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   kravietz 🦇 (kravietz@agora.echelon.pl)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 21:12:16 JST kravietz 🦇

   On a meeting with Keith #Kellogg, a #Romania journalist Pavel Popescu asked why is #Trump asking EU for 5% defense spending while at the same time supporting pro-Russian parties such as #AfD and #Georgescu in Romania. He quotes Georgescu contesting increased military spending, which goes literally against Trump’s advice. Yet, Vance criticised Romania for annulling the elections where he won due to foreign interference over TikTok. That was actually a very good question that nobody else has asked.

   Kellogg answers rather bluntly: it’s not our problem, it’s Romania’s internal policy problem, just as the elections in Ukraine.

   It seems to me that what Kellogg and Vance want to convey is not the US is telling Romania to elect Georgescu as president, but that Georgescu was able to pull off his stunt with TikTok because everyone had previously ignored him. And because they ignored him, they then had to cancel the election in panic, which was perceived as a huge damage to the European perception of democracy. Even if it was fully justified by Georgescu violations.

   As a reminder, #TikTok was blocked in the US during elections. Trump criticised it and unblocked it, but the fact remains - it was blocked during the elections. And then Biden warmly welcomed Trump to the White House, they had a tea and shook their hands on TV. That was important part of the democratic process.

   The part where Vance is meeting AfD and generally supporting a party, whose party is openly anti-American and contests #NATO and US presence in #Germany - this one is more puzzling.

   The only explanation I have is that while we perceive AfD as a monolith, it’s really an amalgam of various political movements. And if we look at the pro-Russian faction of AfD itself, I don’t think they were pleased with Vance’s advances which could actually distance the rest of AfD from the Russian and anti-NATO fraction.

   Plus, Republicans clearly don’t consider AfD to be some kind of evil that has to be eradicated at any cost - they consider AfD to be a logical consequence of mainstream parties of Germany ignoring legitimate social problems of high energy prices and uncontrolled migration for years. In the Republican logic, the way to deal with AfD is to reduce their voter base by tackling these problems by mainstream parties, not preventing AfD from talking about it and offering solutions even if they are wrong.