Look Who Is Interested in Promoting Regime Change
Does the Trump administration care about democracy promotion? No. Populist promotion? Most definitely.
My latest column for World Politics Review is now online. It riffs off of Seva Gunitsky’s thesis in Aftershocks that shifts in hegemonic power can lead to shifts in concomitant regime change across the world. In short, through a variety of mechanisms, rapid growth in a democratic hegemon can promote a wave of democratization while rapid retrenchment can promote a wave of authoritarianism.
My column considers how Gunitsky’s model works if the United States is currently experiencing regime change — as folks like Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way and others have argued. What happens then?
You’ll have to read the whole thing to see my answer, but what I’d like to stress here is how — contrary to MAGA claims — the current Trump administration seems way more interested in affecting the domestic politics of other countries than other recent presidents:
Some of Trump’s supporters might counter that, contrary to the woolly-headed liberals of past administrations, his brand of transactional diplomacy is uninterested in the domestic regime type of other countries.
But the data from the past two months flatly contradict such a claim. Multiple high-ranking policy principals, including senior Trump adviser Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, have vocally expressed their opinions about other countries’ domestic politics. Indeed, days after Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk made a remote appearance at a campaign rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party.
And in February, when Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference, he barely mentioned external security threats like Russia and China, other than to say he does not worry about them. Rather, he pointed to the effort by mainstream European parties to keep the AfD and other populist, far-right and often illiberal movements from power as the greatest threat to Europe’s fundamental values. In other words, Vance was far more interested in European countries’ domestic regimes than any foreign policy matter.
Since the column was published, another data point has trickled in. Over the weekend Trump personally weighed in on far-right French politician Marine Le Pen’s criminal conviction of embezzlement. According to the New York Times’ Roger Cohen:
“FREE MARINE LE PEN!”
With this blunt call, a strange one in that the French far-right leader is walking the streets of Paris, President Trump has waded into the politics of an ally, condemning her conviction this week on embezzlement charges and her disqualification from running for public office.
The conviction was “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. Elon Musk, his billionaire aide, drove home the point: “Free Le Pen!” Mr. Musk echoed on his social media platform X.
More than an extraordinary American intervention in French politics, the statements ignored the overwhelming evidence arrayed against Ms. Le Pen, who was convicted of helping orchestrate over many years a system to divert European taxpayers’ money illicitly to offset the acute financial difficulties of her National Rally party in France.
This is a variation on a theme, but it’s an important one: neither Donald Trump nor his administration are isolationist. They are not pursuing a values-free foreign policy. Rather, they are actively promoting their brand of far-right populism and are actively meddling in the domestic politics of other countries.
Yes, and he's doing it in Canada. In a transparent attempt at a kiss of death, he endorsed Mike Carney by saying he would be easier to deal with. No one believed him and the Liberals are dominating the polls. Elom Musk also endorsed the Conservative, Pierre Poilievre.
It reminds me of a point Arendt made in Origins of Totalitarianism: that, despite the left’s ostensible commitment to internationalism, the far-right in Europe displayed far more genuine tendencies towards promoting their ideological co-partisans abroad. In that sense you can see that the far-right in a way is a repudiation of nationalism, insofar as people like Vance clearly value foreign racists far more highly than they do many of their fellow Americans. Any ideology built around the denial of community and society (which Trumpism is) will inevitably produce a strong tendency towards this sort of stuff, which I think is also why Trump-aligned parties are struggling globally: voters correctly see Pierre Poilivre or Peter Dutton as potential Quislings.