I’d be hard-pressed to argue that JD Vance’s meeting with the leader of the German fascist party on Friday was weakly covered by the press. Yet somehow, it hasn’t registered quite the degree of shock and revulsion here in the United States that it deserves to. That visit, along with Vance’s shocking speech at the Munich Security Conference, confirms every worst suspicion about this morally rudderless mountebank. The argot of diplomats and newspaper editorials, which express “concern” or even “grave concern,” doesn’t begin to describe how we Americans should feel about what Vance did last week in our name.
The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a “suspected extremist” organization by the German domestic intelligence agency. It has been shunned by all other parties; with a Bundestag election coming up February 23, the leading candidate, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has vowed that he won’t form a government with the fascists. AfD’s leaders have constantly downplayed the country’s Nazi past. And the vice president of the United States just met with its leader. While shunning a meeting with the sitting chancellor.
This is not remotely normal. True, it’s not as if the United States has never allied itself with fascist regimes. There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, and some others. But those were all during the Cold War, and U.S. support was, though hardly defensible, merely defensive—that is, it was offered solely because these thugs were enthusiastically anti-communist. It was support based on one mutually shared interest.
Vance’s meeting—and Elon Musk’s earlier one, since he, too, is a member of our government, however shadily—is something much different. It’s ideologically motivated. Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it.
I never could have imagined, none of us could, that the government of the United States of America would openly ally itself with a fascist political party. In the heart of Europe. In Germany, for God’s sake. And while we’re imagining things, imagine this: Although the conservative Christian Democrats are ahead in the polling, with 29 percent, AfD is in second at 21 percent. Imagine that AfD somehow wins. The U.S. government will be openly cheering a fascist victory.
Combine this with what we already know about Ukraine. The Trump administration is going to give Putin whatever he wants. What exactly this is, we don’t yet know. But when Saudi Arabia is hosting talks that include the U.S. and Russia only, and not Ukraine or the other nations of Europe, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to smell the fix that’s in.
Trump wants Ukraine to basically turn over a big chunk of its wealth to him. The British Telegraph reported Monday that Trump wants $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s minerals, which the paper said would “amount to the US economic colonization of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” And take note of what Trump said last week, vis à vis the money the Biden administration spent helping Ukraine defend itself: “They may make a deal. They may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. But I want this money back.”
“They may be Russian someday.” We know what that means. That’s a nice little country you got there, I’d hate to see that something should happen to it.
Last year, many people warned that under a second Trump administration, the U.S. would fundamentally alter its posture toward the world. That our country would go from being (however imperfectly) the linchpin of the concert of democracies to being the leader of the global far-right, anti-democracy movement. Then, it was speculation. Now, it’s happening right in front of us.
It’s a horrifying thing to watch. The transformation is happening domestically, too, of course; even more pronouncedly than in the realm of foreign affairs. Musk’s DOGE power-grab, the firings of civil servants, the attacks on the press like the barring of The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, the hideous cuts to scientific research—these and other moves, like the coming assault on Medicaid and all the many services it provides to both poor and middle-class people, all carried out by unilateral edict, are the acts of a government making its contempt for democratic norms clear every day. Several times a day.
But somehow, while foreign policy doesn’t matter as much in Americans’ day-to-day lives, it tells the rest of the world what kind of nation we have become. Step by step, the United States of America is becoming part of a global fascist network. Do we care yet?
