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      Germany hits back at Marco Rubio after he panned labeling of AfD as ‘extremist’

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      Germany’s foreign ministry has hit back at the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, following his criticism of Germany’s decision to label the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party as a “confirmed rightwing extremist group”.On Thursday, Rubio took to X and wrote: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy – it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD – which took second in the recent election – but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”Rubio went on to say: “Germany should reverse course.”In a response on X, the German foreign ministry pushed back against the US secretary of state, saying: “This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”Germany’s response to Rubio comes after its domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), designated the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force on Friday.The BfV’s decision marks a step up from its previous designation of the country’s anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin and largest opposition party as a “suspected” threat to Germany’s democratic order. According to the BfV, the AfD’s xenophobic stances based on an “ethnic-ancestry-based understanding” of German identity are “incompatible with the free democratic basic order” as indicated by the country’s constitution.The spy agency added that the AfD “aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and thus to assign them a legally devalued status”.It also said: “This exclusionary understanding of the people is the starting point and ideological basis for ongoing agitation against certain individuals or groups of people, through which they are defamed and despised indiscriminately and irrational fears and rejection are stirred up.”During February’s general election in Germany which was rocked by extensive US interference including public votes of confidence by staunch AfD supporters such as Elon Musk and JD Vance, the AfD amassed approximately 21% of the vote, finishing second.The far-right party’s rise to popularity in Germany has come as a result of a broader wave of growing rightwing extremism across Europe.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the same time, public figures in the US have openly made remarks or gestures that are sympathetic to nazism, despite the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on antisemitism across the country – a move which has been called into question by higher education institutions and Jewish senators who accuse Trump of targeting free speech.Musk, who had been given the designation of a “special government employee” by the Trump administration, made back-to-back apparent fascist salutes during the president’s inauguration rally earlier this year.Last month, during a Capitol Hill hearing that sought to explore supposed government censorship under Joe Biden, Republican representative Keith Self quoted Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister under Adolf Hitler.“A direct quote from Joseph Goebbels: ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,’ and I think that may be what we’re discussing here,” he said. More

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      A plea to the West: help us save America’s democracy | Anonymous

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      Donald Trump and his political allies in Washington have undertaken far-sweeping actions to undermine the foundations of American democracy, while simultaneously pursuing policies that erode and disrupt eight decades of trust and cooperation with democratic allies in Europe, North America and Asia.While leaders in these countries grapple with what is happening in Trump’s America, they must now ask themselves a new and critical question of immense relevance – one that has never been asked before in the modern era:“As nations who were helped by America in world war two and who have depended on the United States for our security, do we now have an obligation to reciprocate and help tens of millions of Americans whose liberty is threatened? Should we – can we – do anything to help the American people in their moment of democratic peril?”Yes. I firmly believe that the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan have a historic obligation to the American people to do what they can to help us preserve our democracy. An America descending into authoritarianism also poses a threat to the democracies they lead.I have two memories that speak to how foreign democracies should think about what they see happening in the United States of 2025.When my mother passed away, I found a small ceramic teapot in her cupboard with gold lettering on the bottom that read: “For England and Democracy. This teapot was transported to the USA by the Royal Navy.” My mother had purchased it during the early days of the second world war to support Britain and its people. Ordinary Americans such as my mother were doing their part – however small – to support a democratic country besieged by Nazi Germany.During the cold war, I remember hearing American presidents deliver speeches that were highly critical of the Soviet Union. At the end of these remarks, they would sometimes take a moment to directly address “the Russian people”. Our presidents were saying: “We see you as victims of oppression. We know that you are suffering under a cruel regime, and we hope that someday, in some manner, you will be free from the yoke of Soviet communism.” I know that when these messages got through Russian jamming, they were heard and gave some degree of hope to large segments of the Russian population.These two memories tell me that fundamental bonds based on enduring values can exist between governments and peoples who are not citizens of that government. Freedom, democracy and the rule of law can be those values. They also say that in the modern world, ordinary citizens in one nation can take a range of actions to support governments and citizens of another country.Today’s America is a place of fear for many. Americans are afraid that their livelihoods will be destroyed by a president who exercises unconstitutional acts of political retribution against his “enemies”. His targets: universities, law firms, corporations, states, certain agencies of his own government, and any federal employee who dissents in public. The judiciary and the media have been targets of vicious verbal attacks from Trump and his allies in Congress, which are precursors of actual future assaults. Foreign students, permanent residents and immigrants are rounded up and deported using highly questionable methods.European, Canadian and Japanese leaders are having a difficult time adjusting to this new American reality. The muscle memory of 80 years of intense cooperation, and in some cases dependency on the United States, is very difficult to break.I know the questions these leaders must be asking in private: is the United States becoming our adversary and perhaps our enemy? Will we be alone in our battle against the authoritarians in Russia and China? Will Trump and Elon Musk use governmental power and immense personal wealth to undermine our own democracies by encouraging the growth of far-right, anti-democratic forces in our countries? How can we protect ourselves when the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world is in rapid retreat from justice, from economic reality, from science, from policies that protect global health, while it aggressively pursues actions that accelerate dangerous atmospheric warming to the detriment of all?The silence of European, Canadian and Japanese leaders in the face of the US’s democratic crisis is both understandable and deeply disappointing. But make no mistake, their silence is a betrayal of their historic obligation to the American people as well as their commitment to democratic forces the world over. There are at least three difficult steps these leaders should consider.First, they must form common cause with the American people – not our government – and publicly state what they are saying in private. American democracy is in peril from an increasingly lawless government in Washington. They need to acknowledge that if American democracy erodes and dies, democracies the world over will be less safe. For the first time in history, Americans need to hear a message from foreign democratic leaders in support of preserving and sustaining our 249-year-old republic. You owe us at least this if you believe in democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSecond, take steps that begin to isolate the United States in world diplomacy that indicate strong disapproval of Trump’s activities to curtail democracy and his efforts to strengthen ties to authoritarian governments such as Russia. Refuse to visit the United States and make it clear that the US president is not welcome in Europe, Canada and Japan. If the US slips further into authoritarianism or undermines your own democracies, consider suspending the G-7’s yearly meetings and taking further actions to indicate that diplomatic business as usual will not be the norm as the Trump administration pursues an anti-democratic path.Third, move aggressively to act as Trump attacks our great universities and science centers, weakens countless not-for-profit organizations including our national museums, cultural centers and public media, as he moves to destroy US humanitarian relief efforts, as he terminates prior US environmental commitments and repeals laws and regulations designed to slow the climate crisis. Invite Americans engaged in these endeavors to work directly with the people of Europe, Canada and Japan and your like-minded institutions to support these American entities because they are part of our democratic fabric. And they often better your own societies and help people the world over. Establish and encourage the creation of people-to-people initiatives that will bring Europeans, Canadians, Japanese and Americans closer together to carry on what Trump and his allies are either destroying or weakening.I know that taking these actions will be extremely difficult. Trump will respond with verbal assaults and irrational retaliation because his power is unchecked. He and his allies will accuse you of interfering in our domestic affairs. In forming common cause with Americans fighting for our democracy, I deeply regret that you will begin to understand the growing fear that grips all segments of our society, and the retaliation visited every day upon the American people and institutions Trump deems as “enemies”.Defending European, Canadian and Japanese economic interests from Trump’s obsession with tariffs and other harmful actions he may take in the foreign policy arena, though important, does not repay the historic debt that you owe the people of the United States to help us preserve our democracy. I ask you to understand that staying silent as Donald Trump weakens American democracy will not deter him from harming your democratic societies. And your silence can only serve to embolden him in his efforts to erode the democratic standards embedded in the US constitution.

      The writer is a former US diplomat who wishes to remain anonymous More

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      US and Ukraine sign minerals deal that solidifies investment in Kyiv’s defense against Russia

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      The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.The minerals deal, which has been the subject of tense negotiations for months and nearly fell through hours before it was signed, will establish a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that the Trump administration has said will begin to repay an estimated $175bn in aid provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war.“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, in a statement.“President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine. And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, confirmed in a social media post that she had signed the agreement on Wednesday. “Together with the United States, we are creating the fund that will attract global investment into our country,” she wrote. The deal still needs to be approved by Ukraine’s parliament.Ukrainian officials have divulged details of the agreement which they portrayed as equitable and allowing Ukraine to maintain control over its natural resources.The Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said that the fund would be split 50-50 with between the US and Ukraine and give each side equal voting rights.Ukraine would retain “full control over its mineral resources, infrastructure and natural resources,” he said, and would relate only to new investments, meaning that the deal would not provide for any debt obligations against Ukraine, a key concern for Kyiv. The deal would ensure revenue by establishing contracts on a “take-or-pay” basis, Shmyhal added.Shmyhal on Wednesday described the deal as “truly a good, equal and beneficial international agreement on joint investments in the development and recovery of Ukraine”.Critics of the deal had said the White House is seeking to take advantage of Ukraine by linking future aid to the embattled nation to a giveaway of the revenues from its resources. The final terms were far less onerous for Ukraine than those proposed initially by Bessent in February, which included a clause that the US would control 100% of the revenues from the fund.On Wednesday Trump said a US presence on the ground would benefit Ukraine. “The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging,” he said at a cabinet meeting.Speaking at a town hall with NewsNation after the deal had been signed, Trump said he told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a recent meeting at the Vatican that signing the deal would be a “very good thing” because “Russia is much bigger and much stronger”.Asked whether the minerals deal was going to “inhibit” Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump said “well, it could.”UK foreign secretary David Lammy welcomed the agreement in a post on X, adding that “the UK’s support for Ukraine remains steadfast”.It was unclear up until the last moment whether the US and Ukraine would manage to sign the deal, with Washington reportedly pressuring Ukraine to sign additional agreements, including on the structure of the investment fund, or to “go back home”. That followed months of strained negotiations during which the US regularly delivered last-minute ultimatums while cutting off aid and other support for Ukraine in its defence against Russia.Ukraine’s prime minister earlier had said he expected the country to sign the minerals deal with the US in “the next 24 hours” but reports emerged that Washington was insisting Kyiv sign three deals in total.The Financial Times said Bessent’s team had told Svyrydenko, who was reportedly en route to Washington DC, to “be ready to sign all agreements, or go back home”.Bessent later said the US was ready to sign though Ukraine had made some last-minute changes.Reuters reported that Ukraine believed the two supplementary agreements – reportedly on an investment fund and a technical document – required more work.The idea behind the deal was originally proposed by Ukraine, looking for ways to offer economic opportunities that might entice Trump to back the country. But Kyiv was blindsided in January when Trump’s team delivered a document that would essentially involve handing over the country’s mineral wealth with little by way of return.Since then, there have been various attempts to revise and revisit the terms of the deal, as well as a planned signing ceremony that was aborted after a disastrous meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House in February.Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Ukrainian justice ministry had hired US law firm Hogan Lovells to advise on the negotiations over the deal, according to filings with the US Foreign Agents Registration Act registry.In a post on Facebook, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko gave further details of the fund, which she said would “attract global investment”.She confirmed that Ukraine would retain full ownership of resources “on our territory and in territorial waters belong to Ukraine”. “It is the Ukrainian state that determines where and what to extract,” she said.There would be no changes to ownership of state-owned companies, she said, “they will continue to belong to Ukraine”. That included companies such as Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil producer, and nuclear energy producer Energoatom.Income would come from new licences for critical materials and oil and gas projects, not from projects which had already begun, she said.Income and contributions to the fund would not be taxed in the US or Ukraine, she said, “to make investments yield the greatest results” and technology transfer and development were a “key” part of the agreement.Washington would contribute to the fund, she said. “In addition to direct financial contributions, it may also provide new assistance – for example air defense systems for Ukraine,” she said. Washington did not directly address that suggestion.Ukraine holds some 5% of the world’s mineral resources and rare earths, according to various estimates. But work has not yet started on tapping many of the resources and many sites are in territory now controlled by Russian forces.Razom for Ukraine, a US nonprofit that provides medical and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and advocates for US assistance, welcomed the deal, and encouraged the Trump administration to increase pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the invasion.“We encourage the Trump administration to build on the momentum of this economic agreement by forcing Putin to the table through sanctions, seizing Russia’s state assets to aid Ukraine, and giving Ukraine the tools it needs to defend itself,” Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy for Razom, said in a statement. More

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      Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

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      For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More

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      Donald Trump, beware – this is what a global liberal fightback looks like | Timothy Garton Ash

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      Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada’s election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served – alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections – to constrain the men who would be kings.In rallying everyone who believes in equal individual liberty to this fight, we liberals have a problem of our own making. Policies associated in many people’s minds with liberalism over the last 40 years have themselves fed the reservoirs of popular discontent from which nationalist populists continue to draw support. Neoliberalism, hypercharged through a globalised financialised capitalism, has led to levels of inequality not seen for a hundred years. An identity politics intended to remedy the historic disadvantages of selected minorities has left many other members of our societies – especially white, male, working and middle class – feeling themselves culturally as well as economically neglected. Both these approaches reneged on liberalism’s central promise, lucidly summarised by the philosopher Ronald Dworkin as “equal respect and concern” for all.Neoliberalism has also turned the world’s most powerful democracy into something very close to oligarchy. The separation of private wealth and public power – a precious and fragile innovation of modern liberal democracy – has been reversed. Insatiable plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are now supporters of Donald Trump’s political power, while he promotes his own and his rich pals’ economic interests. With the help of the media and platforms the plutocrats control, Trump persuades many ordinary Americans that their suffering is entirely due to foreigners (immigrants, China), while in reality it is more likely to be the fault of people such as Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg.So we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: with the enemies of liberalism and the problems created by liberalism itself. Unity will be strength. If we each try to negotiate separately with the bullies, be they in Washington, Moscow or Beijing, they will pick us off one by one.These coalitions of counter-power will be composed of states, but also of civil society actors and active citizens. At least half the population of the United States is with us. Electoral authoritarian states such as Turkey and Hungary also have lots of would-be-free citizens. The world’s largest example of applied liberal internationalism, the 27-country European Union, will be crucial to the fightback. So will major individual democracies including Britain, Canada, Japan and Australia.We need to do many things at once. Promoting free trade against Trumpian beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism is an obvious starting point. It’s also easier said than done, since mutually beneficial trading arrangements take time to craft. Yet there are some accessible immediate wins. A trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur group of Latin American states only awaits ratification by all relevant parties. Britain and the EU should be more ambitious at their upcoming summit on 19 May. The EU doesn’t need anyone else’s involvement for it to create a single digital space and unified capital markets, nor to build up European defence industries, which would also be a neo-Keynesian economic stimulus.The monopolistic platforms and mega-wealth of the American oligarchs are a danger to all other countries. If the EU were prepared to use its regulatory superpower, coordinated with the efforts of other liberal democracies, we could do more to curb them. But regulation and taxation alone are not enough.Whether in Europe, Canada, Australia or Japan, our entire digital infrastructure is effectively American. Imagine one day your iPhone and iPad stopped working, along with your cloud provider, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter (AKA X-itter). What would be left? TikTok! “And Bluesky”, you may add, referencing the liberal social platform of choice. But that too is American. This is not only about infrastructure. It’s about how we create the digital public sphere essential for the future of liberal democracy.Civil society initiatives can also help. Why, for example, haven’t we already seen a major statement of solidarity with embattled US universities from universities across the liberal world?So can consumer protests. The impact of a largely spontaneous boycott of Tesla cars is pushing Musk to return to his business activity, cutting the leisure time he can spend on vandalising his country’s administrative state. Canadians now have the BuyBeaver app on their phones, so they can avoid US-made goods. (I hope they boycott Russian ones too.)It’s also a matter of fighting style. Anti-liberal nationalists use the bludgeon, we the rapier. When they go low, we go high. When they go ape, we stay cool. When they lie through their teeth, we stand by the facts.In foreign policy, the most urgent challenge is to save Ukraine, which Trump is throwing under the bus. The fact that he is pressing the Ukrainians to abandon even their legal claim to Crimea being part of Ukrainian sovereign territory shows how supporting Ukraine is now essential to defending fundamental principles of liberal international order.What emerges after this hurricane will not be the same as before. It will be transformed both by us learning from our own mistakes, so as to build back better, and by the revolutionary impact of Trump. A liberal democratic constellation that is not fundamentally secured by the US “liberal leviathan”, in the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry’s striking phrase, will be something very different from what we knew between 1945 and 2025.Even the geography will change. Canada, for example, which once seemed – in the nicest possible way – somewhat peripheral to world affairs, comfortably tucked up there between a friendly America and a frozen Arctic, now suddenly looks like a frontline state. One of the world’s most liberal countries is, beside Ukraine, one of the most directly threatened by Trump’s anti-liberal assault. And the thawing Arctic is a major new theatre of international competition. Fortunately, it looks as if Canada is going to have a government that is not just Liberal in name but also combatively liberal in nature.A quarter-century ago, when the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001, the editor of Le Monde wrote a famous banner headline: “We are all Americans!” Today, friends of liberty the world over should say: “We are all Canadians!”

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

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      In Poland, we know all about fighting illiberal regimes. Here are our lessons for the Trump age | Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura

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      In 2016, one year after the rightwing populist Law and Justice party won an overall majority in Poland, there was a knock at a door. The mother of a young journalist opened it. To her astonishment, it was the security services looking for her son. No details were provided. Thus began an informal campaign by the authorities against the media and civil society in Poland, including our thinktank, Kultura Liberalna. After hearing the news about the journalist, we called Aleksander Smolar. The legendary anti-communist dissident, who ran his own NGO, told us that the security services were also trying to arrange “informal” meetings with his staff. And he comforted us: “Don’t worry, we’ve had a playbook for this kind of situation since the 1960s.”At that moment, we almost travelled back in time. We spoke about responding to this new regime as if we were once again under communism. What is striking in retrospect is that we all knew what to do. Our eastern European political culture, shaped by historical catastrophes, has developed some antibodies against oppressive power. Over the past centuries, the state has often been wiped off the map or occupied by foreign aggressors. Adversity sparks initiative.So, what advice did the former dissident give us? First, we started speaking publicly about what was happening. Second, we demanded that the security service officers present their actions in writing and with legal justification. As a result, the campaign disappeared as quickly as it appeared.But political harassment continued in other forms. The more emboldened the authorities became, the more elaborate (or crude) the stigmatisation of ideological opponents was. Soon, one thing became clear: as under communism, the political battlefield was everywhere. It touched every area of public life. Founding our thinktank in a democracy, we never imagined having to face political invigilation. That was naive.Our own struggle didn’t end with the Polish liberal opposition’s victory in 2023. What’s more, political attacks now take a transatlantic shape. As US Vice-President JD Vance made clear in his Munich speech in February, in which he attacked European leaders, American rightwing populism has global ambitions.So here is a handful of suggestions for Americans and others who seem disoriented and overwhelmed.First: go beyond digital activism. A wave of anti-Trump street demonstrations recently swept across the US. In the age of social media, that might seem like an outdated or secondary tactic. But it’s not. In a time of effortless communication and online petitions, physical work matters twice as much. It sends a nonverbal message of urgency and sacrifice, and – more importantly – signals an invitation to fellow citizens to join. These protests should be regular and designed for the long haul. They should be citizen-led. Initially, flexible horizontal structures, ready for quick response, turned out to be more effective in practice in our experience.Second: no ageism, please. As our own history shows, opposing populism in power is possible only if intergenerational solidarity takes place. We heard a reporter sneer that the New York, anti-Trump protest crowd skewed old. So did ours in Poland! Yet over time, younger people joined in as the burdens of populism became more personal. Again – diversity matters most. Not just in communication tools, but in the social makeup of the protest movement.Third: it’s always the constitution, stupid. One hallmark of authoritarianism is the erosion of constitutional law. It’s not about abstract legal theories – it’s about changing the rules of the state without formal approval. Donald Trump’s musings about a potential third term are a prime example. The US constitution clearly forbids it. But the very mention signals a willingness to operate outside the legal order. Polish populists broke the constitution almost immediately after taking power. The consequences are still with us. What helped was keeping a detailed record of key legal violations.View image in fullscreenJust as important was documenting the repression of civil society – like the example this article opened with. In an age of short attention spans, civil society must archive the illegality of populism – for rapid and effective accountability afterwards. The constitution is the terrain of the battlefield.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFourth: don’t leave. Populists in power try to persuade neutral officials, such as public prosecutors, to resign from their government positions. Ideally, they want to rid their political opponents from the country. But don’t let them force you into exile, if you can help it; resistance on the ground will be crucial, just as it was for figures in the anti-communist opposition in eastern Europe before 1989.Fifth: plan ahead. Perhaps the most psychologically difficult task is extending a hand to those with whom you have political disagreements. The facts are hard to ignore: in democracies, populists win through elections. Hardliners won’t change, but the 10-20% of swing voters in the centre can be decisive.Regaining power is possible but requires a dual-track approach. Use social media to shape political narratives. But also, unplug. Switch on to political aeroplane mode. Think long-term. Don’t get caught in the news cycle or buried under the “flood the zone” avalanche of absurdities populists use to wear down their critics.Plan for the next presidential election. It’s not enough to promise justice and institutional repair. You also need a compelling vision – a positive, practical alternative to the populist programme. Without it, the fuel runs out – even if you win an election. And have patience. Ultimately, the fight for democracy is never about just one election. Populism existed even in Periclean Athens. Which is why the struggle for liberal democracy requires a warm heart and a cool head. This is the core of the anti-authoritarian playbook.

      Jarosław Kuisz is editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly Kultura Liberalna and the author of The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty

      Karolina Wigura is a Polish historian and co-author of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty: An Essay (Why the Eastern European Mentality is Different) More

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      Son of CIA deputy director was killed while fighting for Russia, report says

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      An American man identified as the son of a deputy director of the CIA was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2024 while fighting under contract for the Russian military, according to an investigation by independent Russian media.Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, died on 4 April 2024 in “Eastern Europe”, according to an obituary published by his family. He was the son of Juliane Gallina, who was appointed the deputy director for digital innovation at the Central Intelligence Agency in February 2024.The story of how the son of a top-ranking US spy died fighting for Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an unlikely tale of how homegrown anger at the United States and online radicalisation led from a middle-class Virginia childhood to the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.On a VKontakte page attributed to Gloss, a high school football player born to parents who both served in the military, he described himself as “a supporter of the multipolar world. I ran away from home. traveled the world. I hate fascism. I love my homeland.” He also posted the flags of Russia and Palestine.According to the investigative website iStories, Gloss is one of more than 1,500 foreigners who have signed contracts with the Russian military since February 2022. The database for the enrollment office was later leaked, exposing him as having signed the contract in September 2023. Sources told iStories that Gloss had been deployed with “assault units”, those engaged in harsh frontline fighting, in December 2023. An acquaintance said that he had been deployed to a Russian airborne regiment sent to storm Ukrainian positions near the city of Soledar.“With his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael was forging his own hero’s journey when he was tragically killed in Eastern Europe on April 4, 2024,” his family wrote in the obituary, which did not mention Russia and Ukraine or discuss the circumstances of his death.In university, Gloss was active in gender equality and environmental protest circles. He joined Rainbow Family, a leftwing environmental protest group, and in 2023 traveled to Hatay, Turkey, to assist in the recovery following the earthquake that killed more than 56,000 people. He had also become increasingly angry at the US for its support of Israel and the war in Gaza.While in Turkey, Gloss began expressing a desire to go on to Russia. “He was usually watching videos about Palestine and was so angry at America,” one acquaintance told iStories. “He started thinking about going to Russia. He wanted to war with the USA. But I think he was very influenced by the conspiracy theory videos.”After receiving a visa to Russia, he traveled around the country before arriving in Moscow, where he joined the military shortly before his documents expired. Photographs and videos obtained by iStories showed he was sent to a Russian training camp, where he mostly trained alongside Nepali contract soldiers. Three months after enlisting, an acquaintance said, he was deployed to Ukraine as a member of an assault battalion.A number of acquaintances told the outlet that he had not been interested in fighting, but hoped the army would allow him to receive a Russian passport and stay in the country.The circumstance’s of Gloss’s death are not known. A friend said that his family had been informed by the Russian government of his death but were given little other information. “It was announced that he died within the borders of Ukraine,” the friend wrote. “We do not know whether he participated in the war. They did not provide any other detailed information.”It was not clear whether the Russians performed a background check on Gloss or knew the identity of his mother. The Guardian has approached the CIA for comment on the reports. More

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      Ukraine, Gaza and Iran: can Witkoff secure any wins for Trump?

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      Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana, the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.In the words of the former CIA director William Burns, it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.The US’s aim has been to keep the three era-defining simultaneous sets of negotiations entirely separate, and to – as much as possible – shape their outcome alone. The approach is similar to the trade talks, where the intention is for supplicant countries to come to Washington individually bearing gifts in return for access to US markets.The administration may have felt it had little choice given the urgency, but whether it was wise to launch three such ambitious peace missions, and a global trade war, at the same time is debatable.It is true each of the three conflicts are discrete in that they have distinctive causes, contexts and dynamics, but they are becoming more intertwined than seemed apparent at the outset, in part because there is so much resistance building in Europe and elsewhere about the world order Donald Trump envisages, and his chosen methods.In diplomacy nothing is hermetically sealed – everything is inter-connected, especially since there is a common thread between the three talks in the personality of the property developer Steven Witkoff, Trump’s great friend who is leading the US talks in each case, flitting from Moscow to Muscat.View image in fullscreenTo solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.Witkoff has strengths, not least that he is trusted by Trump. He also knows the president’s mind – and what should be taken at face value. He is loyal, so much so that he admits he worshipped Trump in New York so profoundly that he wanted to become him. He will not be pursuing any other agenda but the president’s.But he is also stretched, and there are basic issues of competence. Diplomats are reeling from big cuts to the state department budget and there is still an absence of experienced staffers. Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia. For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, who attended the first Russian-US talks this year in Saudi Arabia, spent 10 years in the US as Russian ambassador. He was accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who then visited the US on 2 April.In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.View image in fullscreenAs to the Gaza issue, Benjamin Netanyahu has lived the Palestinian conflict since he became Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 1984.Richard Nephew, a former US Iran negotiator, says the cuts to state department means the US “is at risk of losing a generation of expertise … It’s beyond tragedy. It’s an absolutely devastating national security blow with the evisceration of these folks. The damage could be permanent, we have to acknowledge this.”One withering European diplomat says: “It is as if Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grandmasters on three chessboards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”Bluntly, Witkoff knows he needs to secure a diplomatic win for his impatient boss. But the longer the three conflicts continue, the more entangled they become with one another, the more Trump’s credibility is questioned. Already, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll published this month, 59% of Americans think Trump is costing their country its credibility on the global stage.The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite – the public erosion of a super power.In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran. Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and Mossad’s head, David Barnea, met Witkoff last Friday in Paris to try to persuade him that when he met the Iran negotiating team the next day in Rome, he had to demand the dismantling of Tehran’s civil nuclear programme.Witkoff refused, and amid many contradictory statements the administration has reverted to insisting that Iran import the necessary enriched uranium for its civil nuclear programme, rather than enrich it domestically.Russia, in a sign of Trump’s trust, might again become the repository of Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, as it was after the 2015 deal.Israel is also wary of Trump’s aggrandisement of Russia. The Israeli thinktank INSS published a report this week detailing how Russia, in search of anti-western allies in the global south for its Ukraine war, has shown opportunistic political support not just to Iran but to Hamas. Israel will also be uneasy if Russia maintains its role in Syria.But if Trump has upset Netanyahu over Iran, he is keeping him sweet by giving him all he asks on Gaza.Initially, Witkoff received glowing accolades about how tough he had been with Netanyahu in his initial meeting in January. It was claimed that Witkoff ordered the Israeli president to meet him on a Saturday breaking the Sabbath and directed him to agree a ceasefire that he had refused to give to Joe Biden’s team for months.As a result, as Trump entered the White House on 19 January, he hailed the “EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signalled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies”.But Netanyahu, as was widely predicted in the region, found a reason not to open talks on the second phase of the ceasefire deal – the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a permanent end to the fighting.Witkoff came up with compromises to extend the ceasefire but Netanyahu rejected them, resuming the assault on Hamas on 19 March. The US envoy merely described Israel’s decision as “unfortunate, in some respects, but also falls into the had-to-be bucket”.View image in fullscreenNow Trump’s refusal to put any pressure on Israel to lift its six-week-old ban on aid entering Gaza is informing Europe’s rift with Trump. Marking 50 days of the ban this week, France, Germany and the UK issued a strongly worded statement describing the denial of aid as intolerable.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is calling for a coordinated European recognition of the state of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia is insisting the US does not attack Iran’s nuclear sites.Witkoff, by contrast, has been silent about Gaza’s fate and the collapse of the “EPIC ceasefire”.But if European diplomats think Witkoff was naive in dealing with Netanyahu, it is nothing to the scorn they hold for his handling of Putin.The anger is partly because Europeans had thought that, after the Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public row with Trump in the Oval Office, they had restored Ukraine’s standing in Washington by persuading Kyiv to back the full ceasefire that the US first proposed on 11 March.View image in fullscreenThe talks in Paris last week between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and European leaders also gave Europe a chance to point out it was Putin that was stalling over a ceasefire.But instead of putting any countervailing pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire, Witkoff switched strategy. In the words of Bruno Tertrais, a non-resident fellow at the Institut of Montaigne, Witkoff is “is now presenting a final peace plan, very favourable to the aggressor, even before the start of the negotiations, which had been due to take place after a ceasefire”.No European government has yet criticised Trump’s lopsided plan in public since, with few cards to play, the immediate necessity is to try to prevent Trump acting on his threat to walk away. At the very least, Europe will argue that if Trump wants Ukraine’s resources, he has to back up a European force patrolling a ceasefire, an issue that receives only sketchy reference in the US peace plan.The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, addressing the country’s parliament on Wednesday, pointed to the necessity of these security guarantees. “Any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach,” he said.View image in fullscreenBut in a sense, Trump and Putin, according to Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution, a Russia specialist in Trump’s first administration, may already have moved beyond the details of their Ukrainian settlement as they focus on their wider plan to restore the Russian-US relationship.It would be an era of great power collusion, not great power competition in which Gaza, Iran and Ukraine would be sites from which the US and Russia could profit.Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported” “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II … We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”Witkoff has also mused about what form this cooperation might take. “Shared sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” he said, adding: “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?” More