Since Trump’s return to office, some very interesting things are happening to, rather than merely at, the State Department. It is nothing short of radical. Bear in mind we are talking about a 102 year old institution(in its modern form that is to say) that, it won’t be an overstatement to say, has given direction to world affairs especially during the long 20th century and beyond.
Did MAGA actually manage a Leninist takeover of the state?
It is a hallmark of the MAGA/Trump movement to be radically dismissive of any professional/bureaucratic “big government”. That is no surprise. But the sheer scale of the dismantling that has taken place is astonishing.
As per FT’s reporting:
Of the 101 nominations for ambassadorships in his second term, just nine were career diplomats…State has, they say, become obstructive, losing sight of its purpose to help achieve America’s national security objectives…Diplomats warn of a crude politicisation and a purge of experts in an “America First” culture that scorns regional expertise.
….
“Many of our most experienced diplomats have been summarily fired,” he adds. “Now there are no career diplomats in the rooms where it happens . . .
The gutting of the department is like a medieval siege, says the former senior diplomat: “First they lob the cannonballs into the town . . . then they salt the fields.”
…If there is one thing on which veteran diplomats and Maga activists agree, it is that the state department is undergoing a sweeping change of culture. Trump’s team has moved fast to impose its America First vision on a department they see as being liberal, hostile and prone to leak to the press. The spirit of revenge as well as revolution is in the air. 1
The choice of the words “revolution is in the air” is perhaps not accidental to describe what Trump’s team has done to the State Department. It was after all, Steve Bannon, who, I remind is you is perhaps the chief ideologue of the Trump/MAGA movement. Someone who once unabashedly declared himself a Leninist:
“I am a Leninist.” Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too,” replied Bannon. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”2
When one thinks back on this declaration, it somehow makes sense that, of all the departments, it is the State Department that now carries an air of revolution. Bannon’s remark was so absurd at the time he said it (prior to Trump’s 2016 election) one can hardly blame the liberal establishment for not taking him at face value but alas, here we are.
Enter “Civilisational Bonds”
Until very recently, reading a headline such as this would have been unthinkable: “US to fund Trump-aligned Europeans building ‘civilisational bonds’.” So what is this civilisational bond grant exactly?
The State Department is launching a grant from its so called Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The department defines its purpose as:
The purpose of democratic government is to protect natural rights and fundamental freedoms, including free speech and religious liberty, while ensuring citizens can freely choose their elected officials and hold their government accountable. For centuries, the transatlantic partnership has been rooted in a common understanding of natural law, virtue, and national sovereignty. However, European governments are increasingly drifting from these foundations through supranational bureaucratic overreach and partisan weaponization that concentrates power in technocratic institutions less accountable to democratic choices. At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for renewing the U.S.-Europe partnership to defend common heritage, restore respect for sovereignty, and address modern challenges like mass migration and violations of free speech.
When the document is read in detail, it seems that it is in fact a funding opportunity (serious money for EU standards) for all things undermining EU speech regulation, migration policy, and "supranational" institutions. Whether it is a think tank publishing anti-migration material or a civil-society group pitching a free-speech-themed project (what such a project might involve is not specified) counts.
This funding offer cannot be understood when examined apart from last year’s National Security Strategy, which contained the by now infamous warning of Europe’s impending “civilizational erasure.” It was in that same context that Vice President JD Vance personally travelled to Hungary to endorse Viktor Orbán, who was promptly voted out of office in a landslide election.
Set against Bannon’s earlier remarks, all this becomes harder to dismiss as merely the crude politicisation of the State Department. The wording of the State Department makes me wonder if the MAGA ideologues within the administration have progressed to reading Gramsci after achieving a not-so-Leninist takeover of the State. The funding announcement is laden with phrases such as; “civic-society”, “cultural engagements”, “public intellectuals” and so on and so forth. The terminology reeks of a bid for cultural hegemony, or perhaps counter-hegemony in Europe complete with a call to arms for its would-be “organic intellectuals.” I know posing the question whether MAGA Trumpians are adopting Gramscian methods is a rather absurd one. But the fact that such a question can now be posed says more about the fuzzy new world we now find ourselves in than about the question itself.
The real danger of using funding as a foreign policy tool
Beneath all this, there is something much more sinister I want to point out. While a grant intended to cultivate a civilizational Transatlantic bond may seem somewhat innocuous in the grand scheme of things, linking access to taxpayer-funded foreign assistance to a highly politicised stipulation ventures into very dangerous territory.
In my latest piece,I wrote about how during the height of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the US Federal Reserve discovered it could selectively rescue entire countries from financial ruin by choosing to extend US Dollar swap lines to them in their hour of need:
The 'so called' liberal capitalism died in 2008. Not with a bang but with a whimper.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the most decisive innovation, or a revelation I should say, yielded by the 2008 crisis. It was not only the US banks that were in dire need of liquidity injection. In other countries, the major financial institutions had gross US dollar liabilities on their balance sheets. Because the dollar was unlinked from the gold standard, as relayed above, the US effectively permitted banks from abroad to credit US dollars. This is in principle what is termed as a euro-dollar. But when push came to shove and these banks could not access dollar liquidity when global credit dried up, there was a real problem. The sovereign nations needed to recapitalize their banks so that they could save their finances. But there is a caveat, after all, not every country except the US can create dollars at will. The way out of this conundrum was designed under the technocratic shroud of the Fed. It was given, on purpose, a highly technical name “swap lines”….
So thanks to the global financial crisis, the Fed discovered that it had perhaps the most powerful geopolitical weapon in its hands. Fed lacked any form of democratic legitimacy to make decisions on matters of utmost geopolitical importance such as this.
Now, let’s imagine the next financial crisis is upon us, the very crisis that people across the board have lately been warning about. Given that foreign holdings of US assets have risen to roughly 69 trillion USD, around 22 trillion of which buried in US equities. A stock market that is at this point resembling more and more a a big bet on AI. So, what happens if that wager collapses and the world is plunged into another major credit crunch?
What would happen if the Federal Reserve, instead of extending dollar swap lines to distressed countries on technocratic grounds3, makes such support conditional on some form of guarantee of a “civilizational bond”?4 That would unequivocally amount to tying whether a country’s economy floats or collapses to geopolitical coercion. This, alarmingly, appears to be the direction in which things are moving.
Steve Bannon’s Leninist purge of the so-called deep state, the term so loved by the MAGA , has long had the Federal Reserve in its sights. The Fed obviously is the crown jewel. The overt war between Trumpian MAGA and the Federal Reserve has already been under way for some time. It is, I would argue, entirely within the realm of possibility that the Fed eventually folds. That bodes ill for everyone, to say the least…
I still cannot believe he said that
or a veneer of technocratic grounds I should say as some countries were excluded after opaque decision making processes. Hungary and Ukraine are among the countries excluded. look at what happened to both in the years that followed.
It is also not coincidental that the word “bond” comes from physical tie that binds which later semantically evolved into meaning a debt obligation. Very appropriate choice of a word in the part of the State Department in that regard. also, rest in peace David Graeber who magnificently laid all this out in his book: “Debt first 5000 years”
