During the Cold War, large and influential Communist parties in Western Europe maintained ties with Moscow, ranging from sympathetic to subservient. The United States kept its distance and in many cases supported their opponents financially and politically.

Now Europe is confronted with a loose alliance of Russian-leaning parties, this time on the other end of the spectrum: the far right. And the U.S. government has taken the opposite approach: a warm embrace.

By doing so, the United States is condoning Russia’s subversion of the postwar Europe that America helped create and secure. The parties Russia favors are hostile to the European Union, opposed to higher military spending and receptive to Russia’s arguments about the recklessness of NATO expansion and the need to assert right-wing Christian values.

Should these parties and their populist cousins eventually dominate Europe — they are in government in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia, and making an impact in France and Germany — they could eviscerate NATO and geopolitically neuter if not subjugate Europe itself. That is certainly Russia’s hope.

A Europe thus benighted would dash America’s post-Cold War vision of a continent “whole and free” that the European Union and the Atlantic alliance, for all their problems, have done much to advance and which has been an enduring source of geopolitical stability.

Of course, the Trump administration has made clear its disdain for those accomplishments.

Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance exhorted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference to stop shunning the extreme parties in their midst. German politicians, he argued, should remove the “firewall” against working with populist parties, clearly referring to the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Afterward, he met with the AfD leader. Elon Musk, who seems to be acting like President Trump’s prime minister, congratulated the party’s leader on its second-place showing in Sunday’s elections in Germany.