Opinion | America and Russia Are on the Same Side Now

During the Cold War, large and influential Communist parties in Western Europe maintained ties with Moscow, ranging from sympathetic to subservient. The United States kept its distance and in many cases supported their opponents financially and politically.

Now Europe is confronted with a loose alliance of Russian-leaning parties, this time on the other end of the spectrum: the far right. And the U.S. government has taken the opposite approach: a warm embrace.

By doing so, the United States is condoning Russia’s subversion of the postwar Europe that America helped create and secure. The parties Russia favors are hostile to the European Union, opposed to higher military spending and receptive to Russia’s arguments about the recklessness of NATO expansion and the need to assert right-wing Christian values.

Should these parties and their populist cousins eventually dominate Europe — they are in government in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia, and making an impact in France and Germany — they could eviscerate NATO and geopolitically neuter if not subjugate Europe itself. That is certainly Russia’s hope.

A Europe thus benighted would dash America’s post-Cold War vision of a continent “whole and free” that the European Union and the Atlantic alliance, for all their problems, have done much to advance and which has been an enduring source of geopolitical stability.

Of course, the Trump administration has made clear its disdain for those accomplishments.

Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance exhorted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference to stop shunning the extreme parties in their midst. German politicians, he argued, should remove the “firewall” against working with populist parties, clearly referring to the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Afterward, he met with the AfD leader. Elon Musk, who seems to be acting like President Trump’s prime minister, congratulated the party’s leader on its second-place showing in Sunday’s elections in Germany.

Then, further repudiating trans-Atlantic solidarity, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to discuss Ukraine’s future, freezing out Ukraine itself, as well as Europe. It seemed clear that the United States intended to pursue a rapprochement with Russia, which would likely mean ending sanctions, cajoling Ukraine into relinquishing occupied Ukrainian territory, and perhaps even guaranteeing Ukraine’s perpetual exclusion from NATO.

Mr. Trump followed up the conference by ludicrously suggesting to reporters that Ukraine had started the war by refusing to cede territory to Russia. Calling President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a “dictator,” he has set the stage for satisfying President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate war aim: removing Ukraine’s Jewish leader as a prelude to installing a Russian stooge on the pretext of “denazifying” the country.

Moscow could hardly have scripted a result more in line with its dubious argument that NATO enlargement forced it to reclaim its sphere of influence and invade Ukraine. This narrative, largely embraced by Europe’s far right, reinforces Russia’s threat to NATO’s eastern members, starting with the Baltic States, if Ukraine is defeated or forced to capitulate.

Mr. Trump and members of his circle have also shown sympathy for and influenced right-wing populist parties in Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. In Britain, Mr. Musk is trying to undermine the Labour Party in favor of the right-wing Reform U.K. party. Mr. Trump and those around him have shown admiration for Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has visited Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago several times and provided a veritable blueprint for the president’s authoritarian-minded policies.

The parallel between Europe’s Moscow-leaning parties during the Cold War and the far-right ones of the 21st century is certainly not exact. The far-right parties also show varying degrees of sympathy with Russian interests.

Western Communist parties were more formally linked to the Soviet Union than today’s far-right European parties are to Mr. Putin’s Russia. Before World War II, they belonged to the Communist International directed by Moscow, which Stalin eventually dissolved to placate his new American and British allies during the war. A postwar successor organization, the Cominform, included French and Italian Communists, as well as Eastern European parties directly answerable to Moscow, before it was abolished in 1956. By the 1970s, some Western Communist parties — notably in Italy and Spain — had claimed a degree of independence from the Soviets under the banner of “Eurocommunism.”

The consistent factor, however, has been Moscow’s affinity for fifth columns to advance its interests — the Cominform early in the Cold War, an international right-wing grouping today. Today’s right-wingers include quasi-fascists and Christian white supremacists whose views bolster and attract Christian nationalist conservatism in the United States; Mr. Putin’s nationalist autocracy, safeguarded by the Russian Orthodox Church; and Mr. Orban’s “illiberal democracy.”

Moscow is busy in Europe. The Kremlin’s political and material support for far-right groups has deepened European social and political divisions, enabling it to keep discrediting Western democracy. Russian interference includes covert influence operations that German officials believe have penetrated Germany’s political institutions and the AfD. Last year, German journalists revealed emails and text messages between a Russian intelligence officer and an adviser to an AfD member of the Bundestag to advance the party’s attempts to stop Germany’s shipment of battle tanks to Ukraine. The officer and adviser have denied involvement.

Czech authorities believe Voice of Europe, a Prague-based news website, has funneled money to politicians in at least six European countries as part of what the authorities called a Russian influence operation. Russia has consistently denied involvement in disinformation campaigns against the West.

Regardless of Russia’s tactics, Europe’s extreme-right parties today share the Trump administration’s hostility to wokeness and immigration, much as the Western Communist parties of the 20th century advocated causes that Democratic administrations in the Cold War found congenial: social justice, civil rights for African Americans and an anticolonial agenda. Yet Democratic administrations, unlike Mr. Vance now, never suggested that European governments should accommodate them.

American administrations back then assessed the Soviet threat as too dangerous to indulge in political experiments. Today, the stakes are at least as high: If a bellicose Russia thoroughly infiltrated European politics, its far-right proxies could undermine the political structures that European nations have painstakingly built to prevent a regional return to authoritarianism.

In a mild rebuke to Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk, the AfD did not fare as well as some expected in Sunday’s elections in Germany. With the far right on the rise, however, European governments today are more vulnerable to them than they were to Communism by the 1960s, when the political center in Europe had stabilized.

The Trump administration appears not to care. Mr. Vance made it clear that moderate European leaders cannot rely on American moderation, that Trump administration officials are unlikely to welcome intelligence illuminating the depth and breadth of the Russian threat to Europe and that heedlessness and betrayal have become part of U.S. policy.

Dana H. Allin is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the editor of Survival and an adjunct professor at SAIS-Europe of the Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. Jonathan Stevenson is an I.I.S.S. senior fellow and the managing editor of Survival.

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