Cold Civil War Gone Global
14th March 2025
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.