Ideas

The Longest Suicide Note in American History

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.

First published in The Atlantic on December 16, 2025.

by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
December 18, 2025 | reading time: 9 Min.

Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.

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