The Dangerous Strategic Logic Of

Argentina’s Javier Milei and Elon Musk

Why is Trump meddling in the internal affairs of neighbors and allies? Is this meddling just Trump’s support for people he likes? Or is there a strategic logic at work? To get clarity we should look back to early in the Trump presidency. Trump raised eyebrows by frequently suggesting Canada should become the 51st state. Why would an administration that campaigned on being opposed to US activism abroad be interested in re-shaping its neighbor?

It turns out the MAGA movement is not at all indifferent to how our friends, from Canada to Brazil to Mexico to the EU, run their internal affairs:

Recently, the Trump administration offered Argentina—one of the world’s most notorious deadbeats—$40 billion in financial assistance. Is this because propping up Argentina’s economy is vital to US national interests? No. It is because its leader, Javier Milei, is a MAGA fellow traveler. Milei was prominent at Trump’s inauguration and famously appeared on stage with Elon Musk, wielding a chainsaw to symbolize their shared commitment to cutting government. Trump has made it clear that the help is conditional on Milei’s party winning Argentina’s mid-term elections on October 26, an act of blatant interference in Argentina’s internal affairs.

In neighboring Brazil, Trump weighed in this summer to support Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s right wing populist leader. Bolsonaro lost his bid for re-election in 2022 and promptly mounted an assault on Brazil’s legislature, eerily like the January 6 attack on the US capitol. Unlike here, Brazil’s legal system held Bolsonaro to account and put him on trial; Trump slapped a 50% tariff on Brazil that was justified by claiming that “Brazil’s politically motivated persecution, intimidation, harassment, censorship, and prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and thousands of his supporters are serious human rights abuses.”

Here at home, one of the Trump administration’s first acts was to dismantle our instruments of soft power, like USAID, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, destroying the ways the United States provides accurate information about American life. The goal is to give the impression that Americans are united around MAGA and its populist nationalism.

My 30 year career as a CIA political analyst taught me that almost every regime believes it is safer to be surrounded by similar regimes (or by those that its people see as much worse). Sharing a 3000 mile border with a liberal-democratic Canada is a great strength for the US—as long, of course, as the US is itself a liberal democracy. But if it isn’t, Canada becomes a threat. As our liberty in the US recedes, a free and prosperous Canada offers Americans an unwelcome example of what we are losing and how we, ourselves, could be living. Hence it is in Trump’s interest to make it the 51st state, or failing that, to make sure it is clearly subordinate and doesn’t prosper. One way will almost certainly be to support an indigenous MAGA movement in our next door neighbor. Punishing tariffs are also in order.

Similarly with Europe. On February 14, JD Vance gave his first major overseas address at the Munich Security Conference, a prestigious annual gathering of Europe’s senior foreign policy and defense leaders. The audience was waiting to hear how the Trump administration meant to deal with key national security and foreign policy issues. But instead, the speech was a tut-tutting criticism of how Europe was supposedly suppressing free speech and political expression, and this was going to make it hard for the new US administration to cooperate with them: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected president Trump.”

This was a not-so-veiled threat: if you don’t shift in the populist direction we like, bad things will happen. We will call your governments illegitimate and help Trump-aligned allies gain power. Trump has called the corruption conviction in France against Marine Le Pen a ‘witch hunt,’ the same language he used for Bolsonaro. And the tariff threat is always on the table.

To have major European states sustain prosperous liberal democracies is dangerous to the Trump narrative. Best if the continent comes to resemble populist Hungary, the MAGA movement’s model nation, or falls apart in internal strife, beset from abroad by Russia and from within by right-wing radicals. Supporting Europe’s new-right will therefore be a priority for the Trump administration.

Allowing Ukraine, and possibly Taiwan, to be snuffed out is also consistent with MAGA’s long-term survival. It shows that powerful, ruthless autocracies will win in the long-run and that weaker states—nota bene, Canada, Mexico, and others—are advised to bow to their powerful neighbors.

This is the calculation made by authoritarians. Putin fears Ukraine, just as Xi fears Taiwan, because the existence of free alternatives, literally next-door, gives the lie to arguments that only one-man, autocratic rule can succeed.

Americans who want to remain free have a huge stake in supporting the survival of liberal democracies abroad. Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia—these are battlegrounds where our own future will in large part be decided. In most of these arenas right-wing populist movements already exist and are gaining strength. Trump’s victory has been catnip to this trend, convincing many that history is on their side.

The Congress, and the American people, should condemn President Trump’s blatant attempts to support his favorites. These actions prioritize his personal political goals over the national interest, and run counter to longstanding US policy to remain neutral in the internal affairs of other countries.

Adam Wasserman is a retired CIA political analyst with over 30 years experience following failing democracies in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He served on the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the CIA Red Cell, and the National Security Council. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 340 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.