Cold Civil War Gone Global

Two monumental events have shaken the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. They took place at roughly the same time, but few have recognized their connection.

The first was the widespread exposure of USAID as the “world’s hipster vanguard of globalist, cultural Marxist revolution,” in the words of J. Michael Waller. When it wasn’t outright funding jihadist terrorism, USAID redirected billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to left-wing organizers promoting LGBTQ, anti-racism, climate change, and every other imaginable progressive policy around the globe.

While “charity” CEOs living in taxpayer-funded luxury wailed about how cuts would cost lives, the debate among the online Right was about burning USAID to the ground and salting the earth, or perhaps repurposing some form of foreign aid to support an America First foreign policy agenda.

The other earthshaking event was Vice President JD Vance’s transformational speech before the Munich Security Conference. Vance warned that our European allies, who cynically appeal to the shared principles that united America and Western Europe during the Cold War, have increasingly shunned the consent of the governed in favor of a heavy-handed bureaucratic censorship regime that resembles our former Soviet enemies.

The speech rocked Europe and opened a debate on the depth of America’s security commitment. What is the proper role of the U.S. in providing security in Europe? Is it based on geopolitical necessity or shared principles? What kind of Europe would actually be worth defending? Does MAGA merely desire a bigger commitment to NATO funding by European allies? Or a desire to see the U.S. leave Europe to its own devices? Is America First compatible with European nations making their own nations “great again,” thereby becoming allies genuinely worth having?

One can forgive the frustration of the Munich Security Conference crowd in hearing the words of Vice President Vance. For decades now, European elites have been the very best of allies—not for America as a whole but for our ruling class. On all the issues Vance mentioned, whether unchecked migration, censorship, or repression of Christian religious sentiments, European elites are in lockstep with America’s ruling class, and in many cases operate at its insistence.

Foreign Enemies, Domestic Enemies

Burgeoning political strife between Americans at home has come to drive U.S. foreign policy.

The late, great Angelo Codevilla gave us the term “cold civil war” to describe the tense and increasingly uncivil divisions between our ruling class and country class. The ruling class nearly universally holds progressive views and demands progressive policies both here and abroad. Americans of the country class, meanwhile, make up the majority of those who reject the direction of the elites, and who are responsible for electing Donald Trump—twice.

As Codevilla warned,

In revolutionary times or times of profound discord, this approach is especially important: minimize interference in others’ affairs so as to minimize occasions for others’ interference in ours and maintain such military capacity as would discourage anyone from taking advantage of our temporary distraction.

This is not advice the ruling class will accept.

It’s too much to say Europeans were dragged kicking and screaming behind American progressive leadership. They have their own populist revolts they are anxious to put down, after all. But those revolts are being egged on by America’s ruling class, as evidenced by complaints among French elites of the disastrous impact of “le Wokisme.”

Worse still, some of our European allies have intervened directly in our cold civil war. British intelligence played along with the U.S. Intelligence Community’s framing of President Trump (known as “Russiagate”) even though British spies privately suspected the collusion effort was the work of incompetents.

From a strictly strategic assessment, if a foreign nation chooses to intervene in America’s cold civil war, it makes sense to do so on behalf of the ruling class. First, because at least in 2016, their victory seemed highly probable against what seemed to be Trump’s ill-fated presidential run. Secondly, because after 2020 the American ruling class demonstrated it was fully prepared to punish foreign nations they perceived to side with their domestic opponents in the country class.

Much of the driving force of the Biden Administration’s foreign policy from 2020 onward sought to undermine any foreign nation that treated Donald Trump as if he was really president for four years, or warmly greeted his administration in any way. The Netanyahu government in Israel, which played a crucial role in delivering President Trump his signature foreign policy accomplishment in the Abraham Accords, was targeted to be overthrown in a color revolution. The internal Israeli debate over judicial reform was, after all, funded in part through USAID. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates likewise came in for special hostility, and for the same reason.

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