by Franklin Dmitryev

In the wee hours of Feb. 14, a Russian drone armed with a high-explosive warhead breached the shell containing deadly radioactive products from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the site of the world’s most notorious nuclear meltdown in 1986, when it was controlled by the USSR.

That same day, the Trump administration brandished an even more dangerous attack on Ukraine, plus on Europe generally. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the most anticipated speech at the Munich Security Conference, which gathered political leaders from around the world to take up “global security challenges.” Russia’s war on Ukraine was widely understood to be one of the foremost topics of the conference and therefore his speech. Instead, Vance ranted against European liberalism, calling it the greatest threat to Europe, “the threat from within.”

VANCE’S GIFT TO FAR-RIGHT EUROPEAN PARTIES

What this turned out to mean was a demand to open the highest halls of power to the racist, woman-hating, anti-immigrant far right parties, many of which embrace Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to take an even harder line against immigrants, even though existing European policies lead to violent abuse of undocumented border crossers and the deaths of thousands of migrants each year in the Mediterranean Sea. That surely warmed Putin’s cold heart.

In the same Trumpian incursion into Europe, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had, before any negotiations, bowed to two of Putin’s top demands: that Ukraine would not regain the Crimea and Donbas, territory taken by Russia and its proxies in 2014, and that it would not be allowed to join NATO. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Ukraine to demand $500 million worth of rare-earth metals without offering anything in return.

Back in Washington, Trump himself told Fox News that Ukraine “may be Russian someday.” He reported having a warm and friendly phone call with his idol Putin, and planned talks with Putin to decide Ukraine’s fate without the distracting presence of representatives from Ukraine or Europe.

Hegseth and Trump told Europe they had better take care of themselves and ruled out U.S. peacekeepers in any Russia-Ukraine buffer zone, evoking the scenario of a sellout peace deal allowing Putin a time of rest and rearmament, followed by renewed conquest of Ukraine and perhaps more of Europe.

That could be the second flank of the pincer attack. The other was brought into view with Vance’s speech in Munich, a demand for Europe to surrender to its far right.

FREE SPEECH ONLY FOR THOSE APPROVED BY TRUMP/VANCE/MUSK

Typically, his speech was full of Orwellian doublespeak. Just as he and the Christian fascists in the U.S. scream that Christians are oppressed whenever they can’t impose their dictates on everyone else, such as when they try to shut down women’s health centers and rant and scream at the women trying to enter them. He tried to make a hero of an anti-abortion fanatic who was not allowed to stay in a buffer zone around an abortion clinic in England. Those buffer zones exist to protect women’s access to healthcare, but Vance is no big fan of that.

He did not, and never will, make a case for the free speech of nonviolent climate protesters, who are being sentenced to lengthy prison terms in countries including Britain and the U.S. He did not, and never will, make a case for the free speech of Black Lives Matter protesters who were violently arrested and assaulted by the police, or for protesters murdered by vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Vance also claimed that people in Scotland were banned from “private prayer within their own homes,” which was a complete fabrication. He claimed that the government had urged people “to report any fellow citizen suspected guilty of thought crime.” That was a lie, but it is exactly where the Trump-Vance government is heading, with, for example, its threats to prosecute federal employees who don’t snitch on other workers who dare to talk about DEI.

Complaining about the Romanian constitutional court ordering a rerun of an election tainted by Russian interference, Vance objected to using “Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.” That is to say, lying propaganda—one of the most potent weapons wielded by Vance, Trump, and the rest of the far right—should not be called propaganda, but rather “alternative viewpoints.” Of course, he did not mention that it was his leader, Donald Trump, who headed the effort to cancel the 2020 U.S. election through violence, propaganda, and lawfare.

TRUMP-VANCE DEMAND NORMALIZATION OF FASCISM

At this moment, the Trump-Vance administration is gearing up to prosecute and jail political opponents, both Democratic and Republican, and use espionage laws to jail reporters too. With stunningly cynical hypocrisy, Vance lectured Europeans who don’t allow the far right into their coalition governments: “You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news.”

Vance wants Europe to normalize its own far right in the same way that Trump’s extremism has become normalized in the U.S. Shortly after visiting the site of the Nazis’ Dachau concentration camp and pontificating, “we should be committed to ensuring that it never happens again,” Vance met with the leader of the “Alternative for Germany” party (AfD), which is the party of Nazi nostalgia and Holocaust denial, and which denounces Holocaust monuments as “monuments of shame.” Vance and Elon Musk both campaigned for AfD.

Essentially, Vance in Europe was not only campaigning for far-right parties but demanding their elevation to power. If that does not happen, then “there is nothing America can do for you.”

Trumpism—allied with Putin, India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orban, and Argentina’s Milei, as well as the fascist parties of Germany, Britain, Austria, Italy, France, etc.—aims to remake the world under the domination of new forms of fascism—over the ashes of Ukraine, Palestine, and Greenland if need be.