Late last month, the US Department of State published an essay accusing Europe of waging an “aggressive campaign against western civilisation itself”.
Some dismissed it as a sophomoric prank. The author, Sam Samson, was a little-known adviser to secretary of state Marco Rubio who only graduated from college in 2021. That his post appeared on the department’s official substack account made the sceptics think again.
Samson’s essay, which accused European governments of “backsliding” on democracy and having “weaponised political institutions against their own citizens”, laid bare the deepening ideological rift between President Donald Trump’s administration and the EU.