THE GUARDIAN — OPINION: Forget the US president’s seeming volte-face on Ukraine this week: he and Putin fundamentally agree that European liberal democracy is the problem
For many people in eastern Europe, August 1939 may not feel that long ago. That was the moment Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union secretly agreed to partition Poland and forcibly subsume the sovereign Baltic republics and Finland into their totalitarian “spheres of influence”. The world knows what came next.
Now the question arises: is it happening again? This time around, it’s Donald Trump’s United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia making the big geopolitical power-play – and, once again, all of Europe is potential prey. Notwithstanding last week’s sparring over Ukraine, the two leaders’ core aims appear closely aligned.
Physical subjugation of the European continent is not a Trump objective (unlike, perhaps, in Venezuela, Canada or Greenland). But US efforts to dominate the continent through political interference, ideological subversion, economic blackmail, unregulated big-tech predation and the projection of conservative, Christian nationalist cultural beliefs amount to much the same thing.
Putin’s methods are cruder, yet his agenda mirrors Trump’s. He will not let go of Ukraine. He is intensifying, and leveraging, the Russian military threat, from the Baltic states to the Black Sea, including in Moldova, Romania and Georgia. Russian hybrid warfare – sabotage, cyber-attacks, online trolling and disinformation – is now a fact of daily western European life. » | Simon Tisdall | Sunday, September 28, 2025
Some Europeans Fear Trump Aides Want a Far-Right Takeover: The continent’s leaders have concerns that U.S. officials are pushing for parties that support their views of nationalism and traditional values to come into power. »
