem the discontent in a number of ways. First, he thought he would simply wait for the protesters to wear themselves out, just like their predecessors had. When that didn’t work, he tried sacrificing some of his closest associates. Early last year, Vučić had his Prime Minister, Miloš Vučević, resign, in an effort to appease the students. But when that failed, Vučić took more drastic measures. In one particularly jarring episode, the government allegedly used a so-called “sonic weapon” against protesters, prompting people to scatter in a sudden panic. Police and SNS-linked thugs have also beaten protesters, in some cases severely.

All the while, Vučić depicted the protests as a Western-backed “color revolution”, while his surrogates have alleged that the movement is supported by “Ustaše”, a reference to the fascist organization that ruled Croatia during the Second World War, and which massacred Serbs, Jews and Roma. The government has also used Pegasus, a powerful Israeli spyware tool, to surveil protesters through their phones. And, in the days preceding the vote, police raided SL offices and the private homes of several SL activists. At least seven people were arrested, accused of planning election-day unrest. But the students and their supporters were undeterred. As more than one told me, “We’re not afraid anymore.” Faced with determined opposition, and with his own party’s support in steep decline, Vučić likely decided that stepping down was preferable to a bloody street revolution.

The students’ most impressive feat was transforming street protest into a viable electoral vehicle. First, SL was adamant that no single leader would come to dominate the movement. This prevented opportunists from hijacking the protests for their own agenda, and excluded the kinds of narcissistic personalities who have historically gravitated toward Serbian politics. This also guarded against replicating the same personalist style that has disfigured Serbian politics for decades. The leaderlessness of the movement made it harder for Vučić to launch salacious smear campaigns against opponents in pro-government tabloids, a signature of his rule that always kept his political rivals cowed. Serbia’s official opposition were also excluded from the movement from early on, as they were often tainted by association with past scandals. As Savo Manojlović, a member of the Belgrade city assembly, and leader of a movement that supported Student List told me, “a crucial role in this process has been played by the emergence of new, uncompromised faces on the political scene”.

Student List is also ideologically heterogeneous, encompassing conservative nationalists, pro-EU liberals, and Leftists in its ranks. Indeed, the diversity of political thought in the movement is itself a testament to the obloquy in which Vučić is held. On Sunday night, Serbian flags and Orthodox Christian iconography predominated among the crowd of revelers, but there were also socialists celebrating in keffiyehs, and even some muted expressions of “Yugonostalgia”. Yet if that “big tent” approach proved effective at winning elections, critics can rightly point out that the lack of clear ideology will ultimately make it difficult to govern. Indeed, absent the singular, unifying cause of bringing down Vučić, SL members may soon find that more divides them than unites them. It helps, at least, that SL claims it does not necessarily aim to transform itself into a traditional political party like the SNS. Instead, members hope to use the movement to dismantle the Vučić regime: then create the conditions for fair ideological and political competition in future. In other words, SL is the custodian of Serbia’s transition to a genuinely democratic system.

SL has also been deliberately ambiguous about most aspects of foreign policy. This was partly a strategic decision, made to keep the focus on Vučić’s domestic malfeasance. As Vuk Vuksanović, a lecturer in foreign policy and grand strategy at King’s College London, tells me, SL’s victory actually means that foreign policy will change the least of any area of Serbian governance. “The Balkans are now a region where people are preoccupied with things closer to home,” Vuksanović says. Indeed, much of SL’s official program deviates little from the SNS line. Under Vučić, Serbia maintained good relations with both the US and Russia, along with China and the EU. SL is already signaling that it will do the same. Yesterday, sociologist and SL representative Jovo Bakić went on RT to pledge that there would be no changes to Serbia-Russia relations, and that SL would continue Vučić’s policy of opposing sanctions on Russia.

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The one area where SL’s foreign policy does dramatically depart from its predecessor is on Israel. Vučić cultivated close ties with Tel Aviv through arms sales, and oversaw the recent inauguration of a new joint Israeli-Serbian drone factory near Belgrade. But SL explicitly says that it would end arms sales to Israel and increase aid to the Palestinians. SL deplores Israel’s wars on its neighbors and view Tel Aviv as one of Vučić’s strongest backers. On the issue of relations with the EU, meanwhile, SL has had to tread more lightly. The movement contains both europhiles and euroskeptics, so has sought to balance between both. “SL has been playing a middle ground,” Vuksanović tells me. “They cannot fully reject the EU because it’s Serbia’s biggest trading partner, meaning the economy depends on it, but they also can’t do hyper-globalism because it irritates conservatives.”

SL’s success at transforming a student-protest movement into an electoral vehicle capable of taking control of the state will undoubtedly be studied for years to come. Surely, many would-be Gen Z activists will see their success as a template ripe for emulation, especially as youth-led protests are spreading across the globe, from India to Albania, while riots rage across Western Europe. If nothing else, the SL example demonstrates that such movements can have other fates besides wanton destruction and fizzling out into nothingness. Indeed, what is perhaps most distinct about SL is that it never descended into street violence. In fact, it always actively discouraged it, aware that the government would use any acts of violence to demonize the movement and justify more repression. Last week, after the last major protest before the election on Slavija Square, students even picked up rubbish left behind by protesters. Yesterday, after the vote, the students cleaned up the park that once hosted Ćaciland. It was symbolic of the task ahead. Now that they’re in power, SL will be cleaning up the mess that earlier generations of Serbs have made for them.

But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense. 

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

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A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending. “That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”. 

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

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Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.  

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

Pakistan has not been alone in its recent diplomatic exertion: Turkey and Egypt also helped bridge positions behind the scenes, while China reportedly weighed in at a critical juncture. Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif also thanked Saudi Arabia for providing “invaluable support” to the entire process. The diplomatic efforts have been so extensive that some say that recent weeks have laid the tentative foundations for a post-war regional order, one in which countries that have taken the initiative to secure a ceasefire could play a leading role. A quartet sometimes referred to as STEP — an acronym for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan — is being touted as a possible vehicle for maintaining peaceful coexistence with Iran while acting as a check on Israel. The development builds on existing trends. That the war’s mediation was enacted entirely by non-Western countries reflects the continued emergence of a more assertive Global South, along with its concomitant: a diminished United States and a curiously absent Europe.

The foreign ministers of Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt met twice last month, first on the sidelines of a summit of Islamic countries in Riyadh, and later in Islamabad for the first multilateral diplomatic meeting of its kind since the war began. That Pakistan would play host made sense: the country nurses good relations with Iran, the US, and China. The premier aim of the second meeting was orchestrating a ceasefire, but it may have contained the seeds of something more. If there is adequate diplomatic will, the coming together of these countries could translate into a reduction in regional dependency on the United States for everything from arms procurement to vanishing security guarantees. In all likelihood, regional powers will have to step in to fill the vacuum left by a weakened United States. According to the New York Times, “many” of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops have been described as “all but uninhabitable”. “This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month,” Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University, said last Thursday. The new reality will likely demand a concerted response. As former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman tells me, “West Asia, like Europe, is now in search of new arrangements to replace the Pax Americana.”

All four countries share a common interest in securing and maintaining peace. Though Saudi Arabia opposed the war before it began, the country was repeatedly targeted by retaliatory Iranian strikes, which prompted their position to change mid-conflict. After a few weeks, the Saudis decided that if the US started the war, then the US should finish it. And yet, their participation in the quartet indicates that they have also been hedging. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Turkey have real reason to fear that state collapse in Iran could spill across their borders. “In the event of Iranian nation-state collapse, the potential for more chaos in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province could be exploited by armed factions fighting the Pakistani government,” Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, tells me.

Similarly, Turkey shares a 534-kilometer border with Iran, and is concerned that Kurdish militant groups could pose a cross-border security threat in the event of state collapse or a US-Israeli fomented uprising. Meanwhile, in Egypt, soaring energy prices and trade route disruptions — particularly those affecting shipping through the Suez Canal and Red Sea — have placed more pressure on an already brittle economy. Pakistan’s economic situation is also delicate: the country had only just begun to recover from one of the most devastating economic crises in its history when the war began. There were other sources of worry for Pakistan as well: the country is home to the second-largest Shia Muslim population in the world after Iran; at least 26 protesters were killed in clashes with police in Pakistan after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike last month. Much of Pakistan’s Shia population regarded Khamenei as their spiritual leader.

Significantly, all four countries have also been eager to secure good relations with President Donald Trump. All are founding members of his so-called “Board of Peace”. Bilateral relations have also improved during the President’s second term. Last year, Trump returned from a visit to the Gulf touting that Saudi Arabia had pledged $600 billion in investments in the United States. Turkey-US relations also appear to be on better footing, a development rooted both in the personal rapport between Trump and President Erdoğan and in revised US policy: the Trump administration lifted crippling sanctions on Syria last year, and supported the integration of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the Syrian army, two of Turkey’s key demands for post-Assad Syria. The government of Pakistan announced last year that it was nominating Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, while in the White House, Pakistan’s army chief and de facto ruler, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is known as “Trump’s favourite field marshal”. And when Trump announced last year’s supposed ceasefire in Gaza, he did so in the seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt — against a backdrop emblazoned with the words “peace in the Middle East”.

Despite all this Trumpian backscratching, the Israeli-US war on Iran has inevitably forced some nations to revise their thinking. For many, the Americans have discredited themselves, both as reliable negotiators and guarantors of security. “The envoys fielded by the Trump administration are persona non grata with Iran due to their repeated participation in deceptions to facilitate surprise attacks and their perceived amateurish incompetence,” Freeman says. Further, he suggests that the Israeli-American assault on Iran demonstrated indifference towards many allies in the region. “It has become apparent that the United States cannot defend them against Iran and that it assigns military priority not to them but to Israel,” he says. It’s now clear that they need “a new security architecture in their region to coexist with Iran and to deal with the direct and indirect threat from Israel as well as unconditional American support for Israeli aggression”.

Recent events are likely to lead to greater regional cooperation — a process that was already well underway before the latest war on Iran began. After Israel’s attack on Qatar was met with only the faintest of rebukes from Washington last year, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement; like Nato’s Article 5, the agreement stipulates that “any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both”. The move was widely interpreted as a sign the Saudis were no longer relying on the United States for their defense. In January, it was reported that Nato member Turkey was also thinking about joining the Saudi-Pakistani defense pact. This generated talk of a so-called “Muslim Nato”, a development that is probably still far off, if it’s even possible at all. But more piecemeal defense pacts are very possible. Experts have noted that these countries complement one another: Turkey has a large defense industrial base, while Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And Saudi finance would be a welcome balm on both countries’ ailing economies.

Meanwhile, Europe is nowhere to be found. The EU’s influence in the region and the world is at its lowest ebb in recent memory. With its singular preoccupation with Ukraine, Europe has effectively become a single-issue continent. Indeed, there was no European involvement in the Iran War mediation efforts at all. When British prime minister Keir Starmer announced he was travelling to the Gulf to demonstrate his support for the ceasefire last Wednesday, he was roundly mocked on social media as the face of British impotence and irrelevance. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen faced similar opprobrium for Europe’s passivity when she announced her own support for the ceasefire and gratitude for Pakistani mediation. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte flew to the United States last Wednesday in a slapdash effort to convince Trump not to follow through with threats to pull the US out of Nato. In a servile interview on CNN, Rutte said that the world was a safer place “thanks to Trump’s leadership”. With the exception of Spain and some vague gestures at independent thought from Austria and France, most European leaders have appeared largely content to play the role of pliant vassals.

European acquiescence contrasts with Turkish assertiveness, with Ankara appearing especially intent on shaping the emergent order to its liking. Before leaving for a meeting of the quartet in Islamabad on 28 March, Turkey’s foreign minister Hakan Fidan spoke to an audience in Istanbul about the need for the region to take responsibility for its own problems. “Our region should not be vulnerable to external intervention anymore,” he said. “We need to break this vicious cycle with a common vision and joint endeavor, and we are going to achieve it through regional ownership.” The concept of “regional ownership” is something the Turkish government has promoted extensively in recent years. It “implies that major developments in the region directly affect Turkey, and therefore Turkey has an obligation to be involved in order to shape their course”, Mustafa Caner, assistant professor at the Middle East Institute of Sakarya University, tells me. “If extra-regional great powers act recklessly and irresponsibly, regional countries must assume responsibility themselves.” Other members of the quartet concur. As one Pakistani official told me, “together, [the four countries] represent a form of cooperative, action-oriented diplomacy from the region that has been absent for too long”.

But last Wednesday, the Financial Times alleged that Pakistan’s mediation hadn’t been so self-directed after all. According to the report, Trump had ordered Pakistan to secure a truce, since the US purportedly believed that Iran would be more likely to accept the offer “if it was delivered by a Muslim-majority neighbor state”. A blunder made by Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif fueled speculation that Pakistan was doing Trump’s bidding: when the premier posted the ceasefire proposal on X, he mistakenly included a subject line that read “draft — Pakistan’s PM message on X”. Some interpreted this as evidence that Sharif’s team had posted a statement written by the Trump administration. But a Pakistani official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, pushed back against suggestions that Pakistan was merely acting on Trump’s behalf. “For any successful role of a facilitator, you need to have the trust of both sides and their common belief that their interests are better served by coming to the table,” the official said. “Therefore, the question of one party pushing Pakistan to play a certain role doesn’t arise.”

The other three STEP countries also share a desire to present themselves to the world as peacemakers. At the opening ceremony of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza last November, Egyptian warplanes flew a banner that read “Welcome to the land of peace”. The country has been eager to depict itself “as a beacon of peace and civilization in a volatile region”. In recent years, Turkey has hosted multiple rounds of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, leveraging its “in-between” geography to promote itself as a reliable alternative to Western mediation. And at the beginning of Trump’s second term, Saudi Arabia rolled out the red carpet for high-level negotiations between the United States and Russia. Cynics may be tempted to view the “peacemaker” nation-branding as a kind of “peace-washing” — an attempt by strongmen to distract from mounting domestic woes and put on a humanitarian face for the world. And yet even the most virulent of critics probably prefer that these peace initiatives exist rather than not.

It remains to be seen whether the quartet’s diplomacy contains the seeds of something more lasting. As JD Vance left the failed talks in Islamabad on Sunday morning, he hinted that a peace agreement may still be reached soon. Successful mediation in the current conflict might give the quartet the confidence and momentum necessary for a more durable bloc to take root. Either way, there is no going back to the previous state of affairs. While Iran is unlikely to succeed in forcing the full withdrawal of the US military from the Middle East, the American role will almost certainly be reduced. For those with the political will and diplomatic imagination, this should set the stage for a new order to emerge.

But the most significant part of Trump’s anti-interventionist speech, delivered on the first evening of a historic three-day trip to the Gulf, was not in its rhetoric but in policy. In a dramatic announcement, he stated that he would be ordering the “cessation of sanctions” against Syria. This, he said, would give the new government in Damascus “a chance at greatness”. From across the region, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.

Among the most punitive in the world, the sanctions on Syria were introduced during the long reign of the Assad family, starting in the Seventies. But the most debilitating sanctions were imposed in the last years of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, who was ousted in December by Islamist rebels led by the country’s new de facto president Ahmed al-Sharaa. Leaders with a stake in regional stability, including many assembled in Riyadh, had worried that absent sanctions relief, Syria could soon become a failed state — one that could potentially descend into full-scale sectarian civil war and even dissolution, sending more refugees towards Turkey and Europe.

In Syria, where some people haven’t received salaries for months, sanctions have strangled the economy, inhibited foreign investment, hampered the provision of humanitarian aid, and surely placed increased strain on existing fissures within society. As a result, the news boosted Syria’s beleaguered currency, with the pound strengthening against the dollar for the first time in years.

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Sanctions relief, coupled with Trump’s brief meeting with Sharaa yesterday — the first such meeting between a Syrian and American leader in 25 years — mean relations between the two countries have been suddenly transformed. This is due in part to Al-Sharaa’s wise choice to invest heavily in Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia, and aggressive diplomatic outreach that began immediately after his forces seized power. Indeed, convincing the region and the West to trust him despite his history as a leader of militant Islamist groups has been central to his government’s charm offensive. During the US occupation of Iraq, the new president spent years as an inmate in an American prison infamous for nurturing jihadists. Upon his release, he returned to Syria to fight, first with ISIS and then al-Qaeda, eventually severing ties with both to form his own ostensibly more moderate outfit, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Since his ousting of Assad, Sharaa has embraced the language of inclusivity, meeting many minority leaders and securing cautious support from many corners of the EU. Even so, spasms of sectarian violence have tempered the initial optimism that accompanied Assad’s fall.

In Syria, there has been widespread jubilation at the news of sanction relief. But removing US sanctions will not be as simple or as straightforward as many might wish. As Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow at Defense Priorities, explains, Syria has “multiple sanctions regimes in place” — making their revocation complicated. Some, such as Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) sanctions and Executive Order (EO) sanctions, can be lifted unilaterally by the president or his team. More difficult to remove will be the so-called Caesar sanctions, which require Congressional approval. The president can only waive these for up to 180 days, and even that requires him certifying to various congressional committees that this is in America’s national security interest.

One alternative might be simply to ignore the law once those six months are up — something the administration has proven more than happy to do elsewhere. Yet as Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, says, not everyone in Washington will be eager to help the new Syrian government. “There are elements in Washington that are very skeptical towards this idea that Sharaa has moved past his extremist past,” Cafiero says. They would want the sanctions to remain in place for longer.

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Beyond the excitement that accompanied Trump’s sanctions announcement, though, there was another, quieter message that received less attention: removing sanctions on Syria would give the United States an exit strategy. Behind all his praise of the Gulf’s leadership for the region’s achievements, and denigration of failed Western nation-building projects, was an unspoken declaration of his administration’s plans for the Middle East: a policy that would swap Western dependence for regional self-reliance and a reduction if not total withdrawal of the US troops on the ground in northeast Syria.

The US military presence supports local forces in countering ISIS, but the specter of withdrawal has been in the air since Trump won the November election. Assad’s fall a few weeks later forced a reassessment in an altered security environment. But before this week, the Trump administration appeared to have no coherent policy on Syria. Certainly, the rest of the administration’s messaging on Sharaa has been skeptical at best. Sebastian Gorka, Director of Counterterrorism at the US National Security Council, expressed reservations in February: “He was a jihadist for a long time,” he said. “Has he reformed himself? Is he a better man now? Does he believe in a representative (democratic) government?… In my 24 years of studying jihadist movements, I have never seen a successful jihadist leader evolve into a democrat or embrace representative government.”

What’s more, during her confirmation hearing earlier this year, Trump’s current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, denounced Sharaa for “dancing in the streets on 9/11”. And while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not directed such pointed criticism at the Syrian president, there were other, subtler indications that he would not support the new Islamist leadership in Damascus: in March, new photos revealed that Hegseth had the word “kafir” — meaning “infidel” or “non-believer” — tattooed on his arm in Arabic. All this made this week’s developments particularly striking. After meeting President Sharaa, Trump had nothing but praise for him, calling him a “young, attractive guy, a tough guy with a strong past”.

Trump’s new Syria policy, then, seems to put him at odds with top members of his own team. It also suggests that there are other powerful figures who hold considerable sway over his decision-making. Trump has credited Sharaa’s two most ardent backers in the region, Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with convincing him to lift US sanctions on Syria. That they were able to do so suggests that both Riyadh and Ankara now play a preeminent role in shaping Washington’s thinking in the Middle East. It also implies that Trump is not taking all his cues from Israel. Earlier this year, it was reported that Israel had lobbied the US to keep its sanctions on Syria. And, just a few weeks ago, the IDF bombed an area next to the presidential palace in Damascus, only one of the many attacks it has launched against Syria since Assad’s fall. Now, in a dramatic turn of events, Trump is establishing friendly relations with the new Syrian president — on a trip to the Middle East with no scheduled stop in Israel.

Indeed, this week’s trip has exhibited Trump’s predilection for forming alliances with erstwhile foes. Trump emphasized that he was “willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be profound… I have never believed in having permanent enemies.” And in Trump’s world, new relationships are best solidified through dealmaking. This week’s deals have been of a historic size: on Tuesday, Trump secured a $600-million commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States. Sharaa has proven a quick study: though Syria lacks Saudi Arabia’s enormous financial resources, he reportedly offered Trump what he could: a Trump Tower in Damascus. During his meeting with Trump yesterday, Sharaa also invited the United States to invest in Syria’s oil and gas sector.

But, as Cafiero says, American investors will likely remain hesitant, at least initially. Instead, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will be Syria’s most important partners in making investments. The sanctions may soon vanish, but terrorism designations are just one reason why Western governments and companies may be reluctant to invest. With the US looking to reduce its military footprint in the region while strengthening its business partnerships, Trump’s friends in the Gulf appear poised to consolidate their influence in the new Syria.

A few years ago, the idea seemed fanciful. Turkey had just been hit by twin earthquakes, killing more than 55,000 people. As the country struggled to recover from the devastation, and amid a mounting economic crisis, Erdoğan’s Turkish Century seemed destined to remain confined to the realm of fantasy and propaganda. But just two years on, the stars seemed seem to be aligning. As the old order collapses, Turkey is on the ascent, and Erdoğan is poised to take advantage. With Assad gone from Syria, and Iran’s regional influence greatly diminished, it is Turkey that looks ready to fill its place.

All the while, Turkey’s profile has been rising in the West, where the fraying transatlantic partnership is rendering Europe weaker and more peripheral by the hour. As the Trump administration raises the spectre of retreat, a disoriented Europe is scrambling to shore up its defense, and Turkey — which boasts the second largest army in NATO and a burgeoning defense industry — suddenly looks like a formidable partner. Ankara seems to be aligning itself with the EU’s bloc of Atlanticist liberals, while European leaders have shown interest in enhanced cooperation. Turkey has been invited to attend various strategic meetings in Europe and the abrupt surge in overtures prompted Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to quip that the Europeans were now “rediscovering” Turkey’s existence.

Earlier this month, Erdoğan said that “establishing European security in the absence of [Turkey] is inconceivable”. Zelenskyy was already well aware of this. On the day peace talks between Russia and the United States began in Saudi Arabia last month, which sidelined both Ukraine and the EU, it was Erdoğan who the Ukrainian President chose to visit. Only the Turkish leader was capable of projecting strength enough to command the respect of both Putin and Trump. It is clear that, in the emergent Trumpian world, one shorn of liberal platitudes about “shared values” and “defending democracy”, Erdoğan carries more weight than Kaja Kallas and Olaf Scholz. And Turkey, a Black Sea power that has retained relations with both Russia and Ukraine, as well as China and the United States, now appears better positioned than many Western states.

Turkey’s new weight in global affairs seems to have emboldened Erdoğan to take drastic authoritarian measures domestically. Earlier this week, Turkish police arrested his main political rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, on charges of corruption and terrorism. Some 100 other people were also arrested in a crackdown on the opposition and government critics. With Trump in the White House and the EU’s relative strength diminished, Erdoğan knows there will be little substantive pushback as he employs draconian methods to extend his political longevity.

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The response to the political turmoil in Turkey has been dramatic: protesters have flooded the streets of Turkish cities and Turkish markets have tumbled since İmamoğlu’s arrest. If Erdoğan appears as an erratic autocrat at home, abroad he is seeking to depict himself as a constructive mediator and standard bearer of regional security. He has recently offered to host peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, leveraging Turkey’s middle power status to present Ankara as a constructive bridge builder. This expands on the role Turkey played earlier in the war, when, in early 2022, it negotiated the Black Sea grain deal and brokered peace talks. Positioning himself as an indispensable middleman, Erdoğan has also expressed support for Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while the two men call each other friends. Though Erdoğan had “no meaningful dialogue” with Biden, Trump has repeatedly described Erdoğan as “a very smart guy” and “very tough”; he has also credited the Turkish President with the fall of Assad. During an official phone call earlier this week, Trump reportedly told Erdoğan that he entrusted Turkey with Syria’s fate. Matching his words with action, Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Ankara is one of his closest and most trusted associates, Tom Barrack, the top fundraiser for the President’s 2016 campaign. It’s a position that has been vacant since early September.

Marginalized by America, EU membership has also long eluded Turkey. Though it became a candidate country around the turn of the millennium, its accession was blocked, ostensibly over its democratic deficits and human rights record. But many suspected this rationale concealed an unspoken truth: Turks are Muslim and therefore incompatible with the European project, which has always been more civilizational in character than its liberal proponents like to admit. On rare occasions, someone acknowledges this. In a 2002 interview, Convention on the Future of the EU chair (and former French President) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing said that Turkish membership would spell “the end of the EU as a political union”. Two years later, internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein said that if Turkey joined the EU, the “liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain”.

In any case, European leaders have often found Turkey more useful outside the EU than in it. During the early years of the Syrian Civil War, millions of refugees entered Turkey. Then, in 2015, an unprecedented number fled onward into the EU. Eager to prevent further new arrivals, the EU struck a deal: Brussels would pay the Turkish government to house Syrians. As far as Europe was concerned, Turkey was a convenient buffer state, useful for the offshoring of the EU’s problems rather than an equal partner. The 2016 attempted coup in Turkey contributed to a further deterioration in relations with EU countries. But recent weeks have seen a reimagining of this relationship, with a country once regarded as a fringe irritant elevated to the status of major player integral in European security.

If recent months have seen the tables turn for Turkey-EU relations, then the shift in relations with Syria have been yet more momentous. Turkey opposed Assad right from the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, in 2011, and for years furnished the Islamist opposition with direct and indirect assistance. His fall last year, and the victory of opposition forces led by former al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was celebrated as their own — and not without reason. There is talk that Turkey might train the new Syrian army and open airbases in the country; now that HTS is in power, Erdoğan is hoping to reshape the country and region to his liking. The ambition is political as well as economic: the day after Damascus fell, Turkish construction-related stocks, primarily in steelmakers and cement, soared to new heights. In Syria’s ruined infrastructure, Turkish firms see a lucrative opportunity.

Even recent massacres of members of the Alawite sect by Sunni militants have allowed Turkey to advance a long-held interest: the thwarting of the Kurdish led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Earlier this month, the new Syrian government signed a landmark agreement with the SDF, which Ankara views as a terrorist affiliate owing to its ties to Kurdish militants in Turkey. The agreement stipulates the integration of all civil and military institutions in SDF-held northeastern Syria into a unified Syrian state. The deal also dissolved the SDF’s autonomous administration, which Turkey regarded as a threat to its security. Pro-government media in Turkey has framed the agreement as a success in securing the SDF’s “disarmament”. Meanwhile, a delegation of senior Turkish officials rushed to Damascus to press for its implementation in line with Ankara’s interests.

While it may yet be derailed, the agreement would remove the main impediment to Turkey-US relations: the US backing of the SDF. America currently has 2,000 troops in Syria to support the SDF in its fight against ISIS, but the Trump administration has hinted it might recall them. The agreement between the SDF and Damascus is seen as a prerequisite for this.

Erdoğan also has high hopes that he can now repatriate many of the millions of Syrians who have fled to Turkey in recent years. If Syria’s security situation spirals into further sectarian violence, Erdoğan risks paying a heavy political price. The initial arrival of Syrian refugees provoked a xenophobic backlash in Turkey, boosting the electoral fortunes of the nationalist opposition to Erdoğan, who see the presence of so many conservative Muslims in the country as a threat to Turkey’s secular tradition. They will only return voluntarily to a stable, functioning Syria. The massacres earlier this month already mean that the Trump administration is all but certain to keep its crippling Assad-era sanctions in place, which will make it far harder to entice Syrians back home. Regime change in Damascus has therefore presented Erdoğan with both immense opportunities and risks.

Assad’s overthrow has also revived talk of the so-called “Turkish model” — an old idea that held up Turkey as the pinnacle of regional success. The model is associated with Erdoğan’s 2000s-era honeymoon period with the West. Turkish sociologist Cihan Tugal has described it as “a marriage of formal democracy, free market capitalism and (a toned down) conservative Islam — Islamic liberalism”. This meant that Erdoğan’s conservative Muslim government could justify un-Islamic practices like alcohol consumption in economic terms, as essential for boosting tourism. The model was a response to the Iranian revolution and the destabilizing reverberations it had sent throughout the region; it was an attempt to incorporate the threat of political Islam rather than suppressing it. During the first decade of the new millennium, many believed the Turkish model might be the answer to the Middle East’s woes: it promised to make Islam both governable and modern.

As far as Turkey’s Western admirers were concerned, the model was a success: it nurtured the entrepreneurial instincts of Anatolian businessmen and tempered any excesses in piety through exposure to globalization and international capital markets. At the height of the Arab Spring, in 2011, when the Turkish model was being prescribed for the entire region, Turkey’s economy was growing faster than any country in Europe. Infrastructure projects multiplied, the country’s network of roads grew by 10,000 miles; the number of airports doubled to 50; Turkish Airlines flew to more destinations than any other airline on Earth; and gleaming shopping malls and mosques proliferated across the country.

At first glance, it appears that the new leaders of Syria would be the ideal pupils for the Turkish model. Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa sounds a bit like Erdoğan did in the mid-2000s. While carefully cultivating a pious image for himself, the former al-Qaeda emir has promised an “inclusive” political process that will reflect the will of the people. He claims to have embraced pragmatism and fashions himself as a neoliberal. He’s so convincing that “globalists” of the old school have been desperate to hear more: in January, al-Sharaa’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, was interviewed on the Davos stage by none other than Tony Blair. A few weeks later, al-Sharaa was a guest on Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast The Rest is Politics.

Even in the unimaginably optimistic scenario that would see Syria replicate Turkey’s example, it wouldn’t be a recipe for universal success. The Turkish model always contained major flaws. For one thing, its vast economic growth was not felt by most Turks. Even at the pinnacle of the model’s supposed success, Turkey still had a high unemployment rate, and inequality was the third highest of all OECD countries. In the end, then, the Turkish model contained within it the seeds of its own demise: the new middle class that had been empowered and enriched by neoliberalization ultimately rebelled against Erdoğan’s neoliberal government, culminating in the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. The failures of the Arab Spring, along with the government’s draconian response to the Gezi Park unrest, spelled the end for the optimistic period associated with the Turkish model. As liberal, democratic Islam and a path to EU membership receded from view, a more conservative and authoritarian version took its place. Though Erdoğan kept the neoliberalism, this vision has endured there ever since.

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At the same time, Erdoğan’s grand ambitions for Turkey’s role in the world are constrained by a gloomy domestic reality. Turkey’s economy is now in tatters. Last summer, it sank into recession and inflation has been sky-high for years, hitting a peak of 85.5% in October 2022. As of December, it was still a staggering 44.4%. In spring of last year, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the municipal elections to İmamoğlu’s secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in a sweeping, nationwide defeat.

The fall of Assad, then, was a life raft for Erdoğan, as he struggled to navigate these domestic woes. But the neoliberal Islam of early Erdoğan is unlikely to provide Damascus with a similar boost. Donning a suit, courting the affections of the WEF, and preaching the gospel of neoliberalism like a Pole in 1991 have not yet enabled the new Syrian government to bring sectarian strife under control, or convince their doubters that they seek to build anything other than a Sunni supremacist state. And even if they could, the fact that the Trump administration and other Right-wing populists are challenging the entire liberal order — tearing down free-trade treaties, withdrawing from multilateral institutions, and raising the specter of de-globalization — makes the Davos crowd and their models look even more outmoded, almost like a relic.

If Turkey can’t export peace or a recipe for economic growth to Syria, Erdoğan could yet profit from war. The country’s booming defense industry is fast becoming a source of national pride. According to Erdoğan, Turkey now ranks eleventh in the world in defense industry exports. Last year, its defense exports totalled $7.1 billion, an increase of 29% from $5.5 billion in 2023, while its defense products are now exported to 180 countries around the world. In particular, Turkey has excelled in the production of drones. Its flagship product, the Bayraktar TB2, has been described as “the drone that changed the nature of warfare” for its affordability and capacity to evade air defenses.

Also burgeoning is Turkey’s space program, though few outside of Turkey may have heard about it. Turkey is building up its existing space research and development to supplement its defense industry. At the end of last year, construction began on its first spaceport in Somalia. (Turkey opened its first African military base in Mogadishu in 2017 and is rapidly expanding its presence across Africa.) Meanwhile, the Turkish government has acknowledged that it plans to use its spaceport for missile testing. In space as on Earth, Turkey has sought to diversify its foreign relations: it has applied to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a planned lunar base led by the Russian Roscosmos and China’s National Space Administration that is a competitor to the American Artemis program. Erdoğan has also met with Elon Musk and the two are said to enjoy cordial relations, the Turkish president expressing an interest in collaborating with Musk in the future, since they are both “actively working in the fields of space and technology”.

With this array of cards to play, Erdoğan is now making a renewed bid for EU membership. This time, though, he is not just asking for Turkey’s accession; instead, he is fashioning himself as the EU’s savior. “It is Turkey and its full EU membership that can save the European Union from its deadlock, ranging from the economy to defense and from politics to international standing,” he said at the end of last month.

Of course, not everyone in Europe will be happy about the prospect of closer relations with Turkey. Erdoğan and his ambitions are still viewed with suspicion by many. Distrustful observers have deemed his civilizational rhetoric and aspirations “neo-Ottomanism” — an irredentist ideology that would supposedly see the return of old imperial lands to Turkey. Steve Bannon has described Erdoğan as “the most dangerous man in the world” over his alleged desire to restore the Ottoman Empire. Such fears are misplaced: “neo-Ottomanism” is more of a rhetorical device used to fire up his base than a sinister plan for territorial reconquest. Still, Erdoğan’s civilizational rhetoric makes some in Europe bristle. Only last year the Turkish President asserted that “the West’s progress — built on blood, tears, massacres, genocide, and exploitation… has temporarily gained the upper hand to strangle the divine and human-centered civilization of the East”. Such proclamations are standard fare among leaders outside the West, but surely trouble some in Europe.

Others still are concerned about Erdoğan’s “transactional” approach to foreign policy, on full display when Sweden and Finland made bids to join NATO. Erdoğan wielded Turkey’s veto power to block the membership of both Nordic states until they agreed to crack down on Kurdish exiles accused of terrorism. If some EU leaders are prepared to embrace Erdoğan to fortify European security, they know he’ll expect to receive something in return.

This week’s arrest of İmamoğlu will be another major concern for those already skeptical of deepening EU-Turkey relations. It will also be a significant test of widely touted “European values”: will European leaders prioritize defense and security (and therefore preserving their relationship with Erdoğan) over democracy? Blunt-force authoritarian tactics can only strengthen European reservations about the prospect of enhanced cooperation, but it is also entirely possible that European leaders will simply choose to look the other way: since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Brussels has pivoted to a more aggressive posture, adopting the vision of a so-called “geopolitical Europe” that is less concerned with values and has “at last learned to speak the language of power”. Erdoğan fits into such a picture perfectly.

Indeed, Turkey’s message of European renewal has been gaining traction. Though the EU is effectively closed to new members, and Turkish accession will not be forthcoming, the country is suddenly being treated as a formidable power worthy of respect. After four years of Biden, during which European liberals paid lip service to combating authoritarianism and defending democracy, their sudden embrace of Erdoğan reveals more than just the extent of Turkey’s new relative power. That the Europeans must line up now to kiss the sultan’s ring demonstrates how swiftly the world has changed.

Or maybe that’s just me. Despite her many years in the public eye as elite arm candy, including her four years as first lady, we still don’t really know who she is. In 2012, Melania tweeted a photo of a Beluga whale with the question, “what is she thinking?” Twelve years on, it is still difficult to ascertain. Years of relentless press scrutiny and a new memoir have supplied us only with hints. This impenetrability is part of what makes her such a perfect site for our projections. We see what we want to see.

Liberals love to hate her. She has been mocked for her accent, for being multilingual, and has been the victim of xenophobia and sexist barbs. “I can say ‘anal costs extra’ in six languages,” was one viral meme. News that she was going to make changes to the White House rose garden in 2020 was met with a xenophobic tweet storm by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, expressing fury that a “foreigner” had “the audacity to … pull up history dating back a lifetime…These trashy, evil, stupid people need to get out of our house. What GALL she has.” American comedian Rosie O’Donnell has tweeted a video suggesting that Melania’s beloved only son, Barron, had autism. And feminists described her delightedly as “the only first lady to pose naked”. With Melania, the rigid dictates about how we use language to talk about identity no longer apply. We can say what we like.

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Now Melania is returning to the White House, and she is already signalling that she’ll be charting an independent course. She has refused the traditional tea meeting with outgoing First Lady, Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s alleged role in the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022. And she is not the least bit approachable, unlike Michelle Obama who did folksy Q&As on Vine, or Jill Biden, who once tweeted “you can take the girl out of Philly” after physically blocking protesters with her own body, prompting Vox to applaud her “relatable toughness”. Melania is restrained and unknowable — a cipher in an era of garish American confessionalism.

Admittedly, her protectiveness is hard-earned. A former friend, confidante and advisor, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, recorded their private conversations and wrote a tell-all book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of my Friendship with the First Lady. Most salaciously, the book details the tensions between Melania and her daughter-in-law, Ivanka. Wolkoff describes her efforts to sideline Ivanka at the inauguration and keep her out of official portraits, while Melania privately refers to her daughter-in-law as “Princess”.

The announcement of her memoir, Melania, was treated as yet another violation of decorum, a departure from sanctified democratic tradition, and therefore suspect. Her patriotic immigrant story, a fairy tale about becoming American, was described as a last-ditch cash grab before the election: another tawdry consumer item for sale alongside the Trump coins, the trading cards, and the $100,000 Trump Victory Tourbillion watch. (There is also an 18K “First Lady” watch in rose gold, which retails for a more modest sum of $799). But while the Trumps’ tacky profiteering is undeniable, she was hardly the First Lady to monetise her position. Michelle Obama’s own memoir, Becoming, received a soft-focus rock star treatment: it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and was accompanied by a stadium tour and soundtrack by Questlove. In 2018, the Obamas signed a multi-year deal with Netflix, a corporate partnership that was never subjected to similar criticism by the liberal commentariat.

Melania was born in 1970 in Slovenia, the wealthiest republic of what was then socialist Yugoslavia. She describes an idyllic life full of foreign travel, sports cars, and fashion — hardly the drab, walled-off hell of many Cold War propagandists’ fantasies. Her upbringing in the republic of Slovenia during the Seventies and Eighties was happy, she insists; she wanted for nothing. Young Melania Knaus ran on the cobblestone streets of the UNESCO World Heritage city Dubrovnik in Croatia; she went shopping in Italy, and walked in her mother’s fashion shows in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. She is therefore very much a child of the socialism of leader Josip Broz Tito, himself a lover of luxury cars, yachts, and fine cigars. Tito also cultivated an image of elite glamour.

Around the time of Melania’s birth, Tito was photographed driving Sophia Loren around in a golf cart and hosting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the Croatian coast. An entry from Burton’s diary in 1971 notes that Tito and his wife lived in “remarkable luxury unmatched by anything else I’ve seen”. The very next year, bronzed Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione opened the opulent Penthouse Adriatic Club on the Croatian island of Krk, which included a luxury hotel and casino, and was staffed by female “pets” in skimpy French maid uniforms. There were even rumours that one of the swimming pools was filled with champagne. When it flopped and closed the very next year, Guccione attempted a similarly inspired hotel and casino project in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But misfortune struck again and he ran out of money. The project was soon rescued by none other than Donald Trump, who purchased the half-finished Guccione property, opening the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in 1984. Melania’s image can therefore easily be situated within the Yugoslav tradition, and she herself can be seen as an extension of the golden age of Seventies Titoist luxury and glamour.

But nothing in the book answers the question always lurking: “What is she thinking?” Written in superficial, thank you-note politesse, Melania, in typical fashion, recedes from view. The delivers the stiff immigrant narrative, light on personal details but heavy on easy moralising. “Life’s circumstances shape you in many ways, often entirely beyond your control,” she writes. “Your birth, parental influences, and the world in which you grow up. As an adult, there comes a moment when you become solely responsible for the life you lead. You must take charge, embrace that responsibility, and become the architect of your own future.”

It is standard pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps fare, Americana imbued with the usual veneration of hard work and self-reliance. But Melania is aligning herself with a particular kind of immigrant, the kind that is part of her husband’s flock: the “good”, Trump-supporting foreigner who is patriotic, embraces American values, and does not feel victimised by their adopted country. In Melania’s world, we can surmise, immigrants of her kind stand in contrast to those who resent their country, reject its values, and call it racist. The latter see structural racism and xenophobia as the forces that have ultimately shaped their lives: responsibility is mostly external to oneself. In contrast, for the Trumpian immigrant, responsibility lies within. Despite years of Democratic Party courting, the recent presidential election has made clear that a great number of foreign-born Americans now identify more closely with Melania’s immigration narrative.

While she takes great care to depict her early years in sunny terms, there are indications that all was not easy. “As a child, I was somewhat shielded from the darker aspects of the system, but its presence loomed in the back of our minds,” she says. We know from other sources that her father, Viktor Knavs, was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and appears in the police files of UDBA, the Directorate for State Security. Identified as a travelling salesman. He is thought to have violated Yugoslavia’s criminal code, supposedly through tax evasion. Though some American have suggested that Knavs should have been denied US citizenship on the basis of the alleged criminal record, it is possible that UDBA’s interest in Knavs was purely political. As someone who frequently travelled abroad and owned a fleet of cars, Knavs would have likely drawn the attention of the Yugoslav authorities.

None of that is interrogated in her glossy and unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of Yugoslavia in in the last decades before the country began to fall apart. Her story is as sleek and immaculate as the woman herself. And yet, the tiny Alpine country of just over two million has a complex relationship with its native daughter. “The Melania effect” boosted tourism to Slovenia when the Trumps were last in the White House, and Balkan media is already anticipating renewed interest in the country, with enterprising restaurants and artisans already mass producing Melania-themed dishes and products. But not everyone is happy: in 2019, a wood carving of Melania was erected in Rozno, in south-eastern Slovenia, not far from her hometown of Sevnica. A year later, the wooden carving was burned in a “politically motivated” arson attack, and swiftly replaced with a more durable bronze statue in September 2020.

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Back in her adopted country, the attitude is similarly mixed. The continued fascination with her is rooted in her stubborn adherence to traditional modes of gender expression, and her total disinterest in the current imperative of female emancipation. In Melania, she doubles down on her utter fidelity to her wifely duties –infidelities go unmentioned – and to her motherly obligations, her “protection” of Barron first and foremost. She presents, with echoes of Jackie O and Diana, as the betrayed but faithful wife, the princess trapped in a tower, the fiercely devoted mother. She is playing a role of exaggerated femininity, which, in an era of diminished sexual dimorphism in the West, seems almost drag-like.

When asked, in 1999, the year after they first met, if she could picture herself as first lady one day, she demurred: “I would be very traditional, like Jackie Kennedy.” And she was ready to abandon her modelling career in the event that Trump ever became president. “I would stand by him,” she insists, true to form. During a 2005 interview on Larry King Live as newlyweds, Trump claimed that they’d never had a single fight, calling Melania “the rock”. In that interview, she admitted that to be with a man like Donald, “you have to know who you are” and “be smart and strong”. Both insist that theirs is a relationship of equals. But as with other aspects of Melania’s life, much about their marriage — her feelings about her husband’s infidelities, for one — remains an enigma.

It’s easy for women to paint their own opinions on to this blank canvas. A certain cohort are determined that she is the powerless victim of her husband and his politics. The princess in the tower of so many fairy tales, beautiful and trapped. The “free Melania” mania of the first Trump administration, speaks to this inability to understand why she might have chosen to be with this “monster’. And yet, there is very little evidence that Melania is dreaming of freedom. In fact, her memoir offers a glimpse of a very different side of Melania. After the Trumps have left the White House, the FBI raids their home in Mar-a-Lago, and Melania describes a sense of violation. Here her narrative shifts from a studious avoidance of victimisation rhetoric to one of victimhood. After taking so much care to reiterate the need to take responsibility for one’s life, one’s choices, and one’s destiny, she embraces the role of the embittered, wronged victim. Blame is never hers or her husband’s; it is assigned untrustworthy assistants, chiefs of staff, speechwriters, political opponents, and the liberal media. We even get the sense that her much-maligned anti-cyberbullying initiative, Be Best, is actually about herself.

And yet, in other moments, Melania appears sincere. Certainly when she’s talking about “a woman’s natural right to make decisions about her own body and health”, which she did in her book. The revelation that Melania is pro-choice came a few weeks before the election, when the Democrats were attempting to use the Trump-Vance ticket’s anti-abortion stance as a means of cajoling the undecided or uninspired into voting for them. Whether she was being used to appeal to women voters, or if she was sincere, it’s hard to tell. Inevitably, feminist activists refused to take it at face value. “They’re not embracing it at all,” she said in an interview shortly after her book came out. “They’re saying it was a scam, that it was a lie.”This, then, is the price you pay for being unknowable. Everyone simply believes what they want.

Melania shrugs it all off. And her public statements since her husband’s victory have emphasised unity. “I anticipate the citizens of our nation rejoining in commitment to each other and rising above ideology for the sake of individual liberty, economic prosperity, and security,” she wrote on November 7. In her first post-election interview on Fox & Friends last week, Melania dismissed the importance of Vogue covers and flattering press coverage. “We have more important things to do,” she says. Perhaps she has fooled us all. Perhaps there is a more complex, mature first lady about to move into the White House. There have been indications of that complexity before. When the interviewer in 1999 suggested that she might be with Trump for his money, noting that there weren’t too many 20-something supermodels on the arms of car mechanics, she responded with a rare flicker of depth. “You can’t sleep and you can’t hug with beautiful things, with a beautiful apartment, with a beautiful plane, beautiful cars, beautiful houses. You can’t do that. You can feel very empty… and if somebody said, ‘you know, you’re with a man because he’s rich and famous’, they don’t know me.”

And after all these years, we still don’t.

To back up this claim, liberals cite polls which invariably give countries under the US security umbrella disproportionate representation, and which seem to confirm that the rest of the world shares their view. But as anyone who has lived or travelled extensively outside of the West in recent years will tell you, the reality on the ground is much more complex. Trump’s base extends far beyond the United States.

Trump’s allies abroad take many forms, with motivations ranging from an ideological affinity for Right-wing anti-communism to a preference for a limited “America First” policy over the Democrats’ liberal internationalism. When liberals encounter these positions, they tend to label Trump’s foreign admirers as authoritarian. There may be some truth to this: Trump’s populist tough-guy persona is something that people in many parts of the world like, perhaps because it’s familiar. But such linear explanations are also self-serving, and neither entirely accurate nor honest.

The reality is that Trump’s overseas approval can be found in unlikely places. For instance, according to polls from the 2020 election, the country where Trump was most perceived to care about “ordinary people” was Nigeria. In that year, to the incredulity of American reporters, hundreds of Nigerians held a rally for the former president, clad in t-shirts showing his face and waving placards calling for his re-election. At the time, one 23-year-old artist told Reuters that Nigerians appreciated Trump’s “radical” approach to politics. Some liked him so much, in fact, that they weren’t that concerned with the Muslim ban. “If we have a person like Trump… Nigeria will be a better place to stay,” another supporter said. “There will be no need to go outside the country.”

Some attribute Trump’s popularity in Africa to the continent’s Christian minority, and the perception that Trump is the defender of Christians and their interests. He is, for example, a perennial favourite of African preachers and prophets — and none more so than Uebert Angel, a Pentecostal minister from Zimbabwe and an ambassador for the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament. In a recent broadcast, Angel — who has three million Instagram followers and over half a million YouTube subscribers —explored Trump’s “spiritual alignment”. “Donald means the ruler,” Angel explained. And “John, for J, means ‘the voice’”. Angel believes that prayers transmitted by his enormous following saved Trump from that fateful bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Nigerian televangelist Christian Oyakhilome, known as “Pastor Chris”, has also openly backed Trump. As the founder of the megachurch Christ Embassy, which has spread internationally, he alleges that Trump has been targeted for advocating for his flock. “They are angry at Trump for supporting Christians,” Oyakhilome has said. “So the real ones they hate are you who are Christians.”

Elsewhere, some in Africa explicitly support Trump’s dismissive approach to the continent, including his insistence on cutting aid. “For some strange reason, while I despise his divisive rhetoric and certainly don’t think he’s the best choice for President of the United States, I agree with Mr Trump’s position on Africa,” business strategy specialist John-Paul Iwuoha wrote in 2016. “Africa needs to wean itself off the tranquilising milk of foreign aid… and thanks to Mr Trump’s nationalistic ideals, Africa now has a rare opportunity to stand on its own and create a bright and prosperous future for itself.”

This aversion to aid is largely a response to its politicised and transactional nature. On one recent pan-Africanist podcast discussion about Trump and Kamala Harris’s hypothetical Africa policies, the hosts agreed that Harris would step up engagement and aid for Africa, while Trump would likely scale it back. But as they saw it, the Democrats’ supposed generosity with aid is an underhanded tool of manipulation — a means of buying the support of corrupt African leaders and ensuring continued allegiance to the US.

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Further afield, Trump seems to be just as popular in Vietnam, where scooter businesses bear his name and the wall of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant displays a picture of him on The Apprentice. Binh Lee, an entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, has written that Vietnam’s “love affair” with Trump can be explained in part by his nationalism. In the West, nationalism is often associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide. But in Vietnam, as in much of the so-called Global South, nationalism served as the ideological basis for decolonisation. While many rightly emphasise the sharp distinction between these two contexts, some in Vietnam do not. As Lee explained: “With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Donald Trump… embodied the kind of ideal leader forever ingrained in our collective psyche: the hero who would appear at the darkest moment of his country and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph.” Meanwhile, others link Trump’s appeal to Vietnam’s fast-growing economy, where new would-be entrepreneurs view the former president as the embodiment of capitalist success. Others still attribute Trump’s popularity to his anti-China sentiments, which some in Vietnam share.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, attitudes about Trump are also unexpectedly mixed. While some leaders lambasted him for his bellicose rhetoric, others were more circumspect. One prominent lawmaker dismissed Trump’s Indonesian critics, stressing that the president had only adopted anti-Muslim rhetoric to drum up support among the electorate, while another minister described Trump as a “non-ideological and non-confrontational” leader who would treat Indonesia as a “democratic equal”. In a similar vein, researcher Andrew Matong has noted that Trump’s presidency was conspicuously free of the American flag burnings across the Muslim world that were ubiquitous in the time of George W. Bush. Many of these countries’ citizens may find Trump’s language repugnant and dislike his policies, but for many, these pale in comparison to the wholesale destruction of countries overseen by “respectable” Republicans and Democrats.

Similarly, few foreign countries celebrated Trump’s 2016 victory more than Serbia, where Bill Clinton is still despised as the leader who spearheaded the bombing of then-Yugoslavia in 1999. Trump has appeared on billboards there, and you can buy socks emblazoned with his face on Belgrade’s central streets. More recently, the current Right-wing Serbian government has made little secret of its preference for another Trump presidency. Indeed, it has already signed an agreement with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a complex on the site of the old Yugoslav Army headquarters, which was bombed by Nato in 1999. The planned development will reportedly include a controversial memorial complex “dedicated to all the victims of Nato aggression”.

Yet perhaps the most surprising locus for Trump approval is China. Within hours of the assassination attempt, Chinese vendors had printed t-shirts depicting the image of a bloodied, defiant Trump with the slogans “fight, fight, fight” and “shooting makes me stronger”. One vendor on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao claimed he had received 2,000 orders within three hours of putting the t-shirts online.

No doubt many of Trump’s Chinese supporters find him appealing because he shares their distaste for platitudinous liberalism. On a more elite level, however, there is some muted hope that another Trump presidency might be “realistic and balanced”. This is an echo of the Seventies’ logic that “only Nixon could go to China” — the implication being that only an anti-communist hawk could oversee US-China rapprochement, because the same move by a centre-left Democrat would have been tarred as “soft on China”.

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In many instances, then, Trump’s foreign support is motivated by his businessman credentials: he is viewed as someone who prefers making deals to launching secular crusades in the name of democracy and human rights. At the negotiating table, we can surmise, such a distinction matters. While liberal internationalism is sustained by faith, deal-making implies a certain crass rationality.

Indeed, this line of thinking was even evident in a recent interview with Mohammed Al-Hindi, a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was asked whether Biden or Trump would be better for Palestine. (The interview was carried out prior to Biden stepping down as the 2024 nominee.) While noting that “Trump, at the end of the day, just like Biden, would be looking after American interests”, Al-Hindi seemed to suggest that Trump might be slightly preferable. “We kind of miss Trump now, his debates and statements,” he explained. After observing that the current war in Gaza had affected Israel’s standing “in the eyes of the world and the region”, he concluded that “any future president will find those changes on the table and they cannot be disregarded — especially if he is a businessman like Trump”.

Thus, a more complicated picture of US foreign policy emerges from beyond the West. Democrats like to say that the world’s dictators will be happy if Trump comes to power, because he will put an end to Washington’s promotion of “democracy” abroad. But plenty of people who’ve endured such policies do not view their outcomes in the same self-mythologising terms. In fact, many see them as disastrous. The result is something less flattering for both sides of the US political divide: while some of Trump’s overseas defenders like him for what he is, many more like him for what he is not.

If there were fissures, they had been smoothed over: deviant Hungary, long a blemish on the pact’s public-facing unanimity, had agreed not to block military aid to Ukraine provided it would not have to partake in any Nato operations there. All members of the alliance were in total agreement on the basic facts of the war, Stoltenberg insisted. Under Biden’s steadfast leadership, he asserted, the world had united behind Ukraine.

The self-mythologising PR was fitting for a summit that was also the 75^th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. And 75 years after the 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty gathered in Washington to pledge collective defence, the alliance and the world look very different. NATO has always cast itself as a moral arbiter, disseminating “values” and ideology, while simultaneously fostering member states’ dependency on the United States and securing American hegemony over Europe. But this vassalisation has reached a new stage since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion brought a Cold War alliance of questionable 21st-century utility roaring back to life; the long-time neutral holdouts of Sweden and Finland have even opted to join. During the Cold War, NATO counted many of its most ardent critics among left-wing opponents of US militarism; today, its most prominent skeptics are on the Right, and include Donald Trump.

Small wonder, then that American domestic politics loomed large. Held just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, the gathering was timed perfectly to allow Nato leadership to ensure one of their key points for this year — that many hitherto freeloading allies had stepped up their defence spending — would be fresh in the minds of its Republican critics. Back during the now infamous 2018 summit, Trump lambasted flunkies for not paying their fair share and even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. This year, though, Nato leaders could boast that at least 20 out of 32 member states would be spending 2% of their GDP on defence. Both anxious Atlanticists and Nato sceptics would be reassured that the alliance was, as Stoltenberg said, adaptive and agile; it would endure, regardless of dramatic changes in political leadership in its member states. And it was responsive both to events on the ground and internal criticism.

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But efforts to make the event about the steadiness and durability of Nato — a rare fulcrum of stability in an unpredictable world — were challenged by mounting concerns about the cognitive fitness of 81-year-old President Biden. Despite the usual pomp and pathos, along with attempts to pander to Trump Republicans, inevitably, it became a referendum on Biden’s age. Then, during the brief interlude between the summit and the start of the Republican National Convention, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life made it clear that there would be no assurances forthcoming about Nato’s future, that nothing would be predictable.

Things had begun on a triumphant note, in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. There was no shortage of grandiosity on display. “The most successful military alliance in history”, claimed Stoltenberg, had now become the longest-lasting — outliving even the Delian League of ancient Greek city-states. The auditorium looked like Nato’s holy temple, with Biden describing the US commitment to the Alliance as a “sacred obligation”. His performance was better than at last month’s debate, but it wasn’t reassuring. His eyes were glued to the teleprompter as he seesawed back and forth between jingoistic shouting and barely audible, indecipherable mumbling. He managed to muddle through.

The President’s lapses of memory and coherence weren’t such  a surprise. Earlier this year, Biden twice referred to dead European leaders — former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President François Mitterrand — when referring to recent discussions with foreign counterparts. At the summit, Biden did not mistake contemporary leaders for those long dead, but he did confuse allies with enemies, calling Ukrainian President Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.

With Biden faltering so badly, the spectre of a new Nato-sceptic Trump administration drew closer, prompting some of the more hawkish member states to tailor their talking points to address the Republicans. At one panel composed of the three top defence officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, participants spoke in a language they knew the Trump camp would understand: golf. “Nato is a club,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules. When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.” They hammered away at the idea of all those members who were now spending 2% of GDP on defence, hoping to convince Republicans that Europe was now pulling its weight. And yet, as international relations theorist Patrick Porter told me, this “magical 2% figure” was arrived at with full US commitment in mind. Europeans are still avoiding the difficult question: if America scales back its commitments in Europe under a Trump presidency — many in his camp advocate for a “pivot to Taiwan” and a shift of focus to the Indo-Pacific — who will fill in the gap?

In fact, much of the summit did seem to be a carefully calibrated pitch to America — or at least those Nato sceptics at the RNC. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose country is a Nato aspirant, wrote a front-page op-ed in the New York Times with the title “Don’t Doubt NATO, it Saved My People”, outlining the role the alliance played in ending the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Meanwhile, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics addressed the criticism that the US does much more than Europe to support Ukraine, claiming that in truth, it was the other way around. “It’s also very important to explain to the American public,” Rinkevics said in a speech on Tuesday. European Atlanticists fear an American retreat from the continent under Trump, who has complained that Europe has given too little aid to Ukraine, while the United States has given too much.

The contentious subject of Ukraine’s future membership in Nato was the other big theme of the summit. Germany and the United States are unwilling to extend full Nato membership while Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Instead, they say, Ukraine should be granted a “bridge to Nato”, a nebulous promise that fell far from aspirations of full membership that Ukraine has been waiting for since 2008. However, some felt the language of the communique was made stronger by the insertion of the word “irreversible”: apparently the bridge to Nato can only be crossed in one direction. But the Ukraine section of the Washington Summit Declaration, published last week, was ambiguous about its future. “We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its supporters in Eastern Europe are adamant that the country be granted membership, or at least a timetable for it. Only full membership, they claim, can deter Russia. Some suggest that Article 5 security guarantees — the provision that states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all — be introduced incrementally, first on territory already under Ukrainian command, and eventually under those parts of the country Zelensky’s forces win back.

But critics counter that admitting Ukraine risks triggering all-out war with Russia. They contend that membership would make it far more difficult to negotiate a ceasefire or engage in peace talks, since Russia has long insisted that Ukraine in Nato is a “red line”. And they point out that, contra the exalted Atlanticist rhetoric surrounding the current war, Nato has no intention of fighting for Ukraine. And if Nato is not committed to entering the war now, as Ukraine is fighting for its life, then it certainly isn’t going to make any promises about some undefined point in the future. They suggest a dialing down of the rhetoric and scaling of expectations. In fact, dozens of foreign policy experts signed a controversial letter ahead of the summit urging caution. “If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

Notwithstanding membership, Ukraine won’t leave the summit empty-handed. Nato has pledged five strategic air defence systems over the coming year, as well as F-16 fighter jets. These will be donated under the proviso that they can’t be used to strike targets inside Russia. Along with the equipment, a new Ukraine command, staffed with 700 employees, will be established in Germany, and Nato will deputise a senior representative to Kyiv. Ukraine will also receive at least €40 billion of assistance within the next year. The Alliance is also looking to “Trump proof” its assistance for Ukraine and will take over coordination of military aid for Ukraine through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a role hitherto played by the US Department of Defence. This reorganisation was made to ensure that Ukraine will continue to receive military aid, even if a new Trump administration decides to cut it.

With Biden’s cognitive state drawing all media attention, some significant developments received far less scrutiny. There was, for example, a joint-statement by the US and German governments announcing that the US would, in 2026, begin “episodic deployments” to Germany of long-range missiles, including SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. Some of these weapons have a range that would have seen them banned under the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Russia’s response to news of the planned deployments was dramatic. “Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” deputy minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, told Interfax. But what was most remarkable about news of the imminent deployment was how closely it echoed events of the Cold War — but with one glaring difference. During the early Eighties, the United States began deploying Pershing II missiles to West Germany. The news was met with deep anger by the European Left. More than one million people took to the streets in West Germany as weeks of demonstrations also swept through Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and London.

Today, in contrast, the announcement was met with comparative silence. This is doubtless down to the fact that the Left is being slowly absorbed into the Nato project. All four of Nato’s newest member states — Sweden, Finland, North Macedonia and Montenegro — opted to join with Social Democratic-led governments in power. Emblematic of this shift are the German Greens. One former party leader, Petra Kelly, was a star of the anti-missile protests in West Germany, yet some 40 years on, the Greens are now among the most hawkishly Atlanticist in Europe. Meanwhile, many peace initiatives and calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine have come from the Right. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been on a self-styled “peace mission” in recent weeks, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, and Trump in Mar-a-Lago in an effort to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Orban and his ilk are not the dedicated anti-war activists of the Cold War. They support conflict; they just don’t like this one, which they view as an unwinnable liberal pet project. But broad swathes of the Left have also proved inconsistent: they may say they dislike the foreign policy of the United States, but they have uncritically embraced a military alliance that ensures its hegemony over Europe.

As Biden stumbled through his final, possibly terminal, press conference, he did manage to make one clear point: that Trump and his ilk were a threat to Nato. Why the average American voter should care as much as the tbose assembled in Washington, he did not say. And while the eyes of the world watched this very public demonstration of his vulnerability, it was clear that the future of Nato and the entire transatlantic order will be determined by who is elected president in November. The summit that was supposed to be a celebration of the alliance’s stability and longevity was instead a testament to its frailty.

Come next month’s European Parliamentary elections, Orbán hopes a Right-populist wave will allow him and his ideological kin to seize top positions and institutions. With Hungary set to assume the rotating presidency of the European Council in July, its prime minister’s influence could be unmatched.

But rather than just being a question of power, there is something more ideological, philosophical even, at play within this conflict. Orbán’s many liberal detractors characterise him as a threat to fundamental “European values”, but there is a strange lack of clarity about what these “values” actually are. We can assume that people wielding the idea of “European values” mean the “religion of universal progress”: liberal democracy, free markets and, in more recent years, neoliberal identity politics. There is also a hint of secular evangelism in the term; these “European values” can seem like imperialism with a human face.

Orbán, however, also sees himself as the champion of European values, and his critics as the ones who are imperilling them. At stake in this continental insurgency, then, is the very meaning and direction of the EU’s core principles — as well as the equally opaque alternatives offered by Orbán.

At the level of rhetoric, the Orbán concept of a “Europe of nations”, with values rooted in the Christian tradition, is clearly at odds with the progressive liberal vision of a secular Europe premised on human rights and equality. But even the pathologies that Orbán’s opponents rightly ascribe to him — nationalism, clientelism, authoritarianism — are ultimately as European as Eurovision. Indeed, the fact that “EU values” are vulnerable to attack in this way at all reveals a certain vacuousness at the heart of the European project. It is, in other words, an empty vessel ripe for hijacking — and a stealth takeover has already begun.

In 2022, the European television network Euronews was purchased by an obscure Portuguese investment fund close to the Orbán government. The Hungarian sovereign wealth fund, Széchenyi Funds, which is a public body, also invested €45 million in the purchase, and a communications company owned by a close Orbán associate contributed €12.5 million more. The motivation here was not hard to glean: according to internal Széchenyi Funds documents obtained by journalists, Euronews, which was described as “the seventh most influential brand on EU politics”, had been purchased “to mitigate Left-wing bias in journalism”. It is an approach to managing media that Orbán has already perfected at home: recent estimates suggest that Orbán and his Fidesz associates now own or control up to 90% of the Hungarian media landscape.

As part of the Euronews makeover, the network recently moved its headquarters from Lyon to the heart of Brussels. There, in terms of soft power at least, it is in very good company. In 2021, the Hungarian government bought a sprawling 18th-century mansion on the same street in Brussels that officials are already calling  “Hungary House”. Other existing Hungarian government initiatives include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (often referred to as MCC), a think tank which opened a new branch in Brussels in 2022, promoting conservative values and discussions of EU affairs in accordance with Orbánist thought. Finally, the Hungarian government also funds the European Conservative, an English-language publication that runs conservative commentary on European news. Taken together, the proliferation of these Orbán-backed institutions highlights the scale and seriousness of his Brussels ambition.

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In Orbán’s view, the conflict in Europe is defined by two competing camps: his own cohort, the sovereigntists (or nationalists), and his opponents, the federalists. The federalists want to create a centralised “United States of Europe”, undermining the nation state and reducing its powers. Sovereigntists like Orbán, meanwhile, believe the EU should be reduced to a loose, mostly cultural body that unites European nation states in their shared Christianity. For their part, federalists see the sovereigntists as regressive blood-and-soil nationalists — the ideological cousins of fascists responsible for the worst horrors of the 20th century.

But while the divide between the two camps has grown wider and more acrimonious in recent years, Orbán believes that the sovereigntist-federalist tension was once integral to the EU’s functioning. In the past, he explained recently, it was thought that “if [the] sovereigntists defeat the federalists, then the cohesive force will cease, but if the federalists eliminate the sovereigntists, then what follows can only be the creation of another oppressive empire”. However, Orbán says, this constructive balance was degraded as the federalists began to change. In his view, the old federalists of yore were “Catholic universalists”; they did not call for the abolition of nation states, but rather for their protection within something like a united Christendom, an Occident, or a Res Publica Christiana. What has changed is that those federalists have mutated into “progressive liberals… [who have] become like the communists and are now a real threat to our freedom”. There is some irony in Orbán’s conflation of progressive liberal “European values” with communism. As historian Samuel Moyn and others have written, these values were often championed by post-war European politicians and institutions in an effort “to combat domestic socialism”.

Hungary has been at odds with the federalist eurocrats since Fidesz came to power in 2010. Before then, the technocratic elite of the ruling socialists generally got on well with the technocrats in Brussels. The EU played a leading role in helping Hungary avoid bankruptcy in 2008; along with the IMF and World Bank, it assembled a 25-billion-euro rescue package for the country. Punishing austerity measures were introduced, and the socialists replaced their anti-poverty programme with workfare, placing enormous strain on already struggling Hungarians. Fidesz seized on the accompanying discontent.

The party campaigned on a platform opposed to globalisation, supranational institutions and the concept of an “ever closer union”. The battle lines sharpened around the time of Brexit. The British, Orbán said in March, “always thought in terms of nation states”, and with the UK gone, the countries of Central Europe were tasked with upholding the sovereigntist position. But around the same time, something else also provoked major fissures between the so-called Visegrad Group (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland) and much of the rest of the EU: the 2015 migration crisis. That year, Hungary’s notorious border fence became a site of contestation for the meaning of “European values”. For the progressive liberals in Brussels’s federalist camp, it was a symbol of brutality and violence, a dereliction of those essential European “fundamental values”. For Orbán and others in the V4 camp, it was an expression of Hungary’s sovereignty and the Orbanist concept of “European values”, a fortress shielding Christian civilisation from the Muslim hordes. To drive the point home, Orbán invoked the Ottoman invasion during the crisis, stating “when it comes to living together with Muslim communities… we had the possibility to go through that for 150 years”.

This fundamental disagreement about the meaning and maintenance of “European values” is part of what Orbán is hoping to exploit ahead of the European Parliamentary elections. But it won’t be easy. Fidesz abandoned the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021 after facing expulsion over Hungary’s multiplying democratic deficiencies and rule of law concerns, and has yet to join either of the two Right-wing nationalist political groupings in the European Parliament. The two groups are divided on a single issue: support for Ukraine. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, which includes Poland’s Law and Justice party and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, strongly supports continued military aid for Kyiv. In contrast, the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, home to Alternative for Deutschland and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is critical of arming Ukraine and wants to maintain friendly relations with Russia — a position Orbán shares. Polls suggest that both Right-wing groupings are poised to amass more power in the European Parliamentary election.

Some have speculated that, despite their differences on Ukraine, the ECR and ID could merge into a single populist-Right bloc. In mid-April, Orbán held a joint press conference with Former Polish Prime Minister and leader of Law and Justice, Mateusz Morawiecki, and former Frontex chief, Fabrice Leggeri, a candidate for France’s National Rally. The event, hosted by ECR, was attended by numerous members of ID, including MPs from the German AfD and the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang. On the potential for further cooperation, Morawiecki told Euractiv: “I can tell you that I have a very good feeling with my colleagues from Fidesz; I know that Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán have a good relationship.” But the prospect of a merger is highly unlikely, as there are others who are far less enthusiastic about the prospect of welcoming the Hungarians into their ranks. Some ECR members from Czechia’s ODS and the Sweden Democrats have objected to the idea of aligning themselves with Fidesz, citing Hungary’s insistence on maintaining warm ties with Russia. Czech MEP Alexandr Vondra drove the point home in an interview earlier this month: “If someone simply parrots Putin’s propaganda, he has no business being here (in ECR). I have told Fidesz this and no negotiations with them can take place now because of this.”

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And there are further contradictions within this emerging Right bloc. Though many in Brussels may have forgotten it, prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was Hungary that pushed hardest for enlargement of the union to include its eastern “neighbourhood”. Budapest has long insisted that the EU embrace expedited membership for Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This enthusiasm is based in part on Orbán’s personal rapport with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska territory, Milorad Dodik. In early April, Orbán was even awarded the Order of Republika Srpska, and referred to Dodik as “my friend Milorad” during his acceptance speech. In the UK and US, meanwhile, Dodik has been sanctioned for pushing for the secession of Serb-majority Republika Srpska, an act that would very likely trigger a new war in Bosnia.

Upon receiving the award in Banja Luka last month, Orbán also spoke of the necessity of EU enlargement: “Without the Serbs, there is no European security. Without the Serbs there is no healthy European Union… And of course… there is a lot wrong with the European Union — I fight there every day. But today there is no better framework for our nations to strengthen themselves than the European Union.” On the surface, this pro-enlargement rhetoric may seem puzzling — but upon closer inspection, it is entirely coherent: Orbán desires a larger but more fortified bloc. Extending membership to other sovereigntist Christians also has the potential to stymie the federalists’ centralising aims. As Bulcsú Hunyadi, a senior analyst at the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute, explained in 2016: “The bigger the EU gets, the less integrated the union becomes”.

Orbán has always presented his Euroscepticism as part of his broader plan to remake the social fabric of Hungary itself. But such rhetoric often masks the fact that his grand visions are at odds with his meagre domestic record. In the very beginning, he wasn’t entirely without promise. Orbán came to power disavowing neoliberal orthodoxy and the “rescue package” dictated by the IMF, World Bank and EU — and his interventionist economic policies produced some initial success. Yet with time it has become clear that this supposed flaunting of orthodoxy has amounted to little more than “neoliberalism in one country”. As Hungarian sociologist Andras Bozoki has written: “Orbán skilfully attacked the banks (most of them being in foreign hands), the multinational corporations, the foreign media, and EU officials on the basis of [his own preference for] economic nationalism and sovereign independence, but he also combined this with business-friendly domestic policy, such as the introduction of a flat tax, reduced employment rights, and attacks on the homeless, unemployed and trade unions.” In December 2018, for instance, the Orbán government adopted a so-called “slave law” which permits employers to demand 400 hours of overtime per year, a dramatic increase over the 250 hours allowed before. The law also allows employers to delay payments to workers for up to three years.

Meanwhile, Orbán has transformed the state into a vehicle for his own interests, with EU-funded public procurement contracts creating a new class of convivial oligarchs. Consider Orbán’s childhood friend, Lőrinc Mészáros, who became the richest man in Hungary in 2018. Mészáros had previously worked as a pipe fitter for decades, but that year, his companies won the most taxpayer-funded public tenders in the country. These contracts were worth a staggering total of €826 million — 93% of which came from the European Union. He has also appointed allies to key positions of the state and maintained total control over the public prosecutor’s office, ensuring that he and his associates can be shielded from scrutiny.

And while Orbán claims to be the defender of Christian Europe, the number of people who identify as religious in Hungary has plummeted: more than 50% of the country say they do not practise a religion or decline to name their faith. The number of people who admit to practising a religion is at an all-time low — even lower than it was during the socialist period when religious practice was frowned upon by the state. Orbán himself reportedly does not attend Church. He has also fallen out with key religious leaders in Hungary, including some who were once his closest associates. Pastor Gabor Ivanyi, the man who officiated Orbán’s wedding and baptised two of his children, is now among his fiercest critics, enraged by Orbán’s decision to deprive more than 200 religious institutions of official state recognition, leaving many churches near bankruptcy. “Orbán’s Christianity is political Christianity,” Pastor Ivanyi has said. “It has nothing to do with Christ, with humanism or with the Bible.”

Despite his rhetorical trade in nationalism and conservatism, this speaks to an essential vacuity in the Orbán project. Like Vladimir Putin, Orbán’s cultural strategy mostly sees him tilting at windmills, making an enemy of a “wokeness” lifted from the Anglo-American culture wars that have little or no domestic resonance; predictably, his targets have included drag queens and Gender Studies departments. His fixation on “anti-wokeness” in homogenous Hungary can give the impression that he would rather shadowbox with American college students than confront his country’s punishing economic reality, where inflation peaked at over 25% in 2023 — the highest anywhere in the EU — and where food prices surged to more than 45% over the year. Beyond mere domestic distraction, however, fanning the culture war serves an additional function: it allows Orbán to position himself as a leading figure in the transnational Right, and Budapest as a beacon of “anti-wokeness” — a narrative that will serve him if he is to rally populist-Right forces across Europe ahead of next month’s EU parliamentary elections.

Orbán has his own sexual culture war to deal with too. In February, it was revealed that President Katalin Novak had pardoned a man imprisoned for covering up child sexual abuse by the director of a state-run orphanage. President Novak and then justice minister Judit Varga, two of the most prominent women in Fidesz, were subsequently forced to resign — almost certainly on Orbán’s order. But further details soon emerged. As part of the Pope’s visit to Budapest in April 2023, Novak pardoned the former deputy director of a children’s home who had blackmailed children into withdrawing testimony against the orphanage director, a prolific paedophile.

When the full story was made public, protesters filled the streets of Budapest. The inevitable charge of hypocrisy has been levelled at the government: Orbán the great defender of “the family” found protecting such debased criminality. The scandal was made more significant by the defection of Peter Magyar, Varga’s ex-husband and a former Fidesz insider, who in March published a recording of Varga detailing the extent to which members of Orbán’s elite inner circle interfered in the prosecution of a corruption case. Magyar has since styled himself as the new face of the opposition, where he hopes to reclaim the political centre.

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And yet, Orbán’s authority has emerged a little dented but intact. While his credibility has taken a hit, he will survive — though whether his domestic staying power can translate into an illiberal wave that will engulf the whole of Europe remains to be seen. He has proven himself as a political survivor and a chameleon, rising first through the ranks as a young liberal dissident and then to the heights of power as an anti-liberal Svengali. This has led some of his Hungarian critics to assert that his anti-liberal turn was entirely opportunistic, and that he is devoid of any real principles or ideology. Journalist Paul Lendvai has written about then-liberal Fidesz’s crushing defeat in the 1994 election, which reduced the party to the smallest in parliament. He claims it was at this point that Fidesz began its Rightward shift, even swapping their long hair and jeans for more conservative dress: “There seemed to be no deep ideological soul-searching involved — just clear-eyed calculations about what it would require to win power.” Soon, their speeches were filled with references to tradition and the homeland. In this, perhaps Orbán is not so different from the EU with whom he has long been at odds: vacuous and politically malleable, invoking supposedly ironclad “European values” to mask an impoverished spiritual core.

None of this is to downplay the scale of his ambition. At last month’s CPAC Hungary Conference, Orbán suggested that a “sovereigntist world order” could replace the current liberal one, and that it could do so this year, with critical elections on both sides of the Atlantic. “Let the age of the sovereigntists finally come,” he said. “Make America great again, make Europe great again, go Donald Trump, go European sovereigntists!” He emphasised that the sovereigntist world order would have no ideology, and we can surmise that China, with whom Hungary enjoys warm relations, would also be included in it. Whatever the outcome of the European parliamentary elections, this post-ideological competition, which progressive liberals frame as one of autocracies versus democracies, is here to stay.

The question then remains: who and what is truly “European”, or best representative of “European values”? However widely adopted they may seem today, progressive liberal values are a relatively new phenomenon, and, some would say, somewhat deceptive. As Sartre wrote in 1961, during Algeria’s war for independence from France: “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” Anti-colonial icon Frantz Fanon concurred that same year, when he said that “it is in the name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimised the slavery in which it held four-fifths of humanity”.

If Europe’s evangelists of “Europeanisation” were to ask people outside the West who best epitomised “European values”— themselves or Orbán — they might not like the answer. As much as it may panic the enlightened liberals of Brussels liberals, Orbán’s brand of exclusionary nationalism is integral to European history — and is sure to be a part of its future too.

Yet this dullness is integral to the union’s purpose as a peace project. As political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar observed in Passage to Europe, the EU was supposed to represent a “flight of history into bureaucracy” — an attempt to swap the “unpredictability and pathos” that had long characterised relations between European states with “sober interweaving interests”. Wars would be replaced with consensus, law and tedious regulations; potentially incendiary political and ideological divisions would be blunted by heavy technical jargon and compromise. The resulting facelessness was embodied in an apocryphal question attributed to Henry Kissinger: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?”

But all is changing. The EU is becoming less boring and less democratic, and it has acquired a face: European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, who last month confirmed that she will seek another five-year term.

The “Queen of Europe” has been described as “Napoleonic”, “dictatorial”, and “imperious” by detractors, impressions that have been aggravated by her personal idiosyncrasies and flamboyant, patrician air. She is, after all, the wife of Heiko von der Leyen, a scion of an aristocratic family that made its fortunes in silk. She is also a dressage rider and performs in equestrian events, her equine passion inherited from her late father, Ernst Albrecht, one of the nascent EU’s first civil servants and a prominent politician in Germany’s CDU. When Von der Leyen’s pony was mauled to death by a wolf in 2022, the Commission announced that it would downgrade their protection status to allow for culling, much to the horror of wildlife conservationists. An energetic mother of seven, she allegedly sleeps in a modest 25-square-metre room on the 13th floor of the Commission’s Berlaymont building. She is also said to maintain an ascetic discipline in other areas of life, refraining from both alcohol and meat.

Yet such eccentricities fail to capture the transformations within the EU since she came to power. Indeed, her reign is defined by the re-dramatisation of European politics — something which will continue if she manages to secure another term in June, which she probably will.

Von der Leyen’s tenure has been marked by an acceleration of what Perry Anderson has termed “European coups” — the gradual agglomeration of power in Brussels. Even the manner in which she became Commissioner in 2019 represented a break with a procedure designed to lend the EU executive greater democratic legitimacy. In 2003, a Franco-German agreement established the foundations of what would become the Spitzenkandidaten (“lead candidate”) process, whereby the political family with the most votes in the European Parliamentary elections would secure the office of Commissioner for its pre-chosen candidate. But in 2019, Von der Leyen was not the Spitzenkandidat of her European People’s Party (EPP) — instead, she was handpicked by EU leaders Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. The EPP’s Spitzenkandidat, Manfred Weber was thwarted by Macron, who viewed him as unqualified. Von der Leyen, on the other hand, was a long-time Merkel loyalist and, as Macron noted, spoke French exceptionally well. The then-German Defence Minister was also amenable to closer military cooperation with France and had spoken of the need to create “an army of Europeans” — another point in her favour for Macron.

In other words, Von der Leyen’s very rise constituted a quiet coup. Beyond the pretty verbiage about defending democracy, it amounted to what Anderson has described as “the quiet settling of affairs between elites in camera, above the heads of an inert populace below”. Perhaps as a result, Von der Leyen has started to rewrite her origin story, claiming that she “ran in 2019” — referencing a campaign that never happened. For the Queen of Europe, both reality and democracy are malleable.

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Yet Von der Leyen’s weightiest revisionism concerns the EU’s foreign policy. In 2019, she identified the creation of a “geopolitical commission” as one of her main priorities as Commissioner. The EU, she asserted, needed to become a major “geopolitical” actor “to shape a better world order”. Chaos and crisis demanded that it “learn to speak the language of power”. Then came the twin threats of Russia and another Trump administration, both of which lent these aims a greater urgency. The result is that Von der Leyen’s EU is gradually being retooled for war.

Two years ago, EU officials broke the taboo on financing lethal weapons when they decided to fund the provision of lethal military aid to Ukraine. As article 41.2 of the Treaty of the European Union explicitly prohibits “expenditure arising from operations having military or defence implications”, this move required some creativity to circumvent. Towards this end, the EU mobilised the European Peace Facility (EPF), a misnomer for a tool engineered to finance military engagements abroad. To get around the proscription on the financing of war, the EPF has been designed as a €5 billion “off-budget” instrument.

Nor does the drumbeat of war stop there. On Tuesday, the Commission is set to unveil a “sweeping” European defence industry strategy, which will shift the EU’s defence industry to a war-footing, while “upending the way it finances and sells arms”. Von der Leyen has said it will aim to “turbocharge our defence industrial capacity over the next five years”, with a focus on joint procurement.

This approach draws on the Commission’s precedent-setting joint procurement of Covid vaccines, an effort now being touted as a model for success but still mired in major controversy: Von der Leyen’s private text message exchange with Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla — hammering out the details of the April 2021 deal for 1.1 billion doses of the vaccine — has been shrouded in secrecy, with both journalists and the European Court of Auditors stonewalled in their attempts to gain access to the conversation. Suffice it to say such a precedent does not bode well for transparency in the massive new defence procurement process.

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And nor do its other components. The new strategy will, for instance, reportedly include the opening of a Defence Innovation Office in Kyiv and the establishment of a new defence commissioner role. It is very likely that the new defence tsar will hail from Poland or one of the Baltic States; Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s current foreign minister, is viewed as the top candidate. If this does happen, we will see Europe’s centre of gravity shift East, with the more hawkish rhetoric and policies of what George W. Bush once called “new Europe” overtaking that of “old Europe”. In other ways, too, the Commission’s new defence strategy would also make the EU more American: one proposed measure copies the US Foreign Military Sales scheme, the programme that allows Washington to sign contracts with foreign capitals directly, thus streamlining arms sales.

Elsewhere, Von der Leyen is also seeking to strengthen her “geopolitical commission” by reinvigorating the EU’s dormant enlargement process. Or so she claims. Effectively dead since Croatia joined the bloc in 2013, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has supposedly brought it back to life. In June 2022, the EU extended candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova, with Von der Leyen championing the move: only recently, she said she was “working our own reforms to prepare for a Union of 30-plus member states”.

There was, of course, no mention of the fact that accession is notoriously lengthy and tortuous: Serbia has been a candidate country for 12 years and Montenegro for 14. Meanwhile, Turkey was officially extended candidate status at the end of the last century. But Von der Leyen believes she knows how to make it work. And naturally, it would mean breaking more taboos.

Critics of enlargement fear the new member states from Eastern Europe would wield their veto in foreign policy decision-making, paralysing the union and eroding its cohesion. Von der Leyen is thus pushing to scrap unanimity in foreign policy decision-making, which would see “qualified majority voting” take its place — a move that opponents suggest will undermine national sovereignty, depriving member states of their cherished veto.

Yet even if Von der Leyen gets her wish, which would also undercut intransigent Hungary, it is unlikely to mean a fast-track to membership for Ukraine. As a result, EU insiders have dismissed her renewed enlargement talk as “virtue signalling”, while others point out that absorbing an agricultural powerhouse such as Ukraine would be extraordinarily costly and risks provoking more farmers’ protests across the continent. Poland, which has seen months of demonstrations over a glut of cheap Ukrainian grain, is currently among the most outspoken supporters of preserving the unanimity rule in EU foreign and security policy decision-making. Other defenders of the veto say unanimity encourages harder negotiations and promotes consensus. Middelaar agrees, noting that “it is the psychological certainty of being able to block a resolution if you truly oppose it that makes consensus possible”. Besides, as Anderson writes, “the alchemy of the Union is to achieve unanimity through the threat of majority.”

In the end, while an independent European defence industry and foreign policy may very well seem prudent in the current geopolitical context, Von der Leyen’s approach is not. At present, her rhetoric and actions do little more than mimic the kind of stale neoconservatism favoured by some in Washington. She does not seek to articulate her own vision or supply a real alternative, but rather aims to fill the theoretical vacuum left by a withdrawing US with the fading empire’s own logic.

Yet the muscular approach to defence also serves a more self-interested political purpose. Ahead of this June’s European Parliamentary elections, Von der Leyen is courting the European Right. This marks a departure from 2019, when she was regarded as something of a CDU liberal. Back then, she championed gender issues, such as childcare for working mothers, as well as green policies. Come June, however, it is the populist Right who are projected to prosper.

Significantly, Von der Leyen is only making overtures to a specific segment of the European Right: the faction that is pro-Nato. The dividing line here is clear, with Von der Leyen criticising the AfD, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders of the Identity and Democracy group (ID), but embracing members of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), which includes Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s PiS. There is little substantively different between the two groups on anything other than Nato: the ID is critical of the alliance, while the ECR is comprised of some of its most ardent supporters.

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For those on the hard-Right now embracing Nato, the adoption of an Atlanticist foreign policy makes a certain sense: it offers a sort of purifying absolution, and a ticket to the political mainstream. Consider the Sweden Democrats and the Finns (formerly the True Finns), both now members of the ECR. Both parties were once against Nato membership, but dropped their opposition in recent years as it became clear power was on the horizon. Sweden’s centre-right coalition relies on support from the Sweden Democrats for its majority in parliament, while the Finns are now part of the conservative governing coalition. In both cases, a sufficiently pro-Nato stance is political gold dust; all other supposed principles and values, it would seem, are negotiable.

And crucially, this runs both ways. In recent months, as the two became cosy, Von der Leyen has embraced Meloni’s hardline stance on immigration: last year, the pair travelled to Tunisia to reach an agreement on limiting migrant departures and toured the migrant reception centre on Lampedusa together. Both trips embodied a shift at the heart of the EU — that, as segments of the populist Right move towards the mainstream on foreign policy, the centre is sliding to the Right on most other matters, particularly migration.

Just like Von der Leyen, then, the EU as a whole is a creature of ideological plasticity, constantly mirroring developments on the other side of the Atlantic. Over in the US, a nation bracing for its own election, many of the liberals who once decried “kids in cages” as evidence of Trump’s fascism now support bipartisan proposals to beef up border security in return for continued military aid for Ukraine. A less boring EU thus seems to be a more American one, ruled by an imperious queen taking her cues from Washington. In pursuit of a bloc that has “learned to speak the language of power”, Von Der Leyen risks slowly turning a bureaucratic peace project into a prisoner of its own militarism.

Denis Johnson’s novel The Stars at Noon (1986) is the great American example of this form, a wet, hallucinatory junket through the jaws of hell that foreign interventions can become — in this case, 1984 Nicaragua, as CIA-backed Contras wage war on the Sandinista government. One of Johnson’s lesser-known works, the novel takes the form of an anti-travelogue narrated by an unnamed young American woman who will definitely not be documenting this unaesthetic excursion for Instagram.

The book begins with submachine guns in a grimy Managua McDonald’s, an American outpost patronised by horny officials and soldiers of the junta. It is here that we learn that our narrator may or may not be some kind of journalist, or at least aspires to be one, but for now is selling sex in an effort to acquire enough hard currency to purchase a flight out of Nicaragua.

This has led to her being sexually extorted by local officials, who are gratuitously taking advantage of her fallen position while promising to help. And she has fallen very far. Before this, we learn that she worked as a human rights observer with an organisation called Eyes for Peace. After bearing witness to the suffering of others, she quickly became disillusioned with this line of work — in her world, the word “humanitarian” has acquired a sinister meaning. Other exalted concepts — “justice”, “liberty”, “equality” — are equally scorned. “I’ll show you liberty and some of that other bullshit,” she tells one character.

We follow our young American to the bar at the InterContinental Hotel, where the assembled international press corps is drinking heavily and complaining about the lack of “bang bang”. It is better in Beirut, they all concur. But our narrator is similarly unimpressed with them: “As the cabdriver had understood they would be, several journalists were drinking here tonight, the usual bunch, every one the sort of person who really ought to be shot dead right away.”

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It is in this sad hotel bar, among these war tourists, that our narrator first meets her love interest. He is a bland British consultant (“pudding-like and ghostly”), who works for an oil company. “Consultant” is another opaque, sinister-sounding vocation in these parts, and she implores him “not to go into detail” about his dealings. “The Englishman”, as she calls him, is remarkable only for his total lack of remarkability (elsewhere, she notes that he reminds her of a cloud, with a vaporous, forgettable face and white skin). And this is a central point of the book: the title comes from a line from an W.S. Merwin poem, “what we are looking for / in each other / is each other / the stars at noon / while the light worships its blind god”. This is a love story rooted in narcissistic idealisation and self-delusion, with the libidinous political tumult and tropical locale lending the affair a frisson it would not otherwise have. Back in London or New York, we imagine, these two might never give each other a second look.

The political drama is as nebulous as “the Englishman” himself. We eventually learn that he has engaged in industrial espionage. His oil company, along with the Costa Ricans, knew of some possible oil deposits beneath Lake Nicaragua, and in the interest of “fairness” — and perhaps vague political sympathies with enemy states, though like the rest of him, these remain gestural — he passed them on to the Nicaraguans. But the Nicaraguans informed the Costa Ricans of this duplicity, and soon the lovers are pursued by the security services of several state agencies at once, including the omnipresent CIA. Under increasingly unbearable surveillance, the pair make a long, dramatic dash for the border. It is significant that it is the Englishman’s ostensibly “humanitarian” act that triggers this panicked chase. In proxy wars, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

Read some 40 years after the counter-revolutionary war in Nicaragua, The Stars at Noon feels exhilarating, even liberatory. In more ways than one, Johnson’s novel is an escape, unencumbered by tedious contemporary puritanism. No one is mythologised in Johnson’s world, and we are invited to mock and revile both the dull revolutionaries and “the stupid CIA”.

This kind of cynicism in war is not new in literature, but it almost feels that way filtered through a female narrator. Johnson gives us a young woman in excruciating circumstances who is nonetheless not the traumatised female subject of so much millennial women’s writing, reflexively narrativising her experiences through the lens of victimisation. As Caitlín Doherty has written: “MeToo’s impact is detectable not in any political transformation among the professional women who comprised its constituency, but rather in the desiccated dregs of a ‘feminist’ linguistic mode: a speaker who narrates in the first-person, invokes the literary and wants you to know of her pain.” Though our narrator is mistreated by men, she always has something that they don’t: the knowledge that these men, however powerful in the present circumstances, are pathetic, even pitiful.

“Not that the pleasure and comfort of an incompetent small-time official in a floundering greasy banana regime surmounts my every concern, but all men tend to grow innocent, wouldn’t you agree, at the breast,” she muses during one unfortunate encounter. “You can’t help but feeling a little something, if only a small, sharp pity, as if you’d just stepped on a baby bird.”

Young women in the contemporary West have not lived under the top-down institutionalised patriarchy found elsewhere in the world, but this is precisely how women who do have to navigate it: by viewing powerful men not as totems of unearned privilege, but as pathetic prisoners of their own desire and therefore riddled with weaknesses to exploit. That Johnson was able to understand this as a man suggests that “lived experience” is not the only kind that illuminates: in this novel, he gives his female narrator a more powerful, eviscerating voice than most contemporary women would grant themselves. For that, he would undoubtedly be indicted by certain literary puritans today — for failing to make his female narrator sufficiently disempowered, or for writing in the voice of a woman at all.

Yet Johnson’s female narrator is also self-evidently him. The Stars at Noon was written after his own trip to Nicaragua, where he had hoped to produce an article on the revolution for a magazine. Instead, it was during this trip that he realised that he could never be a journalist. He reportedly flew home, fell into a depression and wrote this book. Certain details — the professional journalists in Managua restaurants observed with a mixture of envy and disgust — are clearly lifted from his own experience. At one point early on, Johnson’s narrator calls the editor of a magazine in the US with a desperate pitch; he laughs before hanging up on her. Among other things, this is a book about failure. And this, too, is refreshing in an era in which writers are more invested in constructing the identity of a writer on social media than they are in writing.

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Last year, the French director Claire Denis released a film based on the book. It is a fine enough adaptation, capturing something of the sensual yet sickly atmosphere of the novel, though Denis opted to lift the story from its original Cold War context and resituate it in present day, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the film, the run-down InterContinental Hotel has been partly transformed into a grimy Covid hospital, with a menacing biomedical security regimen and unsmiling guards carrying submachine guns. The story loses something essential set in the present, as the voluptuous and ideological Cold War setting is swapped for our vacuous, post-ideological Cold War 2.0, wherein dictatorship and democracy alike are drifting towards a tech-facilitated authoritarianism. If the movie feels less substantive than the book, then it’s partly because our times are hollower, too.

But how would the contemporary commentator, trained to reflexively pincer apart each piece of media for hidden loci of oppression, react to the novel it is based on? For one, it’s a story that “centres” the experiences of two white Westerners in Nicaragua. Further, our narrator is not interested in signalling awareness of her “positionality”, her “privilege” and her “Westernness”. But, at a time when the CIA would probably employ the language of decolonisation to justify arming the Contras, it is invigorating to read outsiders who are allowed to be simple outsiders. The narrator of The Stars at Noon belongs to the American pantheon of drifters, losers, outsiders, drunks and dreamers. These are not figures that “speak over” local voices, to use the bloodless academic-activist parlance, but from beneath them, as they come from below.

To understand how the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became Germany’s second-largest party, consider the events of the past five days. In an interview with the state broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), made the mistake of suggesting that he would be willing to work in a coalition with the far-Right party. Less than 24 hours later, after facing a barrage of outrage, he was forced into a humiliating U-turn. This is how Germany’s political class hopes to deal with the rise of the AfD: their political resonance is recognised, but any breaking of the cordon sanitaire around them is regarded as dangerous legitimisation.

Much as the mainstream parties have failed to stop it, liberal commentators have also struggled to comprehend the phenomenon. They blame the party’s rise on extraneous factors, from an insufficiently democratic culture in the east (where the AfD enjoys extensive support) to Russian disinformation. A new taboo seems to have been erected around even discussions of the AfD’s popularity, whereby attempting to understand their rise is seen as some kind of endorsement. But the reality is that the party has benefitted from saying out loud the ugly things that others won’t. It would be simpler if the AfD could be shrugged off as another evanescent populist movement. But while gaining from a generalised political dissatisfaction, in their language and rhetoric, they give voice to some fundamental objections to Germany’s political culture — some of which date back to the refounding of the modern nation in 1989.

There are more extremist elements in the party’s ranks which date even further back in Germany’s history. The party was bitterly divided during the pandemic over whether to expel Andreas Kalbitz, an influential former candidate for premier of Brandenburg, when it surfaced that he had been a member of a banned neo-Nazi organisation, German Youths Loyal to the Fatherland. Kalbitz held considerable sway over the party’s more extremist eastern division, whose members were staunchly opposed to his removal. But the AfD’s middle-class libertarian wing in the West insisted on kicking him out; in the end, this more moderate wing had the final say.

Yet today, the party still retains some odious figures. In June, prosecutors in Halle brought charges against Björn Höcke, the incendiary leader of the party’s Thuringia chapter and of its extremist Der Flügel faction, for using the Nazi stormtrooper line “Alles für Deutschland” at a public event in Saxony-Anhalt. And the extremist Right-wing elements within the AfD have increasingly been viewed as a security risk. In 2021, the AfD became the first post-war opposition party to be placed under surveillance by the domestic intelligence agency over fears of extremism.

Despite its Rightwards shift in recent years, the party has only grown more popular. And rather than attributing this to a tradition of neo-Nazi extremism, the reason for the AfD’s proximate rise is more straightforward — and for Germany’s ruling parties, self-inflicted. Above all, the AfD has successfully capitalised on widespread disenchantment with the ruling coalition.

This dissatisfaction is rich and various: there is ample discontent with the coalition’s immigration policies, energy and climate approach, economic policy and foreign policy, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine. Indeed, it seems there is very little that voters are not dissatisfied with, and the little support that the coalition still enjoys stems from simply not being the AfD. After the relative calm of the Merkel years, the back-to-back cataclysms of the pandemic and war in Ukraine have proven crippling for Germany’s political mainstream.

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For many, then, the AfD is a simple protest party: two-thirds of AfD voters say their support derives from disappointment with conventional parties, and only a third say they vote for the AfD out of conviction for its programme. And this is in keeping with the party’s historic strategy. Since their foundation 10 years ago, the AfD has shaped itself into an adaptable and protean vehicle for oppositional politics. Prior to the 2015 refugee crisis, this primarily came in the form of economic frustration. Founded as a free-market Eurosceptic party at the pinnacle of the euro crisis in 2013, the AfD initially opposed bailouts for southern European states and criticised Germany’s role in the euro, bemoaning her lost economic sovereignty.

But the refugee crisis would forever change its course. In that year, Germany took in nearly one million migrants, and the AfD seized on the attendant controversy by embracing a virulent new anti-migrant politics. The shift paid off enormously in the following elections. In 2017, the party secured representation in 14 of the 16 state parliaments and won 94 seats at the federal level to become the third-largest party in Germany. Today, the party’s stance on immigration still provides its bedrock of support.

The AfD’s message has resonated especially well in eastern Germany, where many of the exalted promises of reunification never materialised. Its affluent west has long struggled to fully acknowledge that the unparalleled moment of liberal triumph had serious downsides in its east. Between 1989 and 1991, more than 2.5 million people lost their jobs, while the number of workers in the manufacturing sector fell from 3.3 million to 1.7 million. Over 90% of East German factories and firms were bought up by West German companies. Seizing on this phenomenon of democratic disappointment, recent AfD campaigns have invoked and repurposed the rhetoric of 1989 (the Wende or “turnabout” of reunification), with calls to “complete” the unfinished revolution. For the AfD, the “establishment”, embodied in the conventional parties, constitutes another undemocratic imposition that must be removed as the DDR leadership once was. For instance, the AfD borrowed heavily from the so-called “peaceful revolution” around the fall of the Berlin Wall for its 2019 campaign in the eastern state of Thuringia. Their campaign materials were headed “1989-2019: Be There When History Is Made” and posters spoke of a “Wende 2.0”. The local leader, Björn Höcke, made the appropriation more explicit: “We’re completing the revolution!” he shouted at one rally.

He was drawing on an widely unacknowledged thrum of despondency in Germany’s political firmament. For the country’s victorious liberals, 1989 and the next year’s unification were a moment of unparalleled triumph. “This is a day of undiminished rejoicing,” Nato Secretary-General and former Defence Minister of West Germany Manfred Worner said in 1990. With such a self-congratulatory historical record, few wish to discuss the limitations and broken promises of transition. Instead of acknowledging that the “peaceful revolution” failed to deliver on its assurance of prosperity, they opt to blame the AfD’s popularity on the east’s “anti-democratic culture” produced by the experience of the “two totalitarianisms”, and condemn them for their “misuse” of the memory of unification. They fundamentally see the AfD’s popularity in the former DDR as a symptom of East Germany’s political immaturity.

But it isn’t democracy — or the free market — that AfD supporters in the east are against, nor do they seek a return to the DDR. First, the AfD has always been a virulently anti-redistributionist party. This makes the AfD somewhat distinct from other far-Right populist parties in Europe: it has never adopted pro-welfare policies or rhetoric in an effort to court voters from lower socioeconomic strata. Even less affluent AfD supporters report a preference for lower redistribution than the most affluent non-AfD supporters. Meanwhile, whatever their political conditioning, East Germans are also overwhelmingly supportive of democracy. A recent survey by EFBI revealed that 91% of East Germans identify with democracy as an idea, though less than half find satisfaction with the everyday practice and experience of democracy. And even as AfD moves further Right, it is increasingly seen as a “normal democratic party”. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, 17% of Germans described the party in those terms in 2016; today, that number has risen to 27%.

The subtlety that has been missed is that the language of democracy, along with the rest of the rhetoric of 1989, has proven ideologically malleable — as easily deployed in service of the far-Right as in service of socially liberal politics. A lurid example came with the recycling of the slogan “we are the people”, originally borne on the revolutionary streets of Leipzig in 1989. In 2016, a mob of demonstrators, some of them supporters of AfD, shouted the slogan to protest the arrival of a bus carrying migrants in Clausnitz.

Yet however odious the twin rise of the German far-Right and the country’s wartime remilitarisation might sound, it is also significant that the militaristic impulse is not being driven by the AfD. Instead, it is the once-pacifist Greens that are leading the hawkish charge on the war in Ukraine. Here, the AfD has positioned itself as the anti-war opposition, calling for peace negotiations and restraint on sending arms. And there is evidence that the AfD’s nose for popular outrage is still serving them well. The “traffic light” coalition’s Ukraine policies are increasingly unpopular with large swathes of the electorate. A recent YouGov poll revealed that 55% of Germans now favour peace negotiations to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, while only 28% are opposed.

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A secondary outcome of the Ukraine war has also helped to propel the AfD. As energy prices soared over the winter and German cities discussed turning off their streetlights, the AfD defined itself in opposition to the so-called “Green agenda”. A much-reviled government plan to phase out oil and gas-heating systems caused immense public backlash (a single heat pump costs between €11,000 and €25,000 per household). Even with a partial government subsidy of up to 40%, this is simply not affordable for many people in Germany. As a result, relatively poor AfD voters now regard the Green Party as the antagonist of working Germans; according to one poll support for the climate movement in Germany has halved from 68% to 34% in the last two years).

Added to this, of course, is a broader, more chastening realisation: Germany is no longer Europe’s economic powerhouse, no longer the continent’s workshop. Earlier this year, the country slipped into a technical recession, and the IMF now predicts the country’s economy will shrink by 0.3% this year, contradicting Olaf Scholz’s predictions. The heady days of unification, then, with the Deutschmark as an idol of West German affluence and a post-war pacifist tradition firmly intact, have given way to a much bleaker wartime reality. And as long as the AfD articulates this disenchantment the most powerfully, it will be the chief beneficiary of Germany’s fall from the heights of exception.

But something went wrong. In fact, it appears that the exact opposite has happened. The Greens have been eclipsed by the far-Right they were supposed to counter: the Greens are currently polling at 13%, while the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has seen its popularity soar to 20%. Since last summer’s high of 23-24%, the German Greens have plummeted ten points in the polls. And in Bremen last month, they saw their worst regional election result in the northern state in over 20 years.

The poor showing in the north-western city is symbolically significant: it was there that the party entered a state parliament for the first time, in 1979, as the Bremen Green List. And while Germany’s smallest state is not considered a bellwether, the loss is a reminder that the party remains deeply unpopular with vast swaths of the poor and working class. In Bremen, fears that the Greens’ climate policies will inflict harm on Germany’s industrial base are felt especially acutely: when the city’s powerful shipbuilding industry collapsed in successive waves in the Eighties and Nineties, tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The end of the Cold War compounded the devastation, as the city-state’s booming defence industry was subject to dramatic cuts.

To this day, Bremen has not recovered. The current unemployment rate stands at 11.4% — about twice the national average and the highest in Germany. One in four people is at risk of poverty. While the Greens have paid lip service to voters’s economic concerns, claiming that climate-friendly policies need not “come at the expense of social justice”, many are unconvinced. It is not difficult to see why. One of the Greens’s most controversial plans, which will probably come into force next year, will phase out old oil and gas heating systems, replacing them with climate-friendly heat pumps. The process is expected to cost up to €13,000 per household.

The Greens have always been perceived — rightly or wrongly — as a party of privilege. In 1979, the US ambassador to West Germany, Walter J. Stoessel J, described party members as “unpolitical dreamers, mellow lifestylers, counter-culture, anti-nuclear, anti-technology, back to nature romantics with a few cynical leftists thrown in for good measure”. He also noted that they “drew most of their supporters from the urban areas, specifically from well-educated middle and upper-middle class voters under 30”.

In its earliest days, the party was comprised largely of young militants. The Green movement emerged out of the tear gas and violence of the 1968 student revolt. It was virulently opposed to prevailing social norms, which they understood as not only inherently oppressive, but also key to understanding their parents’ submission to Nazism: “authoritarian” social structures, embodied by both the state and the family, could explain why the previous generation had so tragically failed to resist. The Greens concluded that society could inoculate itself against the resurgence of fascism through the deliberate destruction of social taboos.

This line of thinking led the young Greens down a dark path. The protests of 1968 had revived interest in the works of Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich, who described the supposed links between authoritarian submission and sexual repression. In his book Mass Psychology of Fascism, he wrote: “Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, ‘good’ and ‘adjusted’ in the authoritarian sense … it paralyses the rebellious force.” Influenced by these works, early Green party members pushed for the removal of the two sections of Germany’s penal code that criminalised sex between adults and children.

There were also visible manifestations of paedophile activism during the Eighties. “Paedosexual” rights groups showed up at Green Party events in Nuremberg, bringing with them street children housed at the Indianerkommune. About a decade ago, the Greens ordered an investigation into the party’s past involvement with pro-paedophilia groups and child sexual abuse. During the investigation, it was discovered that the influence of paedophiles on the party was much stronger than previously thought — and that for a brief period in the mid-Eighties, the Greens “practically served as the parliamentary arm of the paedophile movement”. In November 2014, the party held a press conference, at which leaders apologised to the victims of sexual abuse.

It was a long, strange trip for the Greens from the tear-gas choked streets of 1968 to the Reichstag. But in 1998, the party at last entered national government as part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s “third way” coalition. Power would quickly render them unrecognisable: within a year, the pacifist party was breaking the post-WWII German taboo of going to war.

The Greens occupied the foreign ministry then, and at its helm was Joschka Fischer, the leading figure of the party’s “Realo” wing – the realistic, more mainstream segment of the party that was amenable to compromise with established parties. The Realos clashed with the “Fundis” — party fundamentalists who believed that the Greens should never abandon their founding principles. This internal clash reached a zenith in 1999 with the Kosovo War. While Fischer supported participation in the Nato intervention on humanitarian grounds, the Fundis were wary about Germany bombing a city that the Nazis had attacked 58 years previously. After a bitter debate, Fischer’s Realos won out. The Green Party forever abandoned its pacifism, and Germany its unofficial prohibition on war.

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Schroeder and the Greens presided over an increasingly unpopular “neoliberal shock-therapy programme”, and in 2005, they were voted out. The Greens were in opposition for 16 years until 2021, when they returned to power with their strongest ever electoral showing. The party took about 14% of the vote in the federal election, and became part of the “traffic-light coalition”. The Greens had five key ministries, with party leader Annalena Baerbock becoming minister of foreign affairs, while her co-leader Robert Habeck became minister of economic affairs and climate action. They promised a new clean politics, uncomplicated by the baggage of the two major parties.

But it soon became clear that Greens can be as dirty as anyone else. This spring’s “best-man affair” revealed that Habeck’s state secretary, Patrick Graichen, had helped get the best man at his wedding appointed head of the state-owned German Energy Agency (Dena). Further investigation revealed that Graichen had also approved government funding for a climate protection project that his sister had worked on. A few days after the Greens were defeated in Bremen, Graichen resigned. He had been a major player in Germany’s decarbonisation efforts; his resignation signalled another stinging defeat. The scandal has also hurt Habeck’s popularity. In September 2022, 57% of Germans polled said Habeck was doing his job well; when asked the same question last month, that number had fallen to 39%.

More worrying for the party, however, is that their climate policies are increasingly unpopular. According to one Allensbach survey, 80% of Germans are opposed to the plan to phase out fossil fuel heating systems next year. Some say that voters are fatigued by the back-to-back shocks of Covid and the war in Ukraine, and are therefore reluctant to accept more dramatic transformations to their way of life. Indeed, the current conditions in Europe are not fertile ground for the Greens: recent academic research has shown that Green parties are most successful in good economic times. Meanwhile, far-Right ones thrive in times of crisis, and the Greens have provided them with plenty of fodder. The AfD have characterised the party’s environmental policies as “climate hysteria” and “eco-dictatorship” — aiming both to mobilise “climate sceptical” voters against the Greens and fuel polarisation against the issue.

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But the Greens are also under fire from their activist base for abandoning some of their own signature policies. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the German government scrambled to end its dependence on Russian gas. This entailed making compromises on coal and nuclear power. But for climate activists, the biggest betrayal was the Greens’s “backroom deal” with the German multinational energy firm RWE, which allowed for the razing of Lutzerath to make way for a coal mine. Well-publicised protests and activist occupation of the town followed; Greta Thunberg was even detained there by German police. Adding insult to injury, a long-time aide to the Green party leader took a job as chief lobbyist with RWE.

These days, it seems that the only thing the Greens will not compromise on is war, sometimes out-hawking Washington in their rhetoric. Critics have characterised Baerbock’s tenure as foreign minister as undiplomatic, even hostile to diplomacy; her defenders more charitably describe her approach as “straight talking”. In her opposition to peace negotiations, she is also opposed to German public opinion. Last month, a YouGov poll commissioned by DPA revealed that 55% of Germans now favour peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine; only 28% are against them. Furthermore, 54% of Germans are against inviting Ukraine to join Nato; only 27% support it. Meanwhile, the AfD have defined themselves in opposition to the Greens on the war in Ukraine, fashioning themselves as Germany’s “peace party”. AfD MP Petr Bystron claims that the party’s popularity surged in the polls immediately after the unveiling of their peace plan. Indeed, with their denunciations of BlackRock and American arms companies, AfD sound a lot like the Greens of yesteryear.

Keen observers note that AfD’s appropriation of peacenik rhetoric is a clever smokescreen for a worryingly pro-Russian agenda. Some media reports allege that Bystron recently made a secret trip to Belarus. Nevertheless, supporters of the Green’s foreign policy will eventually have to contend with the mounting public opposition to their current approach, beyond labelling critics Putinists or unwitting dupes of Russian propaganda. Opposition to uncompromising German militarism predates Putin, let alone Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by many decades — and no one should understand it better than the formerly pacifist party.

In the failure of the party that was supposed to lead the “green wave” across Europe, there lies a lesson for environmentalists everywhere. Green parties cannot succeed unless they shake their associations with liberal privilege; from today’s vantage point, they seem like a luxury from better times. The public has roundly rejected the naïve idea that the Greens are “outsiders” charting a new, exciting kind of politics. Instead, voters see them as part of politics as usual, even if their machinations are hidden behind pretty verbiage and green paint. Far from embodying a hopeful, unifying message for Europe, then, Germany’s Green dream is out of reach for too many; in fact, it looks like little more than the right to purchase a clear conscience while demanding that the poor subsidise it.

This was a new and progressive face for Nato, the same one it has since used to seduce much of the European Left. Previously, in the Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as an enlightened, “progressive” peace alliance. As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”. Today, by contrast, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland abandoned their long-standing traditions of neutrality and opted for membership. Nato is portrayed as a military alliance — and Ukraine a war­ — that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seem to be singing is “Give War a Chance”.

The Jolie campaign marked a dramatic turn in what Katharine A.M. Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond call “Nato’s strategic narrative” in several ways. First, the alliance embraced celebrity star power for the first time, imbuing its unremarkable brand with elite glamour and beauty. Jolie’s star power meant that the alluring images of the event reached apolitical audiences with little knowledge of Nato. Second, the partnership seemed to usher in an era in which women’s rights, gendered violence and feminism would assume a more prominent role in Nato rhetoric. Since then, and especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe. The alliance has also intensified its engagement with popular culture, new technologies, and youth influencers.

Of course, Nato has always been PR-conscious, and has long engaged culture, entertainment, and the arts. Who could forget the 1999 album Distant Early Warning from electronic duo Icebreaker International, recorded with funding from the defunct “NATOarts” and inspired by the radar stations along Alaska and Canada’s northern periphery built to alert Nato of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike? Or the 2007 feature film HQ, produced by Nato’s public diplomacy division, which depicts life inside the alliance and a mock diplomatic response to a crisis in the fictional state of Seismania? Just about everyone it turns out. But what makes Nato’s more recent strategic turn so effective is that it has successfully echoed candidate countries’ progressive local traditions and identities.

No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968; many had demonstrated against American wars. The early Greens advocated for West Germany’s withdrawal from Nato. But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party that would one day tear it apart. Two camps began to coalesce: the “Realos” were the moderate Greens, politically pragmatists. The “Fundis” were the radical, uncompromising camp; they wanted the party to remain faithful to its fundamental values no matter what.

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Predictably, the Fundis believed that European peace would be best served by West Germany’s withdrawal from the alliance and tended to favour military neutrality. Meanwhile, the Realos believed that West Germany needed Nato. They even argued that withdrawal would return matters of security to the German nation-state and risk rekindling militaristic nationalism. Their Nato was a post-national, cosmopolitan alliance, speaking numerous languages and flying a multitude of flags, protecting Europe from Germany’s most destructive impulses. But Nato membership at the end of history was one thing. Germany going to war again — the most forbidden of taboos after World War II — was something else entirely.

Kosovo changed everything. In 1999 — the 50th anniversary of Nato’s founding — the alliance began what academic Merje Kuus has called a “discursive metamorphosis”. From the mere defensive alliance it was during the Cold War, it was becoming an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom well beyond the borders of its member states. The 78-day Nato bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens.

At a chaotic May 1999 party conference in Bielefeld, the Realos and Fundis fought bitterly over the bombing. Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the most prominent Realo, supported Nato’s war; for this, conference attendees pelted him with red paint. The Fundis’ proposal called for an unconditional cessation of the bombing, which would have also meant the collapse of the Green-Social Democratic Party (SDP) coalition government. The peace proposal failed, crushing the anti-war faction of the party, who would leave the Greens in droves. Instead, the Realos’ moderate resolution triumphed by a comfortable margin. After a brief pause, the bombing of Yugoslavia was allowed to continue. With the Greens’ crucial support, the Luftwaffe flew sorties over Belgrade, 58 years after their last aerial bombardment of the Serbian capital. It was the first German military operation undertaken in Europe since the Second World War.

Following the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the German Greens’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has continued in Fischer’s tradition, scolding countries with traditions of military neutrality and imploring them to join Nato. She has invoked Desmond Tutu’s line: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” And the Greens have even ventriloquised their own dead members, including Petra Kelly, an anti-war icon and longtime advocate for non-alignment who died in 1992. Last year, Greens co-founder Eva Quistorp wrote an imaginary letter to Petra Kelly in the newspaper TAZ. The letter borrows Kelly’s moral stances and inverts them to justify the Greens’ embrace of war. Quistorp wants us to think that if Kelly were alive today, she would have been a Nato supporter. Addressing the long-dead Kelly, Quistorp asserts, “I bet you would shout out that radical pacifism makes blackmail possible.”

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Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office also rolled out a new “Feminist Foreign Policy”, the latest of several European foreign ministries to have done so. This new orientation, also adopted by France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain, paints cosmopolitan militarism with a faux-radical feminist gloss, opening the domain of war and security to women’s rights activists. No-nonsense feminist leaders are depicted as the ideal foil to authoritarian “strongmen”.

Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014, permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically, there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the “Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are striving towards the same goal: peace”.

The academic Merje Kuus has written that Nato enlargement involves “a two-fold legitimation” strategy. First, Nato is rendered ordinary and unremarkable, pedestrian and everyday, and second, it is portrayed as above reproach, vital, an absolute moral good. The effect of this, she says, is the simultaneous banalisation and glorification of Nato: it becomes so blandly bureaucratic that it is below debate, and so “existential and essential”, that it is above debate. And this legitimation strategy has been evident in the limited, tightly-controlled debate about Euro-Atlantic integration in the Nordic countries, neither of which held referendums on membership. After decades of popular resistance to the alliance, Nato, it seems, is above democracy. But as Kuss writes, that does not mean that Nato is imposed on a society. The aim is instead “to integrate it into entertainment, education, and civic life more broadly”.

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Evidence of this is everywhere. In February, Nato held its first ever gaming event. A young employee of the alliance joined popular Twitch streamer ZeRoyalViking to play Among Us and casually chat about the danger disinformation poses to democracy. With them was a mountaineer influencer and environmental activist named Caroline Gleich. As their astronaut avatars navigated a cartoon spaceship, they spoke about Nato in glowing terms. By the event’s end, the stream had turned into a recruitment effort: the alliance employee talked about the perks of his job and encouraged viewers to check the Nato website for employment opportunities in fields such as graphic design and video editing.

The event was part of Nato’s “Protect the Future” campaign. This year it included a graphic novel competition for young artists. The alliance also courted dozens of influencers with large followings on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and brought them out to the headquarters in Brussels. Other influencers were dispatched to last year’s Nato Summit in Madrid, where they were asked to create content for their audiences.

The European Left has been utterly captivated by this show. Following the path taken by the German Greens, major Left-wing parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war and now champion Nato. It is a stunning reversal. During the Cold War, the European Left organised mass protests attended by millions against US-led militarism and Nato’s deployment of Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe. Today, little more than the hollowed-out radical rhetoric remains. With hardly any remaining opposition to Nato left in Europe, and the alliance’s creeping expansion beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, its hegemony is now nearly absolute.