Last week, Donald Trump was on a glitzy, bonhomous trip through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Amidst the talk of hundreds of billions of dollars signed in deals, the rise of Gulf states as potential AI superpowers, and gifts of luxury jetliners, it was announced that the Trump administration had agreed arms deals worth over $3 billion with both Qatar and the UAE.

Democrats are looking to block the deals. Apart from the potential corruption alleged by legislators – the many personal deals the president also inked while on his trip – they criticized the sale of weapons to the UAE at a time when it was prolonging a civil war in Sudan that the U.N. has described as “one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century.”

Earlier this month, a Sudanese politician said Trump’s trip to the Gulf was a “rare opportunity” to make a decisive intervention in a war that is now into its third year. In 2023, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Sudan’s army and the rebels signed a peace treaty in Jeddah. It lasted a day. Despite the involvement of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the conflict – Sudan has accused the UAE of being directly responsible for the May 4 drone attacks on the city of Port Sudan – there was no mention of it during Trump’s visit.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been convulsed by civil war. The fighting – between the Sudanese army and the RSF rebel forces, primarily comprising Janjaweed militias that fought on the side of the army in the Darfur conflict back in 2003 – has cost thousands of lives and displaced over 12 million people. Tens of millions are starving.

In May, the fighting intensified. But on Monday, Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, announced the appointment of a new prime minister  – career diplomat Kamal Idris. The African Union said Idris’s appointment was a “step towards inclusive governance.” But there is little sign of the fighting stopping. In fact, Port Sudan, where much of the humanitarian aid entered into the country, was targeted in drone attacks this month, forcing the U.N. to suspend deliveries. The Sudanese army has said renewed fighting with the RSF will force it to shut down critical infrastructure that its neighbor South Sudan needs to export its oil. South Sudan’s economy is almost wholly dependent on oil. The threat of economic collapse might force South Sudan, which became independent in 2011, to join in the Sudanese civil war. 

This week, the Trump administration was accused of “illegally” dispatching migrants to South Sudan. A judge said such an action might constitute contempt, but the Department of Homeland Security claimed the men were a threat to public safety. “No country on Earth wanted to accept them,” a spokesperson said, “because their crimes are so uniquely monstrous and barbaric.” The Trump administration’s extraordinary decision to deport migrants to South Sudan, a country on the verge of violent collapse and neighboring a country mired in civil war, is in keeping with his attitude towards the region. The decision, for instance, to shut down USAID only exacerbated the food crisis in Sudan, with soup kitchens closing and a loss of 44% of the aid funding to the country. 

With Trump fitfully engaging in all manner of peace talks, from Gaza to Kyiv to Kashmir, why is Sudan being ignored? Given the transactional nature of Trump’s diplomacy, is it because Sudan has nothing Trump wants? In April, for instance, the Trump administration attempted to broker peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda in Washington, offering security in exchange for minerals. In this colonial carving up of resources, perhaps Trump is content to let his friends in the UAE control Sudan’s gold mines and ignore a civil war he might otherwise try to stop. 

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“Russia rejoices,” wrote the pro-European Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on X this week. He was referring to a joint appearance onstage in Warsaw of George Simion, the far right presidential candidate in Romania, and his Polish equivalent Karol Nawrocki just days before elections in both countries. 

On May 18, Romanians will vote in the second and final round of elections to pick their president, with Simion, a decisive first round winner, the favourite, albeit current polling shows he is running neck-and-neck with his opponent Nicusor Dan, the relatively liberal current mayor of Bucharest. Also on that day, the first round of Poland’s presidential elections will take place. Nawrocki, analysts suggest, is likely to lose to the more liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. 

But Simion’s appearance in Warsaw did cause anger, with one Polish member of the European parliament describing both candidates as representatives of “Putin’s international”. Simion denies being pro-Kremlin, but wants to stop military aid to Ukraine. An ultranationalist, he promotes the rebuilding of a greater Romania, raising the prospect of potential territorial disputes with Ukraine, Moldova, and Bulgaria. Indeed, he is already banned from entering both Moldova and Ukraine. 

Rather than Russia, the association Simion prefers to acknowledge is with Donald Trump and MAGA. As he said of his visit to Poland and support for Nawrocki, “Together, we could become two pro-MAGA presidents committed to reviving our partnership with the United States and strengthening stability along NATO’s eastern flank.”

Certainly, Simion’s MAGA love was on show during the first round of Romania’s election on May 4, and MAGA reciprocated that love. 

At the party’s Bucharest headquarters, on a warm, triumphant election night, with Simion having won over 40% of the votes, a MAGA hat-wearing American took to the podium. He asked the cheering crowd if they wanted their own "Trump hat", and threw one (and only one) towards a section chanting "MAGA, MAGA, MAGA." Brian Brown, a prominent conservative activist, was in his element, expressing solidarity with jubilant Simion supporters. 

"You, my friends," he said, "are in the eye of the storm. What happens in this country will define what happens all over Europe. And Americans know it and more and more are waking up to the truth that we must stand together. We must never be silenced." Meanwhile, a protester screaming “fascists” was quickly removed. 

Brown, who leads the anti-LGBTQ group International Organization for the Family and has been described by human rights organizations as an "infamous exporter of hate and vocal Putin supporter," was celebrating a seismic political shift. In response to Simion’s large first round victory, Romania's prime minister resigned. His own party's establishment candidate didn’t even make it to the May 18 second round. 

Simion, a 38-year-old Eurosceptic and self-described "Trumpist," had founded his far-right nationalist party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) just over a decade ago. At the AUR offices on election night – with Simion himself only appearing by video – Brown drew explicit parallels between Romania's situation and that of America, extolling the "friendship of true Romanians and true Americans, people that stand together against a lie." Right wing leaders in other countries echoed the sentiment. Italy's deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, for instance, declared on social media that Romanians had "finally voted, freely, with their heads and hearts." 

Romania's election became a right wing cause célèbre after the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential polls in December last year, ruling that it had been vitiated by a Russian influence operation. U.S. vice president JD Vance accused Romania of canceling the election based on “flimsy suspicions” and Elon Musk described the head of the Constitutional Court as a “tyrant”. This is why MAGA supporters took a keen interest in the May 4 do-over. It was, according to  Brown, a litmus test for freedom, for the voters’ right to choose their president, no matter how unpalatable he might be to the establishment. 

In November, 2024, far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. The polls were scuppered though after intelligence revealed irregularities in campaign funding and that Russia had been involved in the setting up of almost 800 TikTok accounts backing Georgescu’s candidacy. He was also barred from participating in the rerun.

Distrust and disapproval of Romania’s political system have been growing ever since. When I got to Bucharest, my taxi driver, the first person I met, told me he wouldn’t even bother voting in the rerun. The ban on Georgescu was portrayed in right wing circles as anti-democratic. And the support he received from leading Trump administration figures such as Vance was in keeping with their support for far-right parties across Europe. 

Before Friedrich Merz won a contentious parliamentary vote to become German Chancellor, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Germany was a “tyranny in disguise” because its intelligence services classified the anti-immigration AfD, now Germany’s main opposition party, as “confirmed right wing extremist[s].” Vance said the “bureaucrats” were trying to destroy “the most popular party in Germany.” It proved, he added, that decades after the West brought down the Berlin Wall, the German establishment had “rebuilt” it. The outspoken nature of this intervention in the internal politics of an ally shows that the Trump administration would rather maintain ideological ties with far-right parties in Europe than follow traditional diplomatic protocols. 

Simion, for his part, has said that he’s a natural ally of the U.S. Republican Party, and that AUR is “almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the MAGA movement.” Just two weeks before the Romanian elections, Brian Brown met with Simion and his wife in Washington, D.C., with both men propagating their affinity to “the free world” and “Judeo-Christian legacy” in an Instagram video. Simion is also currently being scrutinized over attempts to hire a lobbying firm in the U.S. for $1.5 million to secure meetings with key American political figures and media appearances with U.S. journalists. 

In Romania, the president has a semi-executive role that comes with considerable powers over foreign policy, national security, defence spending and judicial appointments. The Romanian president also represents the country on the international stage and can veto important EU votes – a level of influence that might be considered handy on the other side of the Atlantic too.

The fact that both U.S. and other European far-right leaders came in person to offer their support to Simion after the first round of the election, or paid obeisance online, shows how it’s becoming increasingly important for the far-right to to be seen as a coherent, global force. As Brown put it in Bucharest: “We need MAGA and MEGA. Make America great again. Make Europe great again.” 

With Canada and Australia swinging to the center-left in their recent elections – in what many have called “the Trump slump” – the Romanian election offers Trump and MAGA hope that it can continue to remake the world in its own image. The irony is that MAGA, with its global offshoots, is arguably the most effective contemporary international solidarity movement, despite railing against globalism and being so apparently parochial in its outlook. 

A version of this story was published in last week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to right wing influencer Ben Shapiro, founder of "The Daily Wire". The interview showed how much stock Zelensky puts in speaking to a MAGA and Republican audience. It is with this audience that Zelensky has little credibility and Ukraine little sympathy, as Donald Trump calls for a quick peace deal, even if it means Ukraine ceding vast swathes of territory to the Russian aggressor. Zelensky needs Shapiro to combat conservative apathy about the fate of Ukraine, and combat its admiration and respect for Putin as a supposed bastion of traditional values and religious belief. 

Two questions into the interview, Shapiro confronts Zelensky with a conservative talking point. Is Ukraine persecuting members of the Russian Orthodox Church? It is a view that is frequently aired in Christian conservative circles in the United States. Just two months ago, Tucker Carlson interviewed Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer representing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam alleged that USAID, or some other U.S. government-sponsored organization, created an alternative orthodox church "that would be completely free of what they viewed as the dangerous Putin influence." This, Amsterdam said, is a violation of the U.S. commitment to religious freedom. Trump-supporting talking heads have frequently described Ukraine as killing Christians, while Vladimir Putin is described as a defender of traditional Christian values.

On April 22, Putin met with the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Kirill, his Russian counterpart. The Serbian Patriarch told the Russian president that when he met with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the latter said "we, the Orthodox, have one trump card... Vladimir Putin." It was the Serbian Orthodox Church's desire, the Patriarch said, that "if there is a new geopolitical division, we should be... in the Russian world." It is Orthodoxy's perceived political, rather than purely spiritual, link to Russia that the Ukrainian parliament was hoping to sever in August last year by passing legislation to ban religious groups with links to Moscow.

The Russian orthodox church, which is almost fully under Kremlin’s control, is one of Moscow’s most potent tools for interfering in the domestic affairs of post-Soviet countries. Its ties to Russian intelligence are well-documented and run deep. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, spent the 1970s spying for the KGB in Switzerland. Today, he blesses Russian weapons and soldiers before they’re deployed to Ukraine.

While Christian conservatives in the U.S. accuse Ukraine of violating religious freedoms and "killing" Christians, Zelensky says that it is, in fact, Russian forces that are persecuting Ukrainian Christians. On Easter, Zelensky said 67 clergymen had been "killed or tortured by Russian occupiers" and over 600 Christian religious sites destroyed. I spoke to the Emmy-winning journalist Simon Ostrovsky who said Russia targets Christian denominations.

"If we're talking about an evangelical church," he told me, "then the members of the church will be accused of being American spies. And if we're talking about the Ukrainian Catholic Church, they'll consider it to be a Nazi Church.” But, Ostrovsky added, "Russians have been able to communicate a lot more effectively than Ukraine, particularly to the right in the United States. Russia has been able to. make the case that it is in fact the Ukrainians who are suppressing freedom of religion in Ukraine and not the Russians, which is absurd."

Back in 2013, Pat Buchanan, an influential commentator and former Reagan staffer, asked if Putin was "one of us." That is, a U.S.-style conservative taking up arms in the "culture war for mankind's future". It is a perception Putin has successfully exploited, able to position himself as the lone bulwark against Western and "globalist" decadence. Now with Trump in the White House, propelled there by Christian conservative support, which has stayed steadfastly loyal to the president even as other conservatives question policies such as tariffs and deportations without due process. With the Christian right as Trump's chief constituency, how can he negotiate with Putin free of their natural affinity for the president not just of Russia but arguably traditional Christianity?

The battle over religious freedom in Ukraine is not just a local concern – it’s a global information war, where narratives crafted in Moscow find eager amplifiers among U.S. Christian conservatives. By painting Ukraine as a persecutor of Christians and positioning Russia as the last defender of “traditional values,” the Kremlin has successfully exported its cultural propaganda to the West. This has already had real-world consequences: shaping U.S. policy debates, undermining support for Ukraine, and helping authoritarian leaders forge alliances across borders. The case of Ukraine shows how religious identity can be weaponized as a tool of soft power, blurring the line between faith and geopolitics, and revealing how easily domestic debates can be hijacked for foreign influence. In a world where the persecutors pose as the persecuted, understanding how narratives are manipulated is essential to defending both democracy and genuine religious freedom.

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"What do we even do when the Justice Department ignores court orders?" reads one text from an American friend on my phone. “None of this feels real,” says another.

As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump's Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin's Gulag survivors. By then, Russia's state media was actively rehabilitating Stalin's image, recasting the Soviet dictator as an "efficient manager" who had made necessary sacrifices for the motherland. We felt an urgent need to preserve the testimonies of the few remaining survivors—men and women in their eighties and nineties whose first-hand accounts could counter this historical revisionism.

It was no longer safe for me to travel to Moscow to work with Oksana on developing the project, so we met in neighboring Georgia, in Tbilisi, my hometown. She arrived dressed every bit as the fashion magazine editor she had once been at Russian Vogue before pivoting to become an opposition activist and journalist.

Over wine one evening, she described the constant cat-and-mouse game she had experienced working with Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation. She talked about how Navalny's team had to constantly reinvent itself, adapting to each new restriction the Kremlin devised. When the authorities blocked their websites, they migrated to YouTube and social media. When officials raided their offices, they decentralized operations. When the government froze their bank accounts, they found alternative funding methods. The space for dissent was shrinking daily, she explained, and with each new constraint, they needed to innovate, come up with fresh tactics to continue exposing corruption in Russia and holding Putin accountable.

"The walls are closing in," she told me, "and most people don't even notice until they're trapped."

Her words have acquired an unsettling resonance as I watch the American political landscape transform. When I draw these parallels to my American friends, I often see a familiar resistance in their eyes. Some will say comparing America to authoritarian states is alarmist, that the differences between these societies are too vast. "These are apples and oranges," they'll argue. But the anatomy of repression—the methods used by the powerful to dismantle democratic institutions—remains remarkably similar across time and borders.

There's a reason why those who've lived under authoritarian systems recognize the warning signs so clearly. For Americans, this trajectory feels unimaginable – a departure from everything they know. But for people like Oksana, those who've witnessed democracy crumble, it's more like going back to the future – a painfully familiar pattern returning in new forms.

Recently, a friend in Georgia received a summons that captured the essence of life in an authoritarian state: show up to a state commission hearing and risk becoming a target, or don't show up and face jail time. A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable in Georgia, a country that once exemplified the possibilities of post-Soviet democratic transformation. But that's the thing about authoritarianism—it advances by turning the unthinkable into the inevitable.

Authoritarianism often takes a precise, technical approach to dismantling democracy. It's not always about sudden, violent takeovers. Usually, democratic backsliding is a careful process of erosion, where each small step makes the once outrageous appear normal. What makes this process particularly insidious is how it subverts democracy's own tools – elections, parliaments, courts, and media – turning them against the very systems they were designed to uphold.

Since Coda's inception, we've been tracking the changing landscape of power: the expanding geography of authoritarianism, the abuse of technology, the rise of oligarchy, and the weaponization of historical narratives. Our unique editorial approach identifies "currents" – the patterns bubbling beneath the daily headlines – allowing us to detect emerging trends before they become apparent. Through this lens, we've observed that while authoritarian regimes deploy varied tactics, three essential elements of the playbook repeat themselves with remarkable consistency across different contexts and continents.

The first move is always the manipulation of memory and nostalgia. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. His regime didn't just recast Stalin from tyrant to "efficient manager" – it undermined organizations like Memorial that documented Soviet crimes by branding them as "foreign agents" before shutting them down entirely.

For Oksana, like many others on our team, the Gulag documentary project was deeply personal. Her family had directly experienced political repression under Soviet rule. For the Russian-language version, she chose a different title than "Generation Gulag." She called it: "The Repressions Don't End."

This same pattern is visible in the United States, where the "Make America Great Again" movement taps into a yearning for an imagined past—one in which power structures went unquestioned and concepts like racial equity didn't "complicate" the natural order. This isn't just a political slogan; it's a carefully crafted narrative that creates social conditions that make challenging the mythical past dangerous. 

We've seen this play out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, where school textbooks have been rewritten to glorify the country's imperial past and minimize its complicity in the Holocaust. In India, where Narendra Modi's government has systematically reshaped history education to center Hindu nationalist narratives and diminish Muslim contributions. And in Florida, where educational restrictions on teaching African American studies and racial history follow the same playbook – controlling how societies understand their past to make it easier to reshape their future. 

But rewriting the past is merely the first act. The next phase is to transform this nostalgia into a weapon that redefines loyalty to the nation. Once the mythical golden age is established, questioning it becomes not just disagreement but betrayal. In Russia, this meant that anyone who questioned the revered myths about Soviet glory suddenly became suspect – a potential traitor or foreign agent.

As Oksana traveled across Russia filming interviews with Gulag survivors, many said how distraught they were to see that at the end of their lives, the narratives they thought had been discredited were gaining traction again. The perpetrators of the crimes against them – their executioners, their prison guards – were being glorified once more in state media and official histories.

It's the ultimate form of injustice, echoing what many of my Black American friends tell me they feel today as they watch decades of hard-won progress toward equity being reversed. After fighting so hard to dismantle statues of Confederate generals and slave owners, they now witness white supremacist narratives being rehabilitated and those who challenge them branded as unpatriotic.

Of course, these aren't direct comparisons. Each country follows its own path. Perhaps America's market economy will prove resilient against authoritarian capture. Perhaps its institutions will withstand the assault better than their counterparts elsewhere. Perhaps the federalized system will provide firewalls that weren't available in more centralized states.

But, thinking back to countless conversations with friends who lived through authoritarian transitions, I'm reminded of how gradually the water heats around us all. Each small capitulation, each moment of silence stems from a perfectly reasonable thought: "Surely it won't affect me personally."

Among the 35 victims of Stalin’s Gulags that Oksana interviewed was Irina Verblovskaya. It was a love story that landed Irina in jail "I never thought they would come for me," she told Oksana, her voice steady but her eyes still showing the pain of decades-old wounds. She never thought she was political enough to be noticed. 

American friends often ask me what to do, how to respond once these patterns of repression become evident. I hesitate to answer with certainty. The cases I know most intimately are cases of failure. Nearly everything my dissident parents fought for in Georgia has been reversed in my lifetime. Yet paradoxically, their fight continues to inspire – precisely because it never truly ended. In Tbilisi today, people have stood in the freezing cold for more than a hundred nights, protesting laws that mirror authoritarian Russian legislation.

After years covering wars and political crises, I've noticed that soldiers on the ground often understand which way a battle is turning before the generals do. A taxi driver frequently has a better grasp of city dynamics than the mayor. My first rule is to always listen to people in the thick of it, to pay attention to those who may be at the margins of power but who are the first to feel its effects. Our failure is rarely in lacking prophets, but in refusing to heed their warnings.

Who are America's prophets today? They're the people routinely dismissed as alarmists – constitutional scholars warning about judicial capture, civil rights leaders identifying voter suppression patterns, journalists documenting the normalization of extremist rhetoric, and immigrants who recognize repressions they became familiar with in the countries they fled. Their warnings aren't political hyperbole – they're based on rigorous research, reporting and lived experience. And just as they are the first to detect the warning signs, they're often the first people to be targeted when the final act of the play unfolds.

The last, game-winning tactic from the authoritarian playbook is the criminalization of dissent. This process begins with words – the increasing use of terms like "enemy of the state", “threat to national security”, or "treason" to describe one’s political opponents. See how these labels proliferate in the far-right media. Note how disagreement is increasingly framed as betrayal. To anyone who has lived through authoritarianism, this language isn't merely rhetoric – it's preparation. Project 2025's blueprint for reshaping the Justice Department follows this pattern – creating systems where political loyalty supersedes institutional independence. 

The mechanisms may have evolved but the fundamental approach remains unchanged. In Russia, no one embodied this three-act progression more clearly than Alexei Navalny. In 2014, he was still able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in Moscow's streets against Putin and the Kremlin’s corruption. His warnings about Russia's growing authoritarianism were largely dismissed in the West as exaggerated. Yet the noose tightened around him – first arrests, then poisoning, imprisonment, and eventually death. He posed too great a threat, and the system couldn't tolerate his existence.

That night in Tbilisi in 2019, Oksana talked a lot about what it was like to work with Navalny's team, to mobilize Russians against Putin. We argued about whether or not Navalny was racist. For all his bravery fighting corruption, Navalny had made derogatory remarks about people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, calling Georgians "rodents" that should be "exterminated." Like her, I had grown up with the Soviet collapse as the backdrop of my youth—we were the same age—but my experiences came from a Georgian movement that fought not just the Soviet system but Russian colonialism too.

Our wine-fueled argument eventually settled into a consensus that Western liberal democracy, for all its flaws, remained the best system available—the fairest and freest option we knew. It's only now that I recognize my own slight condescension toward her because she was proudly an activist. After years working in Western media, I had been almost vaccinated against the idea of being an activist myself—journalism had to be pure, objective, detached.

I was wrong. Oksana understood something I didn't yet grasp: in environments where truth itself is under assault, journalism inevitably becomes a form of resistance. For her, this wasn't theoretical—it was daily reality. The boundary I so carefully maintained was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it is now one I no longer believe in.

The Final Warning

A year later, after we filmed about 30 interviews with survivors of Stalin’s purges all across Russia, Oksana went back to show a few of them the result of our work. We have a video of Oksana visiting Olga Shirokaya, a 96-year-old Gulag survivor who had been arrested when she was 27. They sit down on Olga’s couch to watch the film, Olga's eyes widen as she sees her own story reimagined through animation. 

"I feel like I can breathe again," she tells Oksana, her voice trembling. "I didn't think in such a short piece you could so truthfully find the essence of all the things I told you."

I'm haunted by that footage now. Oksana sits there, bright and elegant, while this survivor of Stalin's terror watches her own testimony. By then, Navalny was already in prison. The full scale invasion of Ukraine  was just weeks away. Did Oksana sense what was coming? Did she know she was documenting not just Olga's past, but her own future?

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oksana left Russia. She went to Kyiv to report on the war for an independent Russian outlet – her final act of resistance. On March 23, almost exactly a month since the war had begun, while documenting civilian damage from Russian bombing, Oksana was killed in a Russian missile strike. She was 42.

"The Repressions Don't End" wasn't just the title she chose for the Russian version of our documentary project. It was how she understood history's patterns – patterns that would claim her own life.

We've seen this movie before across different contexts and continents. The script is familiar, the plot mostly predictable. But we don't yet know how it ends – especially in a country with America's democratic traditions, constitutional safeguards, and decentralized power structures.

And so, when friends ask me "what do we do," I tell them: Look to those who've been there before. Democracy isn't saved through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of courage. Through showing up, speaking up, and refusing to turn away from what is happening before our eyes. Through recognizing that the authoritarian playbook works precisely because each small tactic seems too minor to resist. 

We've seen this movie before. But we're not just a passive audience—we're also actors. And we still have the power to change the ending.

All illustrations and videos in this article are from Coda Story's Generation Gulag

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“I signed an order,” Donald Trump declared in his address to Congress this week, “making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female." It wasn’t quite the victory for common sense he thought it was. President Trump, consciously or not, was following a playbook. One that we at Coda Story have tracked for years — a playbook that was written in Russia and is now being followed almost to the letter in America.

For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."

This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't." 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."

When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.

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Last week, Argentinian president Javier Milei was fending off flak and calls for his impeachment. He was accused of fraud for promoting a cryptocurrency that swiftly collapsed, reportedly causing $251 million in losses for 86% of investors. It is the first embarrassment in what has been an extended honeymoon period for Milei, a reformer who promises to remake government in his own libertarian image.  

But if things were getting uncomfortable for him in Buenos Aires, bounding onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland with a chainsaw, he seemed right at home. The chainsaw was a gift for Elon Musk, an unabashed admirer of Milei’s economic policies, his belief that government needs to essentially just get out of the way.  

In Argentina, Milei frequently cites his international clout as evidence of the appeal of his libertarian ideology. He says that Trump brought Musk into his government to replicate the role of Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation. Whether Musk is a committed libertarian in the Milei and Sturzenegger mold is unknown. And unlike them, Musk has no electoral remit to enact his reforms. Back in September 2024, though, when DOGE had not yet taken shape, Musk posted on X that the “example” Milei was “setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.”

And With DOGE fully up and running, Musk described Sturzenegger’s “Chainsaw 2.0” or “deep chainsaw” plans as “awesome.” In this plan, the national government of Argentina would, for instance, not build public housing because it’s something the private sector can do. The “lesson for other countries,” Sturzenegger says, “is that we should revisit the limits of what can be done.”

Just over a year into his government, Milei cut public spending by 30%, shut down half of the country's ministries, eliminated hundreds of laws and decrees, slashed nearly 40,000 public sector jobs, and reduced public works budgets to a bare minimum—all without major civil unrest, in the face of an opposition that remains largely paralyzed.

The shock Americans feel as they try to comprehend exactly how much power DOGE has been given, is how Argentinians felt as they watched Milei’s government—largely composed of individuals with no political experience, some without even a formal appointment—dismantle the state. 

While Milei has dramatically reduced inflation to 2.2%—no small feat in a country where inflation had crossed 200%—his cuts, alongside soaring costs, have also pushed some into poverty and his once high approval ratings are falling. 

That’s why his trip to the U.S. was important. At CPAC it’s Milei’s conservatism – last month in Davos, he railed against the “promoters of the sinister agenda of wokeism” – that counts, not the facts of his governance. Milei takes pride in his high standing within the global right wing. He is a part of what Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, in her own CPAC speech, called a global conservative collaboration. “When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair created a global, leftist liberal network in the 90s,” she said, “they were called ‘statesmen.’ Today when Trump, Meloni, Milei and, maybe, Modi talk, they are called a ‘threat to democracy.’ This is the left’s double standard.” It is this global prominence, Milei hopes, that will continue to propel his agenda forward in Argentina and shield him from the fallout of the crypto scandal. 

As for Milei’s effect on the U.S. – both Trump and Musk appear to be looking at him as the canary in the coalmine of radical deregulation. Just how far can governments go down the path of libertarianism? How far can they go to redefine the role of government in society?  Both approaches reflect a foundational shift in governance philosophy - from institutional processes to disruption by outsiders who view existing systems as obstacles rather than safeguards.

Milei’s first year in government offers a preview of what's unfolding in America. Musk is now taking Milei's playbook further by adding technology - developing AI tools to automate the government downsizing that Milei executed manually with his 40,000 job cuts. Both men use their credentials as disruptors to justify radical changes while dismissing criticism as establishment resistance. And both have created a mutual amplification system - Milei points to Musk's support as validation while Musk points to Argentina as proof that his approach works, despite emerging evidence to the contrary in both cases. A U.S. district judge has, at least temporarily, stopped DOGE from accessing treasury data on the grounds that such data might be “improperly disclosed.” As questions mount about DOGE’s intentions, including from its own employees, Americans should watch Argentina’s libertarian experiment closely. It could serve not as a blueprint but as a warning about what happens when bureaucratic guardrails are dismantled with chainsaws, real or metaphorical.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Swaggering through Europe this week, the U.S. vice president JD Vance and secretary of defense Pete Hegseth gave a masterclass in how to alienate friends and annoy people. At the AI Summit in France, Vance accused European regulators of “tightening the screws” on U.S. companies. “America cannot and will not accept that,” he added, warning his “European friends” to lay off Big Tech. Or else.   

PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.

"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.

Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".

Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.” 

The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine. 

China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation." 

Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.

But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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From Greenland to Gaza, from the Panama Canal to Mars, Donald Trump's territorial ambitions span the globe. Once described as an isolationist, Trump’s rhetoric increasingly resembles that of a 19th-century imperialist. Nowhere is this colonial mindset more evident than in his latest demand - that Ukraine hand over its mineral wealth in exchange for continued American military support.

When he declared last week that Ukraine should "secure what we're giving them with their rare earth and other things," he inadvertently exposed a bitter truth: gauzy Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn’t apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

It was a lesson I learned for myself, reporting from Georgia in 2008 as Russian tanks rolled towards my hometown.By the time a ceasefire was called, Russia had invaded and seized 20% of Georgian land, the territory of America's most loyal non-NATO ally in the region. And Georgia had suffered a wound that would prove fatal. Just months later, Hillary Clinton, Obama's newly minted Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button in Geneva. 

Despite the recent Russian aggression, there was Lavrov, laughing and joking with Clinton about a mistake in the transliteration from English to Cyrillic of the word “reset.” Every Georgian, Kazakh, or Ukrainian who had experienced Russian colonialism first hand, knew that what he was really chuckling about was the fact that Moscow had just gotten away with murder. 

Trump has exposed a bitter truth: gauze Western rhetoric about sovereignty and self-determination doesn't apply to countries that neighbor a colonial power.

In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine was positioning itself to be a key player in the global green technology transition. The country's vast deposits of lithium and various minerals - including 22 of the 34 minerals that the European Union deems to be “critical” – promised a pathway to genuine economic sovereignty. But that future was stolen by Russia's invasion, with a significant percentage of Ukrainian minerals now under Russian control, including half of its rare earths reserves. 

The mineral deposits that remain – resources that could finance Ukraine's post-war reconstruction – are now being demanded by Trump as collateral for military aid. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy leapt at the offer: “let’s do a deal,” he told Reuters about Trump’s conditions, “we are only for it.” Zelenskiy’s desperate need for continued American support means he has little choice but to bargain away Ukraine’s resources. Even if it raises the grim colonial specter of the U.S. and Russia sitting across the negotiating table and carving up Ukrainian wealth amongst themselves.

Trump's approach eerily echoes Victorian-era colonialism. When Cecil Rhodes declared in 1902 that he would "annex the planets if I could," he expressed the same ruthless resource-extraction mindset that now drives Trumpian foreign policy. Both men share a vision of power measured in territorial control and resource ownership, backed by military might.

In his first term, Trump was frequently described as an isolationist, unwilling to continue to fund American military adventurism abroad, unwilling to intervene in the affairs of other countries, unwilling to shelter migrants, and unwilling to abide by international agreements and institutions. Back then, the label was suspect, a badge of convenience. Already in the first weeks of Trump’s second term, the label has become absurd. 

But Trump's mineral-for-weapons proposition, crude as it is, strips away decades of Western illusions. It acknowledges what leaders in Washington and Brussels long refused to see - that countries in Russia's shadow have never had the luxury of true independence. 

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue. It’s a pattern that requires the West to bury its head in the sand after each example of Russian aggression. For instance, after Russia's cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, Western leaders dismissed it as an anomaly. And then, after the invasion of Georgia in 2008, they rushed to "reset" relations. Six years later, after the seizure of Crimea, they still spoke of finding diplomatic solutions. Each time Putin tested the West's resolve, he emerged more emboldened, his every action treated as an aberration rather than as part of a coherent imperial strategy.

Since the 1990s, the West's approach to Russia has been built on a peculiar form of magical thinking - a stubborn belief that Moscow can be changed through engagement and dialogue.

The medieval assault on Ukraine in 2022 seemed, finally, like a wake-up call. For a moment, it appeared that politicians in Europe and the United States understood that Putin wanted to rebuild a Russian empire. But the moment didn’t last long. Even as Putin openly declared his imperial ambitions, even as he openly dismissed Ukraine's right to sovereignty, Western leaders continued to search for off-ramps and resets that existed only in their imagination.

Joe Biden's tactics - treating the conflict as a crisis to be managed rather than a war to be won - became the final chapter of the West’s failed post-Cold War politics. Each delayed weapons delivery, each hesitation justified by the fear of escalation, reflected a familiar priority: stability with Russia over the right to sovereignty of its neighbors.

Those underground deposits in Ukraine tell the story: a large portion now lies in territories controlled by Russia or too close to the front lines to be mined. No wonder, Zelensky is courting Trump’s interest in its rare earth deposits. The choices facing Ukraine's leadership and people remain what they've always been - a series of impossible decisions to be made in the shadow of an empire that has never accepted their right to decide.

“They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they happen to be the same as Europe's values," a Ukrainian soldier told me in 2015. His words haunt me now as we enter this new, cynical era. Deep beneath Ukraine's soil lies both promise and peril - deposits of minerals that could fuel either independence or a new era of colonial extraction. The familiar irony for Ukraine is that these resources, which make sovereignty viable, must also serve as collateral in a great game between colonial powers.

Now that the magical thinking and pretense is over and the hard calculations begin, the only certainty is that the cost will be borne, as always, by those who do not have the privilege of being able to harbor illusions and magical thoughts in the first place.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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Among Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders, all signed in the first week of his new term, perhaps the one with the most far-reaching impact was also one of the least talked about and scrutinized. For 90 days, the United States said, it would freeze all its global aid programs, except for “foreign military financing for Israel and Egypt.” There were no exceptions announced for the billions of dollars the U.S. gives to health programs in Africa each year, including funding to a crucial AIDS relief program that provides anti-viral medications to some 20 million people in 55 countries. 

And that’s without counting the cost of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization which has particularly serious implications for Africa. Eventually, Marco Rubio, the new U.S. secretary of state, walked back some of the order, saying exceptions would be made for “life-saving aid” including HIV treatments.

Despite Rubio’s clarification that essential aid would be granted a “humanitarian waiver,” many aid workers said they hadn’t yet been told whether they could resume operations, having already been told to cease operations last week. In Uganda alone, an estimated 1.2 million people would have been affected by the withdrawal of funds from AIDS relief. The Ugandan-born executive director of UNAIDS, Winnie Byanyima said that the United States’  “unwavering commitment to addressing HIV stands as a global gold standard of leadership.” If Trump continued to back AIDS relief, she added, the U.S. could effectively “end AIDS by 2030.” 

But few Ugandan politicians expressed any anger or even disappointment in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s blanket order to freeze funding. On X, human rights activist, Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya asked “where is the outrage?” Months before, he had told me how the autocratic Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s government monitored social media posts and sometimes used online criticism as grounds to arrest activists.  

By contrast, in August, 2023, when the World Bank decided to suspend new public financing to Uganda, Museveni himself took to social media. The World Bank made its decision in the wake of Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023” which sought to “prohibit any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex” and to “prohibit the promotion or recognition of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” 

The range of punishments included life imprisonment and even the death penalty. For LGBT activist Hans Senfuma, the passage of the act into Ugandan law turned his nightmare into reality “It essentially gives the go-ahead to attack those who are assumed to be LGBTQ+,” he said, explaining that he himself now lived a life of secrecy, rarely leaving his apartment for fear even of his own neighbors.

It is, posted Museveni, “unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors dare to want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money.” Uganda, he added, “does not need pressure from anybody to know how to solve problems in our society. They are our problems.” Later that year, Joe Biden suspended Uganda from a group of African countries granted special duty free access to the US for specified products.

With the election of Trump, Uganda sees an opportunity to return to the fold. “We are going to start engaging with the new administration as soon as possible,” said Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, a senior foreign ministry official. “The tone which His Excellency Trump has set is favorable.” Over a five-year period, it was estimated that Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law would cost it over $8 billion. But with Trump having signed his own anti-LGBTQ executive orders, the Ugandan government sees him as a likely ally, as someone who shares their values. 

Trump has used his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world access to contraception and safe abortions. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

Indeed, as The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported, Valerie Huber, a former adviser to the Trump administration, has been traveling across Africa soliciting government investment in her sex education programs. Huber, TBIJ noted, is the “driving force behind the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a statement signed by 34 countries saying that there is ‘no international right to abortion.’” 

Trump’s executive order commits the United States to recognizing “two sexes, male and female” which are apparently “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This has emboldened anti-LGBT activists across the continent. In Ghana, for instance, a bill has been proposed to imprison people for “identifying” as LGBT or funding LGBT groups. While the new Ghanaian president John Mahama, who like Trump was inaugurated in January, says the bill is “effectively dead on procedural grounds,” activists have been pushing for its passage into law. “With Donald Trump’s return,” said one activist, “Ghana is on the right side of history.”

In a paper commissioned by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education in September, the researcher Malayah Harper assessed the global ramifications of the implementation of Project 2025 proposals. Project 2025, she argued, “calls for an end to using U.S. diplomatic soft power in Africa to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, and refers to this diplomacy as ‘imposing pro-LGBT initiatives.” Connected to this, is the conservative desire for Trump to pull the plug on U.S. funds for foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions. 

And Trump has done exactly that, using his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world, including in Africa, access to contraception and safe abortions. Significantly, while speaking of the government’s “humanitarian waiver,” Rubio made sure to say exemptions did not apply to abortion, family planning, transgender surgeries, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

It is a key trope of Russian propaganda that homosexuality is a decadent Western concept. Russia, the Kremlin insists, is the last bastion of traditional family values, a pitch which has resonated with conservative communities everywhere. Now that the U.S. is following along the same path, the effect on women’s health could be catastrophic. 

Also, as Trump retreats from public health initiatives in Africa and elsewhere, it leaves the door open for others, particularly China to step in and reshape global alliances to its benefit. Anna Reismann, the Country Director for Uganda and South Sudan at Konrad-Adenaur-Stiftung, a foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a major center-right political party, told me that dropping aid funding only fueled anti-Western narratives. “It plays to sentiments against colonialism and paternalistic behaviors of Western powers," she said. In other words, the vacuum left by the U.S. would be filled by China, Russia and other non-Western powers that do not impose human rights conditions on funding. 

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This week, as DeepSeek, a free AI-powered chatbot from China, embarrassed American tech giants and panicked investors, sending global markets tumbling, investor Marc Andreessen described its emergence as "AI's Sputnik moment." That is, the moment when self-belief and confidence tips over into hubris. It was not just stock prices that plummeted. The carefully constructed story of American technological supremacy also took a deep plunge. 

But perhaps the real shock should be that Silicon Valley was shocked at all.

For years, Silicon Valley and its cheerleaders spread the narrative of inevitable American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry. From the "Why China Can't Innovate" cover story in the Harvard Business Review to the breathless reporting on billion-dollar investments in AI, U.S. media spent years building an image of insurmountable Western technological superiority. Even this week, when Wired reported on the "shock, awe, and questions" DeepSeek had sparked, the persistent subtext seemed to be that technological efficiency from unexpected quarters was somehow fundamentally illegitimate. 

“In the West, our sense of exceptionalism is truly our greatest weakness,” says data analyst Christopher Wylie, author of MindF*ck, who famously blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in 2017. 

That arrogance was on full display just last year when OpenAI's Sam Altman, speaking to an audience in India, declared: "It's totally hopeless to compete with us. You can try and it's your job to try but I believe it is hopeless." He was dismissing the possibility that teams outside Silicon Valley could build substantial AI systems with limited resources.

There are still questions over whether DeepSeek had access to more computing power than it is admitting. Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wong said in a recent interview that the Chinese company had access to thousands more of the highest grade chips than people know about, despite U.S. export controls.  What's clear, though, is that Altman didn't anticipate that a competitor would simply refuse to play by the rules he was trying to set and would instead reimagine the game itself.

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight. While companies like OpenAI have poured hundreds of billions into massive data centers—with the Stargate project alone pledging an “initial investment” of $100 billion—DeepSeek demonstrated a fundamentally different path to innovation.

"For the first time in public, they've provided an efficient way to train reasoning models," explains Thomas Cao, professor of technology policy at Tufts University. "The technical detail is that they've come up with a way to do reinforcement learning without supervision. You don't have to hand-label a lot of data. That makes training much more efficient."

By developing an AI model that matches—and in many ways surpasses—American equivalents, DeepSeek challenged the Silicon Valley story that technological innovation demands massive resources and minimal oversight.

For the American media, which has drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid, the DeepSeek story is a hard one to stomach. For a long time, Wylie argues, while countries in Asia made massive technological breakthroughs, the story commonly told to the American people focused on American tech exceptionalism. 

An alternative approach, Wylie says, would be to see and “acknowledge that China is doing good things we can learn from without meaning that we have to adopt their system. Things can exist in parallel.” But instead, he adds, the mainstream media followed the politicians down the rabbit hole of focusing on the "China threat." 

These geopolitical fears have helped Big Tech shield itself from genuine competition and regulatory scrutiny. The narrative of a Cold War style “AI race” with China has also fed the assumption that a major technological power can be bullied into submission through trade restrictions. 

That assumption has also crumpled. The U.S. has spent the past two years attempting to curtail China's AI development through increasingly strict controls on advanced semiconductors. These restrictions, which began under Biden in 2022 and were significantly expanded last week under Trump, were designed to prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most advanced chips needed for AI development. 

DeepSeek developed its model using older generation chips stockpiled before the restrictions took effect, and its breakthrough has been held up as an example of genuine, bootstrap innovation. But Professor Cao cautions against reading too much into how export controls have catalysed development and innovation at DeepSeek. "If there had been no export control requirements,” he said, “DeepSeek could have been able to do things even more efficiently and faster. We don't see the counterfactual." 

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to both Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it. 

As millions of Americans downloaded DeepSeek, making it the most downloaded app in the U.S., OpenAI’s Steven Heidel peevishly claimed that using it would mean giving away data to the Chinese Communist Party. Lawmakers too have warned about national security risks and dozens of stories like this one echoed suggestions that the app could be sending U.S. data to China. 

Security concers aside,  what really sets DeepSeek apart from its Western counterparts is not just efficiency of the model, but also the fact that it is open source. Which, counter-intuitively, makes a Beijing-funded app more democratic than its Silicon Valley predecessors. 

In the heated discourse surrounding technological innovation, "open source" has become more than just a technical term—it's a philosophy of transparency. Unlike proprietary models where code is a closely guarded corporate secret, open source invites global scrutiny and collective improvement.

DeepSeek is a direct rebuke to Western assumptions about Chinese innovation and the methods the West has used to curtail it.

At its core, open source means that the source code of a software is made freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. When a technology is open source, users can download the entire code, run it on their own servers, and verify every line of its functionality. For consumers and technologists alike, open source means the ability to understand, modify, and improve technology without asking permission. It's a model that prioritizes collective advancement over corporate control. Already, for instance, the Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba has released a new version of its own large language model that it says is an upgrade on DeepSpeak.

Unlike ChatGPT or any other Western AI system, DeepSource can be run locally without giving away any data. "Despite the media fear-mongering, the irony is DeepSeek is now open source and could be implemented in a far more privacy-preserving way than anything offered by Meta or OpenAI,"  Wylie says. “If Sam Altman open sourced OpenAI, we wouldn’t look at it with the same skepticism, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize."

The open-source nature of DeepSeek is a huge part of the disruption it has caused. It challenges Silicon Valley's entire proprietary model and challenges our collective assumptions about both AI development and global competition. Not surprisingly, part of Silicon Valley’s response has been to complain that Chinese companies are using American companies’ intellectual property, even as their own large language models have been built by consuming vast amounts of information without permission.

This counterintuitive strategy of openness coming from an authoritarian state also gives China a massive soft power win that it will translate into geopolitical brownie points. Just as TikTok's algorithms outmaneuvered Instagram and YouTube by focusing on accessibility over profit, DeepSeek, which is currently topping iPhone downloads, represents another moment where what's better for users—open-source, efficient, privacy-preserving—challenges what's better for the boardroom.

We are yet to see how DeepSeek will reroute the development of AI, but just as the original Sputnik moment galvanized American scientific innovation during the Cold War, DeepSeek could shake Silicon Valley out of its complacency. For Professor Cao the immediate lesson is that the US must reinvest in fundamental research or risk falling behind. For Wylie, the takeaway of the DeepSeek fallout in the US is more meta: There is no need for a new Cold War, he argues. “There will only be an AI war if we decide to have one.”

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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