The Trump Administration has issued a “suicide note” ending all exposure of Russian influence campaigns, Chinese political manipulation, and Iranian extremist recruitment drives that threaten U.S stability, writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum.

In September, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center ended its agreements in two dozen countries to jointly expose “malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran,” Applebaum wrote in a recent article in The Atlantic.

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She also mentions the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, which seeks to end most U.S. involvement in its previous foreign agreements.

“The [Global Engagement Center’s] former head, James Rubin, called this decision ‘a unilateral act of disarmament,'” Applebaum wrote. “It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.”

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Applebaum notes that the National Security Strategy ignores a decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and sabotage; Chinese attempts to economically influence Africa and Latin America and digitally hack U.S. infrastructure software; and mentions no other rivals or conflicts concerning the United States.

In fact the only “enemy ideology” mentioned in the strategy is “European liberal democracy,” Applebaum notes, adding, “Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.”

“[The people who created this strategy are living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers,” she writes. “They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us.”

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