For longtime European American allies, comments by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Ukraine and Germany this month represent one of the most critical exams of postwar order in decades.
But they represented something else to a cohort of current and former world leaders who gathered this week at Maryland's Conservative Political Action Conference: Thanks to Trump's reelection, its order A cusp of irreparable conversion.
“We missed out on the first American revolution in 1776,” said Liz Truss, a conservative MP who briefly served as British prime minister. “We want to be part of the second American Revolution.”
Truss was one of more than half a dozen politicians from many countries to make a pilgrimage to the CPAC this week at Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington. The CPAC, a long-running gathering of American conservatives who helped promote right-wing rebellion within the GOP during the Tea Party and Trump era, has made these ambitions global in recent years. The conference is now a right-wing political movement in America, Europe and Asia that increasingly see themselves as an ally in related struggles against institutions and geopolitical norms that have dominated world affairs since World War II. It functions as a connector.
Over the past two weeks, Trump and his top officials have questioned the direct and open orders that were more direct and open than the post-war US administration.
Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for more than four hours on Tuesday, resetting the relationship between the two global authority and ending the war in Ukraine I asked for this. At the same time, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodimia Zelensky a “dictator” and denounced Russia's 2022 invasion of his country.
The Riadh Conference came a few days after Vance compared the European Union policing of online speeches against Soviet censorship in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. He also met with leaders of Germany's right-wing alternative party. The German party has long been marginalized due to the embrace of neo-Nazi slogans of some members and links with the recent coup plot.
Vance defended Munich's speech on Thursday in his own CPAC appearance, as did the parade of international allies who took the stage after him.
The standard bearer of right-wing political movements around the world, the prime minister of North Macedonia and Slovakia, Poland and Spain opposition leaders, is a transformative figure in the fight against national and continental liberalism. I was welcomed as.
They cast domestic enemies such as judges, online speech constraints, civil society programs and mainstream news organizations as part of an international project to curb traditional values, religion and the free market. They were welcomed as allysponsors.
“He's completely changing the international painting,” Balaz Orban, the Political Bureau Chief of unrelated Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, said in an interview at the conference.
In a speech on Thursday, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian lawmaker and former president of the country, Jea Bolsonaro, accused him of attempting a coup to maintain power after losing the 2022 election. He described his country as a “lab.” It was “used as a test ground for judicial weaponization against conservatives, libertarians and Christians. It always pretends to protect democracy.”
In particular, the CPAC's foreign delegation celebrated the efforts Elon Musk has been led by eliminating the US International Development Agency and civil society programs funded around the world.
Such programs have enjoyed widespread, bipartisan support over the years in the US and similar support in the European Union. It joined the US in an independent news media, in-laws program and, more recently, in an effort to curb online misinformation. all over the world. However, these efforts have infuriated ascendant right-wing parties, who often violate them.
In his speech, Bolsonaro accused USAID of “leading resources to censorship, excessive judicial outcomes and political persecution.”
Musk's sudden embrace of these complaints about the American development agency reflects the growing influence of global rights over American rights. To present Musk with a chainsaw, he was acting theatrical during the 2023 presidential election.
This year's CPAC is likely a vision of right-wing solidarity that Trump's political trajectory, particularly that some of his former White House advisers, Stephen K. Bannon, tried to shamble during the first Trump administration. It is thought to be a vision of the vision of the .
Speaking at CPAC on Thursday, Bannon threatened to destroy the coalition, but raised his hand at the end of his speech, which appears to be a reference to the Nazi salute. Last month, Musk was held at a Trump inauguration rally.
Bannon's gesture denying he is a Nazi reference prompted Jordan Bardela, the leader of France's far-right national rally party, to cancel a planned CPAC speech on Friday. In a statement, he said he made the decision “quickly” after seeing “gestures referring to Nazi ideology.”
But another international speaker on Friday's programme, Mexican actor and political activist Eduardo Belastegui, relied on Bannon's provocation, lifting his arms with a similar salute at the end of his own speech. .
Speaking Thursday, British politician Nigel Farage was one of the first overseas countries to establish connections with the Republican right-wing during his Obama days, and later on, how far the right came.
“13 years ago, I was the only foreign speaker,” said Farage, a key figure in the 2016 Brexit campaign.
Other speakers followed Mr. Farage's lead in the crusades to the bureaucracy of the European Parliament and the European Union.
“My government was punished for standing up in Brussels,” said Polish Prime Minister Matteus Morawiekki from 2017 to 2023.
Orban, a Hungarian official whose government is a model for many like-minded political activists in global rights, said right-wing political movements are less predisposed to nature to cooperate than freedom movements. However, he argued that sharing more and more interest, centred on Christianity in public life and war skepticism in Ukraine, attracts different movements. .
“It's complicated because if you're a national conservative, it means you do your best to your country and your country's national interests can be at odds with the national interests of other countries,” he said. said. “But we still have to do that. Try to identify the sharing points. And now there are a lot of points.”
