Terje Helland Profile picture
Mar 4, 2025 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
🇺🇸🇪🇺🌎The transatlantic alliance faces an uncomfortable truth: the instability in U.S. politics isn't just about Trump. It’s about the deeper flaws in American democracy itself—flaws that make the U.S. an unreliable pillar of Western security.
🧵A security thread.
1/10 Image
Trump—a convicted fraudster, rapist, and insurrectionist—isn’t an outlier. The fact that he can win power again is a symptom of systemic weakness.
In any functioning democracy, such a figure would be politically extinct.
In the U.S., he was the GOPs first choice.
2/10
How did we get here? Its complicated but two core flaws make American democracy structurally unstable:
1️⃣ Money in politics—Citizens United allows billionaires to buy elections.
2️⃣ Electoral system design—A few swing states decide everything, making it easy to manipulate outcomes Image
Unlike in Europe (at least my country), where politicians resign over minor infractions, the U.S. system enables criminals to return to power.
When legal accountability means nothing, when money outweighs votes, when courts are stacked—how democratic is the U.S., really?
4/11Image
This isn’t just about domestic politics. If the U.S. can’t guarantee stable governance, how can Europe, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, or Japan trust it with their security?
5/11
NATO’s backbone has always been U.S. leadership. But when that leadership can swing between Biden’s internationalism and Trump’s isolationism—on a whim—the alliance itself is on borrowed time.
6/11Image
Europe must wake up. The old assumption—that the U.S. will always be there as a security guarantor—is dead.
A country that can be hijacked by extremists every four years is no foundation for defense and security.
7/11Image
The solution? The West must build an independent security framework.
✅ Europe must expand its defense capacity.
✅ Canada, Australia, Taiwan and Japan must coordinate more closely.
✅ NATO must prepare for a world where U.S. support is conditional—or absent.
8/11 Image
This is not an anti-American argument. It’s about recognizing reality. The U.S. remains a vital partner, but the era of blind dependence is over.
The West needs a backup plan—before it’s too late.
9/11 Image
The biggest threat to the Western alliance isn’t just Russia or China.
It’s the fragility of U.S. democracy itself.
If we don’t prepare for a post-American security order now, we may not get a second chance.
10/11
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Thank you! 🙏

11/11buymeacoffee.com/terjehelland

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More from @terjehelland

May 23
🇬🇪Georgian Dream is not EU-skeptic. GD runs a calculated campaign to ensure Georgia never qualifies, never progresses, and never joins the EU.
The anti-EU rhetoric is now the strategy itself.
The last three weeks make that very visible. 👇
1/13 📷 Civil.geImage
Two facts the regime cannot move. Over 80% of Georgians want EU membership. EU integration is written into the constitution. The pro-Western direction is not a Western imposition. It is the codified preference of Georgian voters, repeated in every credible poll for a decade.
2/13Image
Shaddow ruler Ivanishvili cannot allow that. The US sanctioned him in Dec 2024 for "undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation."
His, and Putins, political project requires the EU path to fail.
3/13 Image
Read 13 tweets
May 19
🇬🇪Open letter, meet open record.
PM Kobakhidze writes to von der Leyen, Costa and Metsola to lecture the EU on police violence in Copenhagen. Peaceful protesters beaten with batons, set on by dogs he claims.
Then read what his own police do, and never answer for.
1/13 👇🧵Image
The letter casts Georgia as the guardian of European values and Brussels as the backslider, with Denmark as the exhibit.
He picked the one subject on which his own government has the longest and best documented record.
2/13
interpressnews.ge/en/article/147…
The premise is whataboutism, and it collapses on contact.
The question is never whether police use force. Every state's police use force. It is whether anyone is held to account when they do.
3/13
Read 13 tweets
May 16
🇬🇪🇺🇸The Trump family recently signed Georgia's tallest building. Their local partner is a former Georgian Dream MP whom US lawmakers flagged as a regime financier. The deal lands while Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD's founder, sits under active US sanctions.
1/6thedailybeast.com/trumps-sign-me…
The partner is Archi Group, founded by Ilia Tsulaia. Former MP for Ivanishvili's party. Named on the sanctions-target list US lawmakers reportedly handed Marco Rubio in January 2025. He has not been sanctioned. That gap is the story. @willneal93
2/6Image
His firm took an estimated $7.2M from Ivanishvili's state Partnership Fund for a Tbilisi factory (Transparency International, 2019). In the same 2016-2018 window, he and his partners donated hundreds of thousands back to the ruling party.
State money in, party money out.
3/6
Read 6 tweets
May 15
🇬🇪🇺🇦Georgian Dream wants one gift from the West: recognition.
GD does not want the gift Kyiv just offered: friendship.
The Yerevan handshake between Zelensky and Georgian PM Kobakhidze was not normalization. It was a strategic trap.
Here's why GD secretly hates this opening.
1/15 Image
This is the third pressure in six weeks.
April 3: Marc Rubio's call to Kobakhidze. The gift GD wanted. Triggered Iranian and Russian counter-signals in 48 hours.
April 12: Hungary's Orbán lost his election. EU firewall gone.
May 4: Zelensky offers the gift GD did not want.
2/15
Sidelines of the 8th European Political Community summit in Yerevan. Ukraine initiated. Kobakhidze "immediately confirmed."
🇺🇦FM Sybiha and 🇬🇪FM Bochorishvili met separately. Return of ambassadors discussed.
Sybiha called it "historical."

3/15jam-news.net/irakli-kobakhi…
Read 16 tweets
Apr 14
🇬🇪🇭🇺Hungary under Orbán shows that a heavily rigged electoral system can still be contested. Georgian opposition is right to study it.
But the comparison only holds if you understand precisely how different the Georgian reality is.
1/11 Image
What Hungary demonstrates: even with gerrymandered districts, captured media, and rewritten electoral law, a resourced and organized opposition can compete for real stakes. The system was bent. It was not broken.
2/11
Transferable lessons exist: long-term civic coalition building, unified candidate lists, refusing to let the regime define the terms of the contest. These are real tools. Georgia's opposition should absorb them.
3/11
Read 11 tweets
Apr 13
🇬🇪🇭🇺Viktor Orbán lost Hungary's election yesterday. For most Europeans, this is a relief. For Georgian Dream, it is a strategic catastrophe.
Their single most important protector in Europe is gone. Here's what that actually means.
1/6 @MakaB__ Image
Since Oct. 2024, Hungary was Georgian Dream's lifeline inside the EU. Orbán blocked every attempted sanctions package against GD officials. He vetoed EU condemnation statements. He hosted GD in full government summits. Twice.
No other EU state came close to doing any of this.
2/6
GD's own words made the dependency explicit.
After CPAC March 2026, Kobakhidze told reporters Hungary "remains the main defender of Georgia's national interests in Europe."
FM Botchorishvili began her tenure by flying to Budapest first. She called it "unwavering support."
3/6Image
Read 6 tweets

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