Letters to America: First You Made the Mess - Now You Export the Arsonists...

Hello again my lovely! 👋🏻

Following the D-Day commemoration last week, today I want to talk about the latest American intervention in Europe.

This one did not arrive with landing craft, tanks, and thousands of young men of many nationalities giving their lives and their futures on the golden sands and cliffs of Normandy.1

It arrived with a microphone, a ceremony, and a grotesque abuse of memory.

On the cliffs above Omaha Beach, at a commemoration for men who died fighting fascism, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth2 looked out over the graves and warned that Europe was now facing another “invasion” - this time from migrants landing on the shores of Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.

Days earlier, your Vice-President JD Vance had used the shocking murder of an 18-year-old in Britain to rail against the “mass invasion of migrants”, despite the fact that both victim and killer were British-born3.

It is hard to imagine a cleaner distillation of where the United States is now: a country so committed to its own mythologies that it can stand on the beaches where Americans died liberating Europe from hyper-nationalism and turn the dead into props for a new ethno-nationalist panic.

What makes this worse is that it is not just rhetoric.

It is policy, strategy and transatlantic organising.

The Trump administration has openly aligned itself with Europe’s far right, treating parties and leaders once regarded as dangerous embarrassments as strategic partners in a shared civilisational project.

It has praised Viktor Orbán as a model, intervened in European political debates over migration and “free speech”, encouraged political currents around Nigel Farage and Reform UK, and lent legitimacy to the AfD in Germany - in the very country that should know, better than most, what happens when racial panic and national humiliation are fused into a governing ideology.

This is not the old American habit of quietly pulling strings abroad while pretending to defend freedom. It is something brasher and in some ways more dangerous: the public export of a political style built on grievance, racial hierarchy, and contempt for pluralist democracy.

That would be bad enough on its own.

But the deeper obscenity is this: many of the people now treated as an invading horde are fleeing conditions the United States and its allies did a great deal to create.

America did not invent migration, obviously4, and it is neither solely nor always the main author of every conflict from which people flee.

But across Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, there is a long and bloody record of intervention, proxy war, economic coercion and regime change pursued in the name of order, anti-communism or strategic necessity.

The people showing up at borders are very often living inside the debris field of those choices.

The fires behind the journey

One of the great conveniences of anti-migrant politics is that it treats movement as though it were some mysterious force of nature. People just appear, the story goes, at the fences and coastlines of rich countries, asking to be let in. The history beforehand is blurred away.

Yet in Latin America, the American role in creating that history is not obscure. It is documented, extensive and in some cases infamous

Take Guatemala.

In 1954, the CIA backed the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz after his government threatened the interests of United Fruit and pursued reforms Washington regarded as dangerously left-wing. The coup did not simply remove one inconvenient president. It helped inaugurate decades of repression, civil conflict and social terror.

Similar patterns followed elsewhere. The United States supported or welcomed the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 19735; backed anti-communist forces across Central America; and treated popular demands for land reform, labour rights and democratic redistribution as potential Soviet beachheads.

In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, this translated into US support for (and even training of) brutal militarisation, death squads, and policies and activities that shattered institutions and created mass displacement.

The aftermath did not stop at the border.

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fled these wars and settled in American cities. In Los Angeles in particular, communities traumatised by war, poverty and exclusion became part of the social environment from which gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18 emerged.

Then, in one of history’s more obscene loops, the United States deported many of these gang-involved young men back to fragile postwar societies unequipped to absorb them.

The violence metastasised.

What had been incubated in part inside the United States was exported into countries already weakened by American-backed conflict. Later, when families fled extortion, gang coercion and state incapacity, American politicians pointed to them as evidence of a foreign menace.

This is what blowback looks like when you refuse to recognise it.

You help break a region in the name of defeating the left. You absorb some of the human wreckage. You criminalise the social consequences of that wreckage. Then you denounce the survivors for arriving at your border. The moral contortion is breathtaking, but so is the historical amnesia.

Iran, again

And this pattern is not confined to the Americas. If the current American “military excursion” in Iran widens, it will be impossible to understand without returning to 1953, when the CIA and MI66 helped overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh after he moved to nationalise Iranian oil.

Mossadegh was not a Soviet puppet. He was an Iranian nationalist who threatened western control over resources. For that, he was removed, and the Shah was restored with American and British support. What followed was not stability but a quarter-century of authoritarian modernisation, secret police terror and popular humiliation that fed directly into the 1979 revolution.

None of this, of course, means every later development in Iran can be laid at Washington’s door.

Iranian clerical authoritarianism has its own agency, and its roots in how Islam was treated by the nouveau Pahlavi dynasty in the 1920s and 30s, and regional powers7 have their own ambitions.

But when American politicians posture as though Iran’s hostility to the United States dropped from the sky, they are erasing one of the central acts of postwar western sabotage in the Middle East.

If there is a fresh real war now, it will not be detached from that history. It will be another chapter in a relationship first disfigured by a western coup against a democratically legitimate government.

The same moral pattern repeats:

• Support strongmen

• Crush reformists

• Create rage, repression and instability

• Then express shocked disbelief when populations radicalise, states implode or civilians flee what y’all have helped create

The imperial centre insists on permanent innocence, even when history is screaming otherwise.

From covert coups to overt endorsements

There was a time when American interference in foreign politics at least felt obliged to wear a mask.

Today the mask is off.

The Trump administration is not merely signalling sympathy with Europe’s hard right; it is openly trying to legitimate and strengthen it.

Thanks for that…

The clearest example is Hungary. In April 2026, JD Vance flew to Budapest in the middle of a tight election campaign to bolster Viktor Orbán, while Donald Trump phoned in his own praise, telling supporters he was a huge fan and stood with Orbán completely.

Vance accused Brussels of interfering in Hungary’s vote while engaging in a far more blatant act of interference himself (oh the irony!).

The symbolism mattered. Orbán has spent years hollowing out Hungarian democracy, attacking independent institutions, demonising migrants, and recasting Christian nationalism as the last defence of Europe. To much of the MAGA right, and particularly to the architects of Project 2025, that is not a warning but a template.

And yet the intervention also exposed something useful. It backfired, or at least failed to produce the aura of inevitability it was meant to create. Orbán’s appeal to American patronage looked less like strength than like dependence. The Hungarian electorate, faced with a foreign vice-president trying to campaign on behalf of its increasingly illiberal ruler, did not simply fall into line.

That matters, because it reminds us that transatlantic far-right solidarity is real, but not omnipotent.

Germany offers an even more alarming case, because the ideological terrain is so haunted.

During the 2025 federal election campaign, Elon Musk and JD Vance both came out in support of Alternative für Deutschland. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to tell European elites to stop shunning so-called extreme parties, while Musk publicly praised AfD co-leader Alice Weidel and described the party as Germany’s best hope.

Some German voters explicitly said the endorsements strengthened their own support for the party.

The message from the American right was unmistakable: the barriers built after 1945 to keep fascist and racist politics outside the democratic mainstream are, in their view, not safeguards but obstacles.

That intervention is especially grotesque because AfD is not some generic protest movement. It is, at best, a neo-Nazi adjacent party repeatedly linked to extremist rhetoric and personnel, operating in a country whose current democratic order was rebuilt on the ruins left by racial nationalism.

When American officials and oligarchs encourage Germans to treat that as normal, they are not merely expressing an opinion. They are trying to rehabilitate a politics Europe learned to fear within living memory for excellent reason.

Then there is Britain, where the lines are fuzzier but the relationship is obvious.

Nigel Farage has spent years presenting himself as a patriotic insurgent against unaccountable elites. Donald Trump sees in him a kindred spirit. Farage, in turn, has repeatedly praised Trump’s border agenda and maintained close political and personal ties to him, even as British voters increasingly register those ties as a liability. Reform UK, for all its attempts to wear a domestic face, exists in ideological conversation with MAGA: anti-migrant panic, culture-war grievance, suspicion of liberal institutions, and a permanent suggestion that the nation has been betrayed from within8 - not to mention insisting that mass deportations and “remigration” will be a core part of its 2029 General Election manifesto.

It is perfectly true that Britain does not require American help to generate its own nativism. Nor does Germany. Nor does Hungary. Europe has a rich and terrible homegrown tradition of this politics.

That point matters.

The Trump administration is not inventing the European far right. It is energising it, validating it and trying to turn it into a friendly governing bloc. This is not puppetry. It is coordination.

The new Atlanticism

For decades, the phrase “Atlantic alliance” conjured a certain self-image: liberal democracies, imperfect but committed in principle to rule of law, mutual defence and basic political decency. That self-image was always compromised by colonialism, coups and hypocrisy. But there was at least a rhetorical aspiration toward pluralism.

The new Atlanticism is something else. It is a loose fraternity of anti-liberal nationalists who admire each other’s assaults on courts, universities, journalists, migrants and supranational institutions.

Hungary under Orbán became an early laboratory for that model. Now it is treated by parts of the American right as a proof of concept: capture the media, stigmatise dissent, militarise identity, promise protection from supposedly invading outsiders, and call the whole package democracy.

The same admiration can be seen in the treatment of Italy’s hard right, in the indulgence shown toward authoritarian turns in Poland when politically useful, and in the obsession with Britain’s anti-migrant populists.

What binds these cases is not a coherent foreign policy doctrine. It is a shared politics of civilisational threat.

This is why the migration rhetoric matters so much.

Once politics is organised around the notion that outsiders are “invading”, “contaminating” or “replacing” what these politicians call the “real” nation, every institution that protects pluralism starts to look suspect.

• Courts become enemies

• Human rights law becomes sabotage

• Journalists become traitors

• Universities become indoctrination camps

• Elections are legitimate only if the right people win...

The border panic is never just about the border.

And here the American role is especially noxious, because the United States still carries enormous cultural and geopolitical weight.

When senior US officials normalise language that overlaps with the abhorrent “Great Replacement theory”, or urge Europeans to stop quarantining extremist parties, they shift the perceived limits of what can be said and done. What was once fringe becomes arguable. What was arguable becomes normal. What becomes normal begins, sooner or later, to become law.

The hypocrisy at the border

There is another cruelty in all this.

The United States and parts of Europe are not just panicking about migrants from regions they helped destabilise. They are also applying a glaring racial double standard to who counts as a sympathetic refugee and who counts as a threat.

The Trump administration’s embrace of white South Africans made that plain.

In 2025, while refugee admissions for many others were frozen or strangled, Afrikaners were offered a fast-track pathway on the grounds that they supposedly faced racial persecution. At the same time, Afghans who had assisted US forces, along with Black and brown asylum seekers from countries in genuine collapse, were left in limbo or targeted for deportation.

The message could not have been clearer: persecution is only legible when the people claiming it fit a certain civilisational script.

Europe - sadly - has run a version of the same script.

The warm reception for many Ukrainian refugees proved that safe passage, rapid status decisions and access to work are administratively possible when governments want them to be. But people fleeing Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan or Eritrea are far more likely to encounter razor wire, detention, externalised borders and a discourse of burden or invasion.

The policy tools have always existed. The selectivity is political and racial.

This matters because it punctures the lie that harshness is simply what serious states must do.

Don’t get me wrong - I know and fully accept that there are real governance questions around migration: housing, schools, labour markets, public consent, integration.

But those questions are not - and will not ever be - answered by turning some of the world’s most desperate people into symbols of national decline.

They should be answered by administrative competence, honest burden-sharing and a refusal to confuse cruelty with control. The far right thrives precisely where democratic governments combine moral panic with bureaucratic failure.

America, my dear

There was once a version of America that many Europeans, however sceptically, could still imagine as corrigible. Not innocent, not altruistic, certainly not consistent, but capable at least of embarrassment, self-critique and periodic repair. It could be pushed. It could be argued with. It could sometimes be shamed into living up, however partially, to its own stated ideals.

The America now shouting at Europe from memorial stages feels different.

It is not merely forgetting its own history.

It is weaponising forgetfulness.

It is pretending that migration is a spontaneous plague rather than the movement of human beings through landscapes scarred by empire, proxy war, extraction and climate breakdown. It is pretending that parties built on racial panic are democratic renewals rather than democratic threats.

And it is pretending that interference is only objectionable when someone else does it.

This should worry any American - no matter their politics - who still believe themselves to be patriots.

If the current administration can cheer for Orbán in Hungary, legitimise the AfD in Germany, encourage Farageism in Britain and use D-Day to sell anti-migrant panic, then the old language of alliance has already been hollowed out.

Europe is no longer dealing with a difficult ally that occasionally behaves badly. It is dealing, more and more often, with a power willing to strengthen the continent’s own anti-democratic forces in pursuit of a shared illiberal future.

And there is the deeper tragedy. America helped make the conditions from which many migrants flee. It then turned those migrants into villains. Now it is trying to teach Europe to do the same more enthusiastically and more shamelessly.

Take care, my lovelies - stay safe, and double check anything you read about politics in Europe right now…

This letter is the first in a new set of four.

The next will look inward: at the white-supremacist logic America never fully dismantled after the Civil War, at how a group of men raised inside apartheid became its most influential amplifiers, and at how “invasion” language ended up on the beaches of Normandy in the first place.

The sequence matters. You can’t understand what America is exporting to Europe without understanding what America never fixed at home. Right now, too many of the same unfinished arguments are being shipped across the Atlantic and sold as fresh wisdom.

If this piece made you angry – or uncomfortable, or both – I’d ask you to do three things. Not as a performance of concern, but because this is one of those moments when passivity is a choice, and it will not be a neutral one.

First, share it. Not because I need the numbers, but because this series is only useful if it reaches people who might not have thought about the direct line between Guatemala 1954, the boats off Lampedusa, and JD Vance’s plane landing in Budapest. Most people are not malevolent. They are simply not given the joined-up story.

Second, push back. If you think I’ve got something wrong – on the history, on the politics, on the comparison – tell me. The comments are open and I read them. I’d rather be forced to sharpen this argument than have it float through your feed untested. Silence is how bad ideas turn into common sense.

Third, if you’re American and you’ve read this far: ask yourself which version of your country you want Europe to be dealing with in ten years’ time. The one that, for all its hypocrisy, still tried to build international institutions and restrain the worst instincts of power. Or the one currently cheering for Orbán and calling migrants an invasion from the graves at Omaha Beach – and teaching others to copy it.

This is not a pendulum. It doesn’t swing back on its own. It moves because people push, or because they stand aside while someone else does.