By Ivan Krastev* – Foreign Affairs
How America’s Weaponization of Ideology Could Backfire.
In the ten months since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office, he has upended the way the United States engages with allies and adversaries alike. He is not only remaking the architecture and decoration of the White House; he is redrawing the mental maps through which Washington sees the world.
Initially, the administration’s focus on tariffs suggested that Trump was uninterested in the politics of other countries and cared only about trade balances. More recent moves have destroyed that illusion. It is ideology, not economics, that explains Trump’s hostility toward Brazil (whose leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, he intensely dislikes) and his unbounded financial generosity toward Argentina (whose right-wing populist president, Javier Milei, whom he has called his “favorite president”). But it is a left-right divide, rather than the traditional divide between democracy and authoritarianism, that defines Trump’s policies. Unlike predecessors such as Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, Trump is not interested in exporting democracy. What he is keen to export is his domestic political agenda—one that is anti-immigration, anti-woke, anti-green.
Perhaps nowhere has the primacy of ideology been more pronounced than in Trump’s approach to Europe. Heaping disdain on the European Union and shunning the traditional liberal values that have anchored the transatlantic alliance, his administration has instead leaned into Europe’s far right. Alongside his ties with Italy’s right-wing populist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Trump has supported the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), Spain’s Vox party, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, among other far-right parties.
There is a sense that the White House views many European countries as just one electoral cycle behind the United States and expects a dramatic rightward turn on the continent in the next few years. Europeans on the right seem to share this conviction and have even taken steps to form a kind of transnational front. A new group of right-wing parties has emerged, the Patriots of Europe, which has vowed to “Make Europe Great Again” and embraces the MAGA revolution a model.
At a moment when Trump is questioning U.S. security arrangements with Europe, threatening to reduce the American military presence there and demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, his backing of the European far right at first appears a strategic masterstroke. It allows the United States to maintain significant parts of Europe within its sphere of influence while simultaneously reducing its commitments to the region. It is a low-cost way to reinforce MAGA influence and prevent the rise of a sovereign Europe that is less aligned with Washington.
In this game, central Europe, where a band of illiberal politicians has already gained a strong base, plays a critical role. Long before the 2024 election, Trump expressed admiration for Viktor Orban, the longtime Hungarian prime minister, who is often presented as model of MAGA leadership; since returning to office, Trump has underlined this relationship by exempting Hungary from sanctions related to the country’s imports of Russian oil. In Poland, the far-right, MAGA-endorsed candidate Karol Nawrocki won the presidential election in June. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has declared his alignment with the U.S. president. And in the Czech Republic, another right-wing populist favored by Trump, Andrej Babis, won parliamentary elections in October and is now seeking to form a new government.
Yet if the Trump administration’s aggressive courting of the European far right has yielded significant wins, it is also a risky bet. For one thing, stoking political polarization may result in a fragmented rather than a Trump-aligned Europe. It is far from clear that even illiberal leaders, starting with Orban himself, will align geopolitically with Trump, whether on Russia or China or on economic issues. At the same time, by lavishing support exclusively on ideologically aligned parties and leaders, the administration may be losing the bedrock pro-Americanism that has traditionally shored up support for Washington in critical parts of Europe.
Illiberal globalists
If the first two post–Cold War decades were characterized by the “westernization” of eastern Europe, with liberal democracy blossoming in former communist bloc countries, in the current moment it’s the opposite. Now there is a gradual “easternization” of western Europe through the spread of Orban-style illiberalism to former liberal strongholds. The dramatic surge of the AfD in western Germany is a striking sign of this shift.
Not long ago, many analysts assumed that the party—which Germany’s domestic intelligence service has designated a “confirmed right-wing extremist” threat to the country’s democratic order—could not expand beyond its base in areas of the former East Germany. That assumption no longer holds, as the AfD’s performance in recent polls and regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia make clear. Today it is the west imitating the east: public attitudes in western Europe have begun to resemble sentiment in eastern Europe during the 2015 migration crisis. The rise of the east in European politics brings the EU ideologically closer to Trump’s Washington.
But Trump’s alliance with Orban and other right-wing leaders in central and eastern Europe goes beyond ideology. Although illiberal forces in these countries are diverse—and often at odds with one another on such questions as policy toward Russia or economic governance—the region resembles American red states in political temperament. It is culturally conservative, predominantly white, and committed to cultural homogeneity. Like MAGA supporters, its populations tend to be hostile to immigration and so-called wokeness and skeptical of climate change. It is not surprising that the eastern European diaspora in the United States tended to favor Trump in the last election.
The sense of a broader realignment became clear after Trump’s victory in 2024: led by the populist-right parties of central and eastern Europe, the continent’s illiberal forces rapidly pivoted from defending national sovereignty against the EU to championing a new transnational movement with a global conservative agenda. Meanwhile, Europe’s centrists often found themselves doing the reverse: many former proponents of globalization and transatlanticism have reinvented themselves as sovereigntists resisting what they see as ideological overreach by Washington.
The Trumpian revolution has divided Europe. Unlike during earlier moments of friction, such as the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, the split is not between pro- and anti-American countries. This time, it is between pro- and anti-Trump political camps. The most important change is that European perceptions of the U.S. political system are now starkly polarized. In a June survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations, supporters of far-right parties such as Germany’s AfD, Italy’s Brothers of Italy, Hungary’s Fidesz, Poland’s Law and Justice, and Spain’s Vox held a predominantly positive view of American politics, whereas mainstream voters in those countries held a mostly negative one. Never before had the council’s polling of Europeans shown a comparable polarization.
The key takeaway is that Europeans’ views of the United States are now defined by their views of Trump. Some traditional transatlanticists are growing apprehensive about the future, given that Trump’s European admirers may cease to support the United States when he is not in power or if his policies fail. By harnessing the illiberal vanguard of Europe’s east, the Trump administration has exacerbated the continent’s old east-west divide and dramatically increased the risk of fragmentation of the EU. And even if right-wing parties gain ascendancy across the region, it is far from clear that an illiberal Europe will be pro-American or that the dream of a more sovereign, less U.S.-dependent Europe is only held by the traditional parties of the center and left. Orban’s own evolving geopolitical vision suggests a more complicated reality.
Hungary’s silk road
If there is one European populist known across the MAGA universe, it is Orban. Having invested heavily in building a transatlantic conservative network since the 2010s, the Hungarian leader has become to the right what Cuban leader Fidel Castro once was to the left—a hero and a model. Orban’s influence across central and eastern Europe is considerable. Should he win reelection in April 2026, he will have a strong claim to being the principal architect of Europe’s post-liberal geopolitical strategy.
Yet a renewed electoral mandate for Orban is unlikely to consummate MAGA hegemony over the continent. The Hungarian strongman may support Trump, but he also sees the West as having entered an irreversible decline. In Orban’s office in Budapest, there are three world maps showing the world from different perspectives: one American-centered, one European-centered, and one centered on China. What Orban sees when he studies them is what he calls a “global system change”—a shift of power to Asia. In his view, Asia possesses demographic momentum, a technological advantage, and enormous capital strength. It is also rapidly developing the military capacity to match the United States and its Western allies. The coming world order, Orban believes, will be Asian-centered.
For Orban, Europe faces a stark choice. Either it could attach itself to the United States and become what he has called an “open-air museum,” admired but stagnant, or it can seek “strategic autonomy,” reentering global competition as an independent power. To the surprise of many, Orban—not unlike France’s liberal president, Emmanuel Macron—has said he prefers a “sovereign Europe.” In Orban’s conservative view, this would mean preserving the single European market but reversing deeper European political integration and maintaining an equal distance from China and the United States.
Connectivity will be the core of Hungary’s grand strategy, Orban explains. Hungary will not join a cold war with China, or a technological or trade bloc aimed at isolating Beijing. This position reflects growing economic realities in Budapest: China now invests more in Hungary than in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. In other words, Orban’s Europe, unlike the Europe of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is not aligned with Trump or the broader U.S. political establishment when it comes to policy toward China. This kind of divergence is not unique to Hungary’s illiberal politicians: Germany’s AfD, for example, seems in many respects closer to Moscow than Washington.
Of course, Europe’s populist right is larger than Orban—and he may yet lose the April election in Hungary, in which he is, for the first time in years, facing a strong challenger. In one of history’s many ironies, Orban’s Fidesz may fall at precisely the moment commentators are proclaiming “Orban’s moment.” Nonetheless, his Asian-centered geopolitical outlook demonstrates the limits of Trump’s effect on Europe.
MAGA to MEGA
The Trump administration has made little secret of its desire to dismantle the existing liberal EU hierarchy. But even if MAGA succeeds in undermining the centrist institutions built by France and Germany and other core European democracies, the populist-right parties it helps elevate may not ultimately support a new kind of American influence over Europe.
The administration’s assumption that Europeans are moving to the right is not wrong, but it errs in expecting that the rise of Trump-friendly leaders will be enough to preserve U.S. dominance. Instead, the rise of the illiberal right is likely to create a deepening economic and political crisis that will provoke what the Oxford political scientist Dimitar Bechev defines as “the scramble for Europe”—a situation in which major powers such as China and Russia and middle powers such as Turkey and the Gulf countries will increasingly compete for influence.
A larger problem for the United States is that Trump’s policies have alienated the liberal establishment that once made the countries of central and eastern Europe Washington’s closest and most reliable transatlantic allies. If populist leaders fall out of favor in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other countries in the region, their successors will likely be no less skeptical of Trump’s Washington than western European liberals are now. In a paradoxical way, by strengthening ties to the European right, Washington may be weakening its influence in Europe as a whole.
Still other points of friction between Trump and the new European right stem from the civilizational nationalism now favored by conservative circles in the United States. The MAGA view that the West should be defined as white and Christian resonates with many European far-right parties, but their supporters are deeply divided over the question of whether Vladimir Putin’s Russia is part of this new illiberal empire. Poles, for example, are scandalized to realize that American conservatives such as Tucker Carlson regard Russia as part of the white Christian West.
But perhaps the clearest consequence of Trump’s European posture is the return of the “German question,” the historical dilemma of managing a strong Germany within a peaceful Europe. As Washington retreats from its European commitments and insists that Europe pay for its own security—and as Europeans increasingly doubt American reliability—German remilitarization has become integral to European self-defense. Yet Trump’s simultaneous encouragement of the AfD, now the second-largest party in the Bundestag, has raised the prospect that Europe’s most powerful country could in the future be led by the German nationalist right—and that Washington might be sympathetic to such an outcome. That has revived old fears among Germany’s neighbors, including segments of the European right in countries that otherwise admire Trump.
If the Trump administration’s European strategy is to impose closer ideological alignment while reducing U.S. economic and military support, it will fail. Right-wing parties, no less than their centrist and liberal counterparts, are aware that in an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape, their countries may have to fend for themselves. Confronted with a hostile world, Europe’s right may rediscover—perhaps reluctantly—the practicality of Europe’s decoupling from an unreliable United States. Ultimately, Trump’s effect on Europe in many ways resembles Mikhail Gorbachev’s effect on the Eastern bloc in the 1980s. Gorby-mania dramatically reshaped the communist regimes of eastern Europe—and in the process helped Moscow lose its sphere of influence.
*Ivan Krastev is Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.