America’s Alignment with Autocracy
RKSL
The Frontline
Sep 5, 2025
The Washington Post on September 4, 2025, reports that the administration is ending long-standing U.S. security assistance for Europe, including the Baltic Security Initiative, while preparing to reduce the American military footprint on the continent. These programs cost hundreds of millions of dollars and underpinned NATO’s eastern flank. Their removal is the systematic undoing of a strategy that kept Russia contained and kept the United States strong.
By deliberately pulling the rug out from under our democratic allies in Europe, Trump is stripping away the most visible expression of American power, support for our allies. Alliances are not favors or a waste of taxpayer money as claimed by cult cheerleaders. Alliances extend U.S. reach, embed American influence in the institutions of others, provide access to bases and markets, and multiply military and economic capacity. They are American power multipliers. They are why the United States prevailed in the Cold War and why it has been able to compete with multiple adversaries at once. To weaken or abandon them is not to free America. It is to discard its own genuine power. That such elementary facts still need explaining is itself staggering.
Russia has worked for decades to achieve exactly this outcome. Its goals have been clear: fracture NATO, divide the United States from Europe, and reclaim dominance over its neighbors. Its methods have been ruthless and layered, propaganda, disinformation, assassinations, energy coercion, cyberattacks, and direct war. The invasions of Georgia and Ukraine were part of this continuum. But Moscow has also worked inside the West, cultivating sympathetic politicians like Orban and Fico, financing extremist movements, and flooding information spaces with narratives designed to corrode faith in democratic institutions. It has long sought to install or enable partners in Washington who would help achieve from the inside what Russia could not impose from the outside. Now, with Trump’s undermining of NATO programs and his open admiration for genocidal dictators, Moscow’s project is advancing not against U.S. resistance but with U.S. cooperation. For the Kremlin, this is the ultimate prize: a divided NATO and an America bending itself toward Russia’s aims.
For China, the signal is equally powerful. It sees that the United States is prepared to distance itself from democratic nations and edge closer to authoritarian partners. That point was underscored just days ago in Shanghai, where the world’s leading autocrats, a who’s who of bloody dictators and wannabes, gathered to deepen their ties and showcase a new axis of anti-democratic cooperation. What was once unthinkable, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and others openly coordinating, has become a reality. The Shanghai meeting was the clearest sign yet that authoritarian powers are knitting together a common front, and that the Trump administration’s posture makes the United States look less like a counterweight and more like a future participant.
As anti-democratic forces shore up ties, we see the dismantling of America’s democratic alliances in real time. Everything points to the fact that this is the intended goal of the Trump administration. The consistency of the pattern, i.e. undercutting NATO, pressuring Ukraine, praising Putin, echoing Kremlin narratives, treating China as a partner in spectacle diplomacy, and looking away from the authoritarian summit in Shanghai, cannot be explained as a drift in policy or simple stupidity. It suggests design. The dismantling of America’s democratic alliances is not an unintended byproduct of poor policy planning. It is the policy itself.
What Trump is doing internationally mirrors what he is doing inside the United States. Abroad, he hammers at alliances with democratic nations and gravitates toward authoritarian partners. At home, he attacks independent courts, demands personal loyalty from institutions, undermines the press, and brands political opponents as enemies of the state. He puts America’s safety in the hands of charlatans, incompetents, and TV hucksters with no knowledge or experience. His drive to concentrate power, to federalize and control every lever of authority, is not a defense of American tradition but an imitation of the centralized systems he admires in Moscow and Beijing. What he calls America First is in fact the logic of command-and-control, closer to communism than to any American tradition.
He knows the public is not yet ready to embrace open alliance with dictators, so he buys time with empty words, repeating over and over again that in two weeks he will respond forcefully to Putin or Xi. The repetition is actually a pre-determined instruction, a way of taking his base as it is now and reshaping it by teaching that such inaction is acceptable. Over time, the habit of doing nothing erodes the expectation of moral responsibility, until abandoning values, ethics, and principle itself begins to feel normal. Just as he insists abroad that alliances are expendable, he conditions Americans at home to believe that the abandonment of ethical action carries no cost.
This is the reckoning we all must confront. The United States is not stumbling into weakness. It is choosing to stand with the forces of autocracy abroad and to reproduce their methods at home. Unless politicians of both parties recognize this fact and start actively opposing Trump’s alignment with authoritarian, genocidal dictators, America will be unrecognizable, if it remains standing at all. And the sooner our traditional democratic allies in Europe and beyond recognize it, the safer they will be.