Treason of Populists

Until a few days ago, it had never crossed my mind that people across Europe - including Londoners like me - were living in a strife-afflicted hell hole, “suffocated” by regulations, stripped of political liberties, and bound for “civilizational erasure.” So, it was with some surprise that I read this assessment in the new US National Security Strategy — a document that echoes pseudo-intellectual propaganda more than resembling any serious foreign-policy analysis.

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As US President Donald Trump’s administration informed Europe of its misery and decline, he also announced its salvation: “cultivating resistance” by “patriotic” political parties capable of confronting the sovereignty-destroying European Union and reversing migration policies that threaten to make their countries “unrecognizable.” The clear implication is that the United States wants far-right Trump toadies to lead Europe: the National Rally’s Jordan Bardella succeeding French President Emmanuel Macron; Alice Weidel of the Alternative fiir Deutschland (AfD) replacingGerman Chancellor Friedrich Merz; and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage instead of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Of course, the last thing Europe needs is to take advice from a US regime that sends armed thugs into the streets to snatch up suspected immigrants, and treats matters of war and peace as opportunities for self-enrichment. It certainly should not heed an administration that takes its policy cues from mendacious propagandists, even if they present themselves as “philosophers,” such as the far-right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, and “theologians,” such as US Vice President JD Vance’s “British sherpa” James Orr.

These pseudo-intellectuals, and the media that amplify them, are the political descendants of the “useful idiots” who helped foster sympathy for the Soviet Union in the West. Just as the journalist Walter Duranty touted the wonders of Soviet life as Stalin marched millions off to the gulag, the useful idiots advancing right-wing populism today have little understanding of the issues they discuss. Instead, they simply make things up, as Camus did with his “great replacement theory.”