In 1966 if you were involved in the music industry you couldn’t avoid mixing with some shady company, live music venues, much like casinos were often run by the mob. If you got on the wrong side of the mob they let you know. One tour stop for The Yardbirds in Rhode Island they turned up late – you don’t keep the mob waiting – and a gangster stormed onto their tourbus toting a pistol shooting his mouth off.
The Yardbirds’ manager was Peter Grant, he stood up right in front of the pistol and said, ‘You’re going to shoot me over $1000 dollars? That’s cheap, I didn’t realise you were that cheap’. Grant was 6’ 3” and 28 stone, he walked the gangster back out of the bus with the pistol pointed right into his gut the whole time. There are lots of rumours about Grant’s past, was he a gangster in London before getting into showbiz? Either way, he was more experienced in having a gun pulled on him than the gangster pulling the gun, so he won that little battle.
Europe needs to take a leaf out of Peter Grant’s book, we face an existential threat from a gangster state – Russia – and it’s become clear we can’t rely on our big brother, America, that’s offered protection for the last 80 years. Europe needs to face up to the precise nature of the threat we’re dealing with, and recognise it’s a threat we now largely need to deal with ourselves (with acknowledgements to Canada, Australia, Japan and S Korea). To defeat a monster you don’t need to become a monster but Europe needs to be clear about the challenge that faces us in 2025 – a bloodthirsty tyrannical state that attacks all its neighbours and a willing stooge that heads up what is now a former ally.

Support for Ukraine, the story so far
Ukraine’s been involved in a war with Russia for 11 years, the last three years have been particularly intense. Europe has supported Ukraine with financial aid, military training, weapons, financial support and refugee hosting. That’s been enough to stop Russia from achieving its fundamental war aims of invading Ukraine completely and has compelled Russia to burn through its equipment stocks, ammo stocks, a big financial warchest and a huge amount of personnel. This has been in concert with aid from the USA, much smarter analysts than me have assessed the level of commitment from the West to Ukraine – generally they point out that Ukraine is thwarting Russia with a load of equipment and weapons designed and built 20 – 30 years ago – we’ve fallen short of donating our best stuff. Even so, Russia’s only managed to take 20% of Ukraine’s landmass and none of its main regional cities since 2022.
Apart from the military support Europe has tried to constrain Russia via sanctions and has embarked on a long term project of weaning itself off Russian hydrocarbons. This is still work in progress as Europe continues to import Russian LNG. While this has been a gradual process, it’s fair to say that prospects for Russia are pretty bleak when Europe stops buying its coal, oil and gas altogether. Many observers have been contemptuous of the sanctions regime – Russia has found easy workarounds, importing sanctioned goods via Belarus and Georgia.
It’s a measure of Europe’s commitment to Ukraine’s cause as to whether it’s willing to clampdown on smuggling that’s been pretty easy to detect. If it really wants to Europe can completely decouple from Russia economically – not sell its cars and not buy its gas. The question is how much does it want to do this?

Much praise for Zelenskyy, much derision for Vance, a serious message from Von der Leyen at the Munich Security Conference – will it prove pivotal in the Ukraine – Russia war?

Reasons to be positive about Ukraine
Ukraine was a key part of the Soviet Union, even if Moscow treated it brutally at times. It was a major industrial and STEM base – a lot of its ships and tanks were actually made in Ukraine. It’s no great surprise, therefore, that Ukraine has constantly innovated during the war with drones, unmanned submersible vehicles, missiles and droids (ground combat robots). During this particular phase of the war, since 2022, Ukraine has built up an increasing level of self-sufficiency with guns and ammo and now many bits of home made kit are superior to that in the hands of other major armies thanks to constant product testing.
Russia has really committed to a war which it was confident would be a rollover not unlike the Russo – Georgian war. It has found, however, it’s almost impossible to get significant go forward because of Ukraine’s drone superiority and after three years Russia has failed to establish air superiority with its conventional fighter jets.
While Russia still has ample stocks of aircraft, this is somewhat deceptive as many of its older planes are borderline airworthy – MiG jet engines have a lifespan of 3500 hours – many have reached that through years of deployment in Syria and Ukraine. While nothing is a game changer, Ukraine has been supplied with post Cold War era jets – the F16 and Mirage. If it has enough of these Russia cannot ever establish air superiority and it won’t be able to launch the kind of co-ordinated ground and air attacks that are decisive in modern warfare.
While the frontline has barely moved since late 2022, the impact on Russia has grown – its financial reserves are steadily dwindling down, its burnt through around 55% of its total equipment stocks, and much of its ammunition stockpile. While Russia has been impressive in continuing to secure so many willing recruits to its armed forces, the losses have taken a toll on Russia’s economy and society – inflation is high despite jacked up interest rates as labour shortages have become chronic. Russia would love to fight a forever war and occupy Ukraine permanently like it has with Moldova, Georgia, and Syria, but with Ukraine it’s bitten off more than it can chew.
Russia’s depletion on the battlefield is plain to see – it has regressed from standard military vehicles for logistics to golf buggies and private cars and recently to pack animals. Experts have pointed at flaws in its logistical efforts from the start, but now Russia moves really small loads at walking pace. Several clips of footage have also emerged of men on crutches being sent to the frontline. Clearly unfit for combat, these are suicide missions because Russia does not want to look after the seriously injured when the war ends. None of this would be happening if Russia was well-resourced and ran its army professionally.
By contrast Ukraine has been very careful with its own resource deployment and tactics, for this reason it still has equipment and weapons stocks despite being outgunned throughout the war. Russia throws progressively older and less effective bits of kit into the theatre of war which could prove telling if Ukraine is allowed to fight on during the second half of this year.

Reasons for urgency, the gangster’s stooge
Russia has used familiar tactics to try and freeze the conflict – make the front line static at least – in the hope that Ukraine’s backers would eventually lose interest. Russia fights in a primitive and imprecise manner, but that doesn’t matter if its sheer will prevails over a near-symmetrical opponent.
If Russia has had a strategy at all it has been to wait for a friend to enter the White House and disrupt support for Ukraine. At the moment a Goldilocks scenario is playing out for Russia politically – President Trump is making a load of unreasonable demands in Ukraine’s direction and asking precisely nothing of Russia. It’s safe to assume that the USA will stop support for Ukraine soon and that won’t resume any time that Trump stays in the White House. Given that President Trump has also started a trade war with liberal democratic friends and neighbours, there’s a hostility coming from America towards us that we’ve not seen since 1812.
What does this mean? Europe is faced with some stark choices – watch Ukraine lose the war to Russia which would precipitate the biggest refugee crisis ever in Europe, even bigger than WWII, and embolden Russia to attack various smaller countries in Eastern Europe for years afterwards. Or Europe could make a massive change in direction, fill in the void left by the USA in support thus rendering Trump effectively irrelevant.

This is something that has to be done very quickly, but it’s pretty straightforward, Europe needs to provide Ukraine with much more of the same – Russia has failed to invade Ukraine when facing off against 30 – 40 year old equipment and it hasn’t innovated in terms of equipment or military doctrine much in three years. Give Ukraine the tools it will do a great job, give Ukraine money it will do plenty of research and outcompete Russia with new tech. Everything we’ve given Ukraine has been a great return on investment if you regard Russia to be a long term threat until it collapses.
In the short term European leaders need to make it clear that they back Ukraine in a decisive way so that defeat or any concessions in talks are out of the question. What’s it going to take? Immediate pledges in the realm of 10s of Billions of $s to extinguish any hope of Russia winning this war this year or next. Remember time is not on the side of either Trump or Putin, they are 78 and 72 years old, respectively, and Putin is running out of road when it comes to his resources.
In the longer term people have been mulling over a new military landscape seeing as the USA can no longer be regarded as a reliable partner.
Perhaps the time has arrived for a European Joint Defence Force – serious players only with voluntary opt-in, as opposed to an EU Army that would be problematic for several member states that are neutral. While this wouldn’t be the intention, but such an institution might be a way back into the European project for Britain that Keir Starmer has been so reluctant to entertain. Europe can’t be lukewarm to the threat of Russia forever, and Britain can’t fudge its relationship with Europe forever. The time is now.

These are dark days. In less than a month, the restored Trump presidency has appeared to dismantle, at least for now, many of the traditional pillars and assumptions of the post-war era. A month ago, Joe Biden was President of the United States, and for all of his sclerotic tendencies and faults, while he held that office no-one was in any doubt where the President stood: that he believed in the Western alliance, favoured democracies, abhorred autocracies, and would defend Europe. Now Donald Trump is the President of the United States, and all of that is gone. We were told by Trump’s supporters, that he would strengthen, indeed save the Western alliance. A month into his presidency, it has all but collapsed. It’s hard to think of such a rapid transformation in the geopolitical disposition of a superpower in such a short time. The postwar order fell, gradually then suddenly.

For the first time ever, virtually every European state now has some reason to think of the United States, long its strategic leader and security guarantor, as a competitor if not even adversary. Even writing the words feels dizzying. This is because the United States under Trump seems eager not just to chart neutrality, but engage an active embrace of Russia, and create a new US/Russia axis. The implications for Europe would be staggering. NATO might still exist, but it is hollow, a Potemkin organisation, as if the League of Nations still existed. Does anyone seriously believe Trump would now honour Article 5 if it were invoked? It’s as if we’ve all fallen into an updated version of Philip Roth’s Plot Against America, with Trump as a modern day Charles Lindbergh. But there’s no closing of the book, no tidy end of this chapter. Even if Trump were to recant, and adopt a more traditional American political position, the trust would be gone.

Trump told us that he would be a president who was less inclined to support Ukraine. There was a world where he had come to office, and for reasons of pure realpolitik, of unsparing and unsentimental logic, said that supporting Ukraine was not worth the cost. This would, in my view, have been cynical and strategically short-sighted, but it would have had an internal Trumpian coherence, within the realms of acceptability. What is so disturbing is not what Trump is doing but how he is doing it. He has not just accepted Russia’s strategic superiority but Russia’s confected realities. Trump has publicly accepted that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for the war- has claimed that they could have stopped it and regurgitated Kremlin talking points that Zelensky is a thief, and a dictator and that he should hold an election, a contest Putin would almost certainly seek to manipulate and undermine. Trump does this having lauded Putin, a man who hasn’t held a free or fair election in years and who has prevented elections in Ukraine because he invaded it.

It is not worth your time or mine to fact check any of this. It would be as to fact check the Ministry of Love, the inane ramblings of a propaganda minister, or a toddler, talking to themselves. But this is a toddler nominally in charge of the West. Trump’s reflux up of this Putiniste vomit serves to relegitimate Putin and delegitimise the Zelensky government, one of Russia’s key aims. It would be as if Roosevelt had labelled Churchill a dictator as the Luftwaffe rained hell down on London. The Russian attacks on Ukrainians civilians haven’t stopped by the way- the Americans didn’t even get that in exchange for the pictures, beamed around the world, of an ashen but gutless Marco Rubio sat alongside the delighted serpentine Sergei Lavrov, a man literally sanctioned by the US government for warcrimes. Indeed, Putin has said that he won’t even guarantee a meeting with Trump, that Trump must go further before he agrees to a summit. He is entirely in the driving seat despite the US spending the week alienating its own allies, giving Russia nearly all of what it wanted, buying Putin’s warped view of history, and Trump can’t even guarantee a meeting. The art of the deal, indeed.

Why is Trump doing it? Why is he cleaving to Putin so tightly? I think there are four key reasons.

1. Radicalisation: There has been a profound radicalisation of the American new right, especially online. The MAGA information system is whole and hermetically sealed, and has been given new impetus by Musk, who spreads misinformation and amplifies far right messaging daily. A Trump cipher from the America First Institute claimed on Newsnight on Tuesday that more people are locked up in the UK for freedom of speech violations than Russia. Whether she believes this nonsense or not it is currently a meme doing the rounds in the MAGA online space. Trump himself may well believe the stuff he’s reading and saying.

2. Ideational: Trump and the MAGA movement like what Putin stands for. They like and admire the fact he is an authoritarian and autocrat. With the collapse of the power of Congress (by its own hand) and the erosion of the authority of the courts, it is the direction Trump and his movement are taking the United States. They also see Russia and Putin as being on their side in the civilisational struggle they care most about: not between democracies and autocracies, but between liberal cosmopolitans and nativism, between international institutions and unbridled nationalist nation states. They have always admired him as traditionalist and a cultural conservative. It is no surprise that Putin has long been lauded by the radical right, even before Trump came along. Fundamentally, they see him as one of their own, in one form or another. It’s the same reason as they defend a whole cast of unsavoury characters from Andrew Tate to Tommy Robinson. The enemy of Trump’s enemy, is his friend.

3. Commercial: Trump and his allies have been quite open about the financial opportunities they see from the normalisation of relations with Russia. Some of this will be legitimate. You can imagine plenty won’t be.

4. Strategic: This is part of a much bigger game and it’s against China. Henry Kissinger once famously wrote: “It should be the U.S. policy to maintain closer relations with either Russia or China than they have with each other.” This belief partly lay behind Nixon’s normalisation of relations with Beijing. Trump admires Putin and crucially doesn’t perceive him as a threat. They believe (correctly) that Russia isn’t a serious strategic competitor to the United States. Its economy is stagnant, its military exhausted, its population ageing, its technology backward. China, by contrast, is the second empire of the world and the US’ main rival, as well as being one of Trump’s few consistently long-standing preoccupations. They want to drive a wedge through the alliance between China and Russia fostered by the Ukraine war, and cleave Russia away. In exchange, they’re not only happy to throw Ukraine under the bus, but most of Europe too, handing Putin what he wanted all along- not only a puppet Ukraine, but a restored sphere of influence which runs alongside much of the old Warsaw Pact.

Trump’s approach is chaotic and haphazard. But I believe these elements and this strategic move is what unites the comments from Hegseth, Vance and Trump himself this last month. It’s too tempting to assume Trump is making it up as he goes along. This is part of something much deeper. Europe’s thinking must be all the bigger as a result. Kissinger said something else: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” Never has that felt truer.

P.S. We discussed this more on Wednesday’s News Agents. Listen here.

Guy Verhofstadt is a former MEP and president of European Movement International. Domènec Ruiz Devesa is a former MEP and president of the Union of European Federalists.

Every cloud has a silver lining. And as Europe is finally faced with the opportunity to build a real European Defence Union amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s disruptive return, this could not be more true.

Despite several achievements in the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy throughout the years — including the deployment of no less than 40 missions and operations for crisis management and peacekeeping around the world — the bloc has continued to rely on the security umbrella provided by NATO and the U.S. for its territorial defense.

There were good reasons for this. After all, NATO’s mission is the collective security of the Euro-Atlantic area and most of the bloc’s member countries are also part of the alliance. Therefore, many considered the EU becoming a major security provider to be an unnecessary duplication, if not a possible cause of dangerous confusion in the line of command in the event of an attack.

However, it’s also true that the Treaty of the EU provides for the establishment of common defense (however undefined) and for mutual assistance among member countries in the event of aggression. Moreover, for Europe, NATO has, to a large extent, meant a political and defense-industrial dependence on Washington.

Be that as it may, it’s clear that current circumstances — including what happened in the run-up to and during the Munich Security Conference — are forcing Europe to “grow up” when it comes to its own security and defense. But what should the EU be doing to build its own defense union?

The U.S. had already shifted its focus away from Europe and toward the Indo-Pacific under former U.S. President Barack Obama. The Washington establishment, both Democrat and Republican, is united in seeing China, not Russia, as its direct strategic rival — even after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine. Arguably, even Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden’s support for the country could have been stronger, faster and more consistent.

Now add to that a president who is possibly willing to force a bad cease-fire, which would have terrible consequences for Europe’s security, and is also a NATO-skeptic, going so far as to threaten abandoning allies who “do not pay” — not to mention his expansionist aims over other NATO members like Canada and Denmark.

For Europe’s part, there is, of course, the temptation to only focus on things like joint weapons production or on exempting defense expenditures from the Stability and Growth Pact — as was the case with the latest informal EUCO. This makes sense. Surely, the EU must get its capabilities and defense-industrial base right, and as defense expenditures rise to unprecedented levels, we need to be spending better, together and European.

As it stands, EU member countries spend about one-third of what the U.S. does on defense, but Europe has about 10 percent of America’s capabilities. Moreover, the bloc’s defense capabilities planning and products are still largely fragmented along national lines, which means gaps in some capacities, duplication of others, interoperability problems, foreign dependencies and inefficient spending. According to the European Defence Agency, this lack of cooperation constitutes an annual loss of no less than €25 billion.

We need a pooling-and-sharing approach across the board, including for joint research, development and the procurement of weapons systems. For this to happen, the European Defence Industry Programme must be rapidly approved by its co-legislators. The coordinated investment could be catalyzed by the EU budget, along with joint borrowing and the creation of a defense bank. And an exemption to the fiscal rules should be limited to joint EU investments only.

Having said that, this is only one part of the equation — the supply side. Equally important — if not more so, in view of Trump’s disruption of the transatlantic bond — is defining and building up our common defense as foreseen in the Treaty of the EU.

The EU’s Rapid Deployment Capacity of 5,000 soldiers is a step in the right direction here, but it’s not enough. This capacity was conceived as an entry force for crisis management operations — not territorial defense. Thus, we must go further. We must develop EU common defense planning and command-and-control structures, thereby including the 27 national armies in a “European Security System” in coordination with NATO, acting as its “European Pillar.”

This is necessary due to Trump’s unpredictability, as well as the EU mutual assistance clause’s lack of operationalization. Currently, in the event of a withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Europe, a paralyzed NATO and a Russian attack on, say, the Baltics, EU member countries would have to rush to improvise an ad hoc military structure to deal with the aggression — a very unappealing prospect, to say the least.

German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote: “Wherein lies the danger, grows also the saving power.” It’s high time Europe got its armies together in a true European Defence Union.

Close your eyes and think of a coup, any coup. What comes to mind?

Perhaps you are old enough to recall September 11 1973, when the Chilean army and air force attacked the Moneda palace in Santiago and killed the elected president Salvador Allende. Or the tanks and truckloads of soldiers that moved smoothly and reassuringly into position in Buenos Aires on March 24 1976, bringing to an end the chaotic and bloody reign of Perón’s widow. There was no fighting then; many Argentinians welcomed the military as a stabilising force, not knowing that the armed forces had already laid the groundwork for a secret campaign of torture and extermination that would plunge Argentina into the darkest chapter in its history.

Or maybe you’ve seen the Brazilian Oscar nominee, I’m Still Here, which depicts the military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart. All these coups were supported and to some extent facilitated by the American government - continuing a tradition that the US began with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

Whatever happens afterwards, the initial phase of a coup usually contains the same elements: a military presence on the streets; roadblocks and ID checks; the seizure of tv and radio stations; the immediate suppression of democratic political institutions; emergency legislation to justify mass arrests and other exceptional measures. Some coups might have ‘spontaneous’ mobs or crowds to give them the appearance of popular legitimacy. Others, like the Franco-led putsch in 1936, require a civil war in order to prevail.

What is now unfolding in the United States is something entirely different. There are no soldiers, police, and paramilitaries. No mass arrests or concentration camps. No displays of force to cow the opposition.

On the surface, a normal, democratic transfer of power has taken place, regardless of the fact that the principal beneficiary of this transition is a convicted felon, who once attempted to overthrow the elected government that defeated him.

And yet, as a result of this process, some of the lamest, stupidest, cruellest, greediest, most fanatical, most rotten, contemptible and downright evil people in America have done to the American government what no American political party has ever attempted to do, and what few people would once have even imagined that anyone would dare to do. For the last month, the richest man in the world - in fact the richest man the world has ever seen - has embarked on the most destructive assault on the federal government in American history, using a team of software engineers, some of whom are not even out of their teens.

Ensconced on sofa beds in government buildings, Musk’s little men have gained unprecedented access to the Treasury’s expansive payment system, which is responsible for an annual budget of trillions of dollars. They have gathered data on millions of government employees, and have begun writing code on government computer programs. So far DOGE has dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) - an achievement that Musk celebrated with all the savage sociopathic cynicism that we have come to expect from this obscene travesty of a human being:

Yes, he should have gone to the parties and entertained them with his dazzling wit. Instead, he preferred to take money from some of the poorest people on earth and then brag about it to his Nazi followers.

Musk’s dweeb hit squad has also imposed mass layoffs at the Education Department, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the US Forest Service and the National Park Service.

Amid this mayhem, there is a kind of sense. In shuttering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk - a man with multiple conflicts of interest - has sought to eliminate the federal department which regulates banking, lending, and credit practices, and which also poses a potential obstacle to his own business interests, and to those of the tech bro mafia who stood gurning beside him at Trump’s inauguration.

DOGE has also gained access to the Federal Aviation Administration’s ‘rapid safety upgrades’ technologies, which aim to improve safety in the aviation sector - a sector in which Musk has a direct interest through his SpaceX company. The Muscovites are currently gathering personnel information at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at Medicare and Medicaid, at the Department of Energy, at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Veterans Affairs (VA).

Last week, the DOGE inbetweeners sacked between 300-400 nuclear weapons specialists at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), without realising what this department actually does. Musk’s vandals have since been trying to give them their jobs back, except that they don’t know how to locate many of them.

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Put that in your pitch for a Netflix series and you’d probably get rejected on the grounds that you’d been hitting the ketamine too hard, which according to rumour, is exactly what the world’s richest man has been doing.

For a country to place its collective fate in the hands of men like this, is the most extraordinary, jaw-dropping, barely credible folly imaginable. Yet not a single soldier or tank has been necessary to achieve this wild outcome.

No one elected Musk. Neither he nor his hirelings are subject to congressional accountability, and a Republican-dominated congress has no interest in seeking it. Latin American golpistas have generally relied on state forces to achieve their objectives. But this is a coup being carried out against the state - authorized by a flurry of executive orders from the criminal-rapist, crooked real estate magnate and reality tv star, who is now telling the dazed electorate that voted for him: ‘ He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.’

Someone should tell the crazed mandarin satan that this is not how democracy works, but don’t hold your breath.

According to WIRED, Musk’s team was recruited on online chatrooms last year. At least three DOGE staffers were recruited by Peter Thiel’s company Palantir, in the following manner:

In online chat groups linked to Palantir alumni and SpaceX interns, Musk’s space company, as well as in a Discord server associated with a military artificial intelligence program, the engineers said they were looking for people willing to spend six months in Washington, DC, cutting federal spending—which accounts for around a quarter of the US gross domestic product—by a third.

One of these recruits is a 19-year-old with the nickname Big Balls, who now occupies the position of senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. Another of Musk’s bright sparks is a 25-year-old staffer, who resigned after tweets were discovered in which he bragged that ‘I was racist before it was cool’ and called for the tech sector to ‘Normalize Indian hate.’

That squeaky little eugencist has since been reinstated by Musk, who called for the journalist who revealed these tweets to be fired.

This is the mighty ‘crew of teenage mutant incels’, as Stephen Colbert calls them, who are defanging the FBI, trying to close down the CIA, and cutting millions from the education budget. All this in the country that raised the ‘national security state’ to a quasi-religious status during the Cold War, and introduced the US PATRIOT Act in order to deter the threat from foreign terrorism.

It’s less than a decade since Trump called Edward Snowden a ‘total traitor’ and a ‘disgrace’ for revealing the US government’s covert surveillance programs. Yet now, Trump and his minions smirk happily while a billionaire with political ties to America’s enemies decimates key government institutions and his pipsqueak army gathers data that neither he nor they are qualified to handle.

Snowden justified his whistleblowing on ethical grounds. The Trump/Musk gang has no such arguments. They are dismantling their own government in broad daylight, in order to create a libertarian environment favourable to Musk and his fellow-predators, while pursuing a vindictive culture war which is removing words like ‘women’, gender’, ‘lesbian’, ‘Black History’, ‘National American Indian Heritage’ and other manifestations of wokery from government websites.

No wonder America’s enemies are laughing. And as for al-Qaeda and the Great Satan, well there’s no need to cut off the head of the snake when the snake is swallowing its own tail. Russia, the country which did so much to inject the culture war toxins into America’s mouldering body politic, also has particular reason to celebrate this outcome.

Last year, Russian media commentators were mocking the stupidity of Trump voters. This year, Russian state television is praising Trump for ‘cutting apart the Western world’ because of his ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine. This ‘plan’ looks set to give Putin everything he had asked for, while bypassing Ukraine - the victim of Russian aggression.

Last week, European leaders listened with stupefaction to an atrocious MAGA speech from the Hillbilly Faust J.D. Vance, who claimed that Europe was more of a threat to freedom and free speech than Russia. Vance coolly expounded Alexander Dugin talking points, collapsed the US-European alliance and abandoned Ukraine to its fate, with the arrogant insouciance of a man who knows he can say whatever the hell he likes without any consequences.

The problem - and it is a huge problem - is that he can, because too many Americans have been too frightened, complicit or lily-livered to call out this barking madness. Too many politicians and commentators have behaved like the punters at Westworld, who thought they were just fighting play-robots and re-enacting the same old fantasy scenarios, until the robots opened fire and started killing them.

European politicians are not entirely dissimilar. To his credit, the German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius excoriated Vance's lazy and dishonest arguments, and even John Major - Mr Gray Man himself - has raised his voice to condemn the good ‘ol boy with a hole in his soul.

But too many politicians continue to treat Trump and Trumpism as if they still lived in a world where the old rules apply. Too few seem unable or unwilling to recognise that the reason why Trump and his MAGA cult are aligning themselves with the Kremlin’s gangster-authoritarianism, is because they are gangster-authoritarians themselves, who share the same reactionary cultural/nationalist vision espoused by Kremlin ideologues like Dugin. This affinity explains the once-unlikely alliances that are now emerging, as a result of Trump’s sordid démarche to Putin. And it also explains how the Musk coup has been allowed to happen.

Trump’s voters may believe that the criminal-rapist is putting ‘America first’, but outside the cult, it looks a lot more like the collapse of an empire.

Some may argue that it serves America right. After all, how many countries have been invaded or attacked by America? Or had their political systems subverted or corrupted, and their governments overthrown by American-led ops? Now America itself is sinking into a vortex of political chaos, stupidity and delusion, and the incel coup is both a cause of that implosion and a consequence of the terrible judgement that made it possible.

Too bad, you might say. And good riddance. But the collapse of an empire is not the same as the collapse of a country - and a society. American neo-imperial decline is a welcome process, because the world doesn’t need empires, whether formal or informal. Nor is clear that this decline is taking place. The nineteenth century Manifest Destiny language that Trump and his mob are moronically and brutishly using regarding Canada, Mexico, Greenland - and Ukraine - suggests that reports of the empire’s death may be premature.

And the priorities that Vance presented to Europe’s stunned leaders last week is just the leading edge of an authoritarian-nationalist wave that threatens democracies across the world, and which is unrolling at precisely the time when the world needs collective solutions to collective problems.

The incel coup is already hurting and killing people, and it will hurt many more. The cancellation of US Aid has destroyed anti-trafficking efforts in the DRC; it has closed hospitals in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, and HIV clinics in Uganda. People are dying, and more will die, thanks to DOGE and Trump, and that is not a mistake - it is the result of a deliberate choice, which makes it evil.

Some Americans may not be bothered by this - for now. But they will also feel the consequences, as they lose firefighters, Medicare and Medicaid and social security, staff in their national parks, government regulators, aviation safety programs, schools, and cancer research programs.

This is class war acting under the guise of culture war, intended to strip American society to the bone. And this is what nationalism does - it rips the heart out of your country, transfers vast wealth to those who are already obscenely rich, and leaves you waving your flag and bleating about sovereignty or transwomen in the bathroom, while telling yourself how great you are and how you owned the libs.

Where this ends, we can’t yet say. The courts may yet force a constitutional crisis, in which the president has to choose between the law and constitution on the one hand, and his malignant agenda on the other. At that point, there will be a political crisis, in which Trump’s movement will implement the next phase of their ‘bloodless’ revolution, as the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts called the Project 25 ‘road map’ that Trump is essentially following.

Perhaps a movement will develop that will bring about the collapse of this deranged government. Or perhaps Trump will bring out police and soldiers. And then there will be dictatorship, civil war, or some kind of Orban-like repressive pseudo- democracy.

At this point, all possibilities are open, and yet too many politicians refuse to recognize it. Here in the UK, our timid and increasingly directionless government continues to imagine that the ‘special relationship’ is still special, and dreams of acting as a ‘bridge’ between America and Europe.

But this is not the bridge, this is the fateful crossroads and the fork in the road. This is the movement that must be opposed, resisted and quarantined within immovable red lines. Because make no mistake about it, these monstrous politics are coming here. And if Reform make any progress, then they will have their own dweebs and incels waiting to reduce Whitehall ‘waste’ in the way that Dominic Cumings has only dreamed of.

To prevent this, we need the broadest possible alliances. We need politicians with principles and integrity who know what they believe in and will stand up for what they believe in. We need journalists who will call a coup a coup, and lay off the sanewashing and the normalising and the ‘let’s just listen to both sides’ kumbaya trilling.

We need people who are prepared to resist, oppose, and condemn this cruelty, inhumanity, corruption and gross deceit before we are all dragged into the MAGA gutter. Such resistance needs to be individual and collective, legal, cultural, intellectual, political and moral.

We need to support Americans who are already doing this, and play our part in building these movements wherever and whoever we are. Otherwise, we might find the incels camping out in Whitehall, and the tech bros in Downing Street, advising Rupert Lowe or Nigel Farage, as they tear society to pieces in front of our startled eyes, while we stand waving flags and telling ourselves we got our country back.

Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women,” “historically,” and “status,” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly concerned with workplace training programs or low-stakes capitalist proceduralism. Instead the claims made by Musk and Project 2025 are far more expansive: for them DEI refers to any effort that acknowledges the reality that people other than cis white men operate in society.