The geopolitics of Charlie Kirk’s murder

We didn’t build Intrigue to weigh in on the kinds of issues now dividing America, but the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has reverberated all around the world.

So you can bet most of the ~180 embassies in DC will have written home about Kirk’s murder, trying to untangle what it all means. Here’s a quick tour down Embassy Row: 

• 🇮🇱 Israel 

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first leaders to mourn Kirk’s shooting, describing the 31-year-old as a “lion-hearted friend of Israel”. Why?

Kirk defended Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks, rejected antisemitism as evil, and staunchly backed the US-Israel alliance. Like many (though not all) American church-goers, he also saw a link between modern Israel and his faith.

But initial MAGA unity around his death is now also partly unravelling over Israel, with some claiming Kirk was privately a little more critical of Jewish people and the Jewish state than he let on publicly (the internet has resurfaced quotes along these lines). Either way, it all hints at a deeper split between the more isolationist parts of Trump’s base, and those feeling bound to Israel over religious and/or democratic affinity.

And we wouldn’t ordinarily brief you on conspiracy theories, but some voices emerging out of this split have now made enough noise for Netanyahu himself to weigh in and reject the idea Israel was somehow involved in Kirk’s death as “monstrous” and “insane”.

Anyway, for Israel, it all reflects two big problems: first, with a vanishingly small minority of young Americans (18-34) still supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza, it’s now lost a key ally within Trump’s young conservative base. And second, it’s all laid bare that even within Trump’s base, there are now divisions over continued US support.

But while Kirk pushed back on any isolationist instincts towards Israel, he embraced that philosophy a little more when it came to…

• 🇺🇦 Ukraine 

Kirk was widely known among several US allies in Europe over his scepticism around US support for Ukraine’s self-defence — this ranged from characterising Putin’s war as a distant border dispute, and Zelensky as a CIA puppet, through to flagging the risks of the US becoming embroiled in another ‘forever war’, if not a full nuclear conflict.

So while most of Trump’s party (and the American public) now want to see more US support for Ukraine’s self-defence against Putin’s aggression, Kirk often stood out as one of the more influential proponents of the opposite view.

The risk for Ukraine has now been in Putin’s predictable efforts to somehow tie Kyiv to Kirk’s shooting (indeed, Russian propaganda just rolled out a fugitive pro-Moscow Ukrainian MP to make that exact claim).

And speaking of propaganda…

• 🇷🇺 Russia, 🇨🇳 China, 🇮🇷 Iran 

Accounts linked to Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran have been in overdrive since Kirk’s assassination, though each with a slightly different angle:

• Putin’s Russia Today tweeted about Kirk’s murder 39 times in 24 hours, not just trying to blame Ukraine, but also amplifying incendiary stuff in hopes of further inflaming US divisions. That’s because Russian propaganda is often less about getting the West to believe something, and more about it believing nothing — because when you believe nothing, you do nothing.

• Iran’s propagandists have also been pushing the above Israel conspiracy theories, in hopes of eroding US support for the regime’s arch rival. And…

• Beijing has been at it too. But (unlike Moscow or Tehran), for China it’s less about trying to pin Kirk’s assassination on an enemy, and more about framing the US itself as a source of chaos and extremism. This suits the ruling Communist Party, both as a way to cast the US as an unreliable ally for anyone else abroad, but also to draw a neat contrast to its own claims of legitimacy via order back home.

But at the end of the day, these and other foreign powers are often just fanning the flames of a wildfire already roaring across the US.