Do you remember what Romania looked like in the summer of 2001?
We were a few months past Ion Iliescu’s triumphant return to the Cotroceni Palace, elected with almost 70 percent of the vote. The relief that Vadim had not won had long since evaporated. Those of us who had believed, in 1996, that the communist apparatchik who stole our Revolution had been evicted from politics for good with Emil Constantinescu’s victory were reliving the nightmare of the first months after Ceaușescu’s fall.
We had fallen once again into the trap of a crude manipulation, manufactured by the same craftsmen who had created the myth of the „terrorists” in December 1989. The people who, in 1990, convinced an entire country that Iliescu’s grin and his burning desire for „peace and quiet” could stand in for democracy and freedom also choreographed the rigged presidential runoff of 2000. A choreography to which Mugur Isărescu and Theodor Stolojan contributed with excessive zeal: their separate candidacies guaranteed that Vadim would reach the runoff. Romanians were caught in a vise, forced to choose between the extremist C. V. Tudor and the „good man” Ion Iliescu.
Could anything have been worse than Iliescu’s re-enthronement? Yes: putting Adrian Năstase at the head of the government, along with an entire network of former Securitate officers and mobsters that, in short order, had many people missing Văcăroiu.
In April 2001, Ristea Priboi, the prime minister’s adviser, had to give up the chairmanship of the parliamentary committee overseeing the foreign intelligence service, after it emerged that before 1989 he had worked in the Securitate department that spied on Radio Free Europe and the exile community. A few months later, the Sidex steelworks in Galați was privatized through an emergency ordinance under which the state took over the plant’s debts, while the „parasite firms” that had drained it for years were left untouched.
Then came the looting of the banks. Banca Română de Scont, owned by Sorin Ovidiu Vîntu, collapsed, taking with it 8 million dollars that the Romanian Post and the Astra insurance company had deposited there, frozen as „collateral” for the group’s ventures; Banca Turco-Română was liquidated after its Turkish shareholders had left with the money, leaving 42 million dollars in debts behind.
All of this came on top of the hole left by the FNI investment fund, where 300,000 people had lost their savings and its manager, Ioana Maria Vlas, was nowhere to be found. And on top of the bill for Bancorex, Bankcoop and Banca Agricolă: more than four billion dollars covered by the state, which is to say by every one of us. And when the „Armageddon II” report accused the prime minister of money laundering and unexplained wealth, the state’s response was not an investigation but the arrest, in the street, of Mugur Ciuvică, the man who had distributed the document.
That was the Romania of those years.
In 1996, we had believed that removing Iliescu from power would automatically lift the „cordon sanitaire” drawn along the Hungarian border, which condemned us to remain for the long term in the no-man’s-land between West and East. Four years later, the coalition built around the Democratic Convention, the only pro-Western force of that era, had collapsed miserably under the weight of internal feuds, incompetence and financial scandals. Looking at Iliescu and Năstase and at the bloated faces of the acolytes already savoring the feast, millions of Romanians were convinced that this country had no hope left and that nothing could save us from a future of underdevelopment and moral squalor under the boot of an all-powerful party.
And yet, something saved us. Something derailed, over time, the plan of the Securitate-mafia nucleus behind Iliescu and Năstase to seize absolute power. It was not a miracle. It was a cataclysm. The attacks of September 11, 2001.
I wrote fifteen years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks on America, that the day that changed Romania’s destiny was not December 22, 1989, but September 11, 2001. In the most paradoxical and saddest way imaginable, another people’s tragedy became our chance. The objections that had kept us out of NATO became irrelevant within a year. Not because we had suddenly become less corrupt or more democratic. Read the European Commission’s reports from 2001 and 2002: in many areas we were going from bad to worse. We were admitted because America needed us. There was nothing „personal” about it. It was „business.” The most important business there is: survival and supremacy.
„(…) That was the moment when Romania’s future was coupled to that of the Euro-Atlantic space. The changes we have felt at every step for ten years now, even if they seem slow and insufficient, are due in part to this twist of fate. Would the surprising political change of December 2004 have been possible if Romania had still been seen as a ghetto in which Iliescu and his people could do as they pleased because nobody cared anyway? Hard to believe.
Even if they are not always visible, even if they are not always intense or well-aimed enough, even if they do not always reach their goals, the pressures that the international family we have (re)joined puts on Bucharest’s political and administrative elite to give up bad habits and greed have not been without effect. Whether it was the marginalization of harmful figures such as Adrian Năstase, or the encouragement of heads of institutions and politicians who do their jobs (…),” I wrote fifteen years ago.
„For one day, all Romanians were Americans,” President Nicușor Dan writes today in The Washington Times. It is a beautiful sentence. It is also incomplete. For Romanians, September 11 did not last one day. It lasted a quarter of a century.
We have lived for a quarter of a century off that moment, the reset of America’s relationship with Romania. We received assistance for reforms, we received assistance in the fight against corruption, but we also received security on credit, with the tacit promise that we would use the respite to become a country worth defending for what it is, not only for where it sits on the map. What we received after September 11, 2001 is plain to see. The question is what we do now, when the creditor is changing its priorities and we have not finished our homework.
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched the war against Iran. On March 11, Romania’s Supreme Defense Council approved, within hours, Washington’s request to use the Mihail Kogălniceanu air base for operations in the Middle East. Rightly so. That is what an ally does. Except that in October 2025 the rotational American brigade had already gone home, leaving around 1,000 U.S. troops in Romania. The difference from 2001 is fundamental. Back then, America sought us out in order to include us in a defense system. Now it uses us as a runway for a war that has nothing to do with the Black Sea, while the number of soldiers who would defend the Black Sea shrinks.
In May, Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany, as punishment for Friedrich Merz’s criticism of the Iran war. Two weeks later, he announced that 5,000 troops would be sent to Poland. What does that mean for the eastern flank? A Pentagon official, quoted by PBS, answered: „We don’t know what this means either.”
Since July, the Pentagon has formally opened its review of the U.S. military posture in Europe. Elbridge Colby, the architect of what the administration calls „NATO 3.0,” presented his conclusions to the North Atlantic Council on August 27. The security architecture we joined after 2001 is now being reconfigured through Truth Social posts and posture reviews, and those who are supposed to implement it find out from the press.
And then there is Ukraine. Last week, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff went to Moscow, then to Kyiv. Trump says he has „a proposal” for peace, without saying what it is. Putin says he wants the rest of the Donbas. Zelensky says the war will last another winter. What does Romania say? Nothing, because nobody asked.
I wrote in November 2016 that there is something more dangerous for us than a Trump-Putin partnership: a U.S.-Russia deal that concerns us too, but in which we have no say. A partial return to the days when we were treated as part of the buffer zone, where Moscow too had a veto over our choices. Ten years later, exactly that scenario is being negotiated, and we are watching from the sidelines.
Meanwhile, Russia pursues its neo-imperial plans. The drone that exploded in Galați in May wounded two people. Romanian pilots shot down three Russian drones in three days at the end of July. The Defense Ministry counted eleven incidents along the border in the last part of August alone. Last week, drone fragments washed up on the beach in Constanța. Moscow is testing how fast we react, how angry we get and, above all, who still defends us.
And who has been defending us, for four and a half years, without ever asking for a vote in our Parliament, is Ukraine. Here comes the worst news of this autumn. Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, who has personally invested in drones for the Ukrainian army and cannot be suspected of sympathies for the Kremlin, wrote on Wednesday in The Washington Post that Russia is on the verge of erasing Ukraine’s battlefield advantage.
Kyiv’s edge was never numbers but speed: the idea from the garage reached the front in a matter of weeks, while the Russian machine needed years. That is over. Russia has learned to innovate at Ukraine’s speed and, on top of that, it produces at industrial scale. It has fitted 5,000-dollar jet engines, sourced from China, onto Shahed drones that now fly at over 200 kilometers per hour, faster than the interceptors that were hunting them in the spring. The innovation cycle has shrunk to three or four months. „A brilliant drone produced in the hundreds is interesting. A good drone produced in the hundreds of thousands changes the course of the war,” Schmidt writes. Guess who can produce more.
Why does this concern us? Because the drones that fell in Galați and Constanța passed through the densest air defense in Europe, Ukraine’s, before they reached us. If that filter breaks, the next line of defense is ours. With an army that, in May, explained in capital letters that an explosion in an apartment block in Galați „does NOT represent an attack on Romania.” How many months do you think it would take the Romanian Army to get through a „three-month” innovation cycle?
The new regional reality is shaped by Russia’s war against Ukraine and its attacks on Europe, but also by Trump’s vision of NATO’s future. It is a reality that puts an end to the post-2001 security architecture and forces us to adjust our priorities urgently. It is a reality made worse by how close we are to a brutal war, by the incursions of Russian drones, by the risk of Putin escalating with direct attacks on one or more NATO countries. This explains the considerable effort President Nicușor Dan is making to keep Romania inside a genuine strategic partnership with the United States. To give a new direction and new substance to the pact cemented during the war on terror.
Nicușor Dan took office with an open fracture in the relationship with Washington, caused by the annulment of the December 2024 elections, an episode that part of the Trump administration read as an abuse by the big European powers against an inconvenient candidate. For a year now, the president has been struggling to repair it.
On February 19 he went to Washington for the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace chaired by Trump, an organization in which Romania has no formal status. He swallowed the criticism at home and in Brussels because he knew what he wanted: a photo, a handshake and, above all, the right to no longer be mentioned in the same sentence as the annulled elections.
On July 2 he published an op-ed in Newsmax, telling American conservatives that „popular support for President Donald Trump remains very high” in Romania. On August 27, a second message, on Fox News, with a sentence worth remembering: „Romania is not asking the U.S. for more. Romania is offering to do more.”
Today, a third, in The Washington Times, the conservative daily read at the White House, invoking the thousands of Romanian soldiers who have fought alongside Americans since 2002, those who never came home, and the principle that „an attack against one could become an attack against all.”
Three messages in the American media in ten weeks, signed by a president who, at home, has no government. That says everything about how urgent it is to remove whatever still stands in the way of the bilateral relationship. In the meantime, Lazurcă and the chief of the defense staff, General Vlad, went to Washington, to Senator Wicker, to Colby, to the deputy national security adviser; then Lazurcă went to NATO, right before the Pentagon presented its plans to review its presence in Europe. On September 1, the president asked his ambassadors for „a more significant economic presence of American companies.”
It is a real effort. Consistent, deliberate, at times humiliating. And the report published on Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation, the think tank closest to the Trump administration, is proof that it has been heard. The document, signed by Jordan Embree and Anthony Kim, asks the White House and Congress to put Romania at the center of American strategy in the Black Sea. It calls us NATO’s „anchor” in the region. It lists the 9 billion dollars of American investment, the 120,000 jobs, Kogălniceanu, Deveselu, the F-35s, Neptun Deep, the Cernavodă reactors, the Vertical Corridor. But the report has to be read to the end.
The Heritage Foundation did not send us a love letter. It is more of a diagnosis. The Americans note, with cutting politeness, that the pace of new investment has slowed. Why? „Legislative instability,” emergency ordinances that are „frequent and unannounced” and change taxes, the rules for micro-enterprises and social contributions overnight. Each such ordinance, they say, adds a „risk premium” that companies factor in before coming here. A blunt translation: you are well placed on the map, you have gas and a port, but we do not trust your state. Exactly what the European Commission’s reports were saying in 2001. The difference is that in 2001 it did not matter, because America needed us at any price. Now it matters. Because, as the presidential adviser has publicly acknowledged, we are no longer vital to the United States.
The painful paradox of this September 11 is that all the op-eds in the American press, all the visits, all the declarations of loyalty cannot paper over what anyone can see with the naked eye: a country that has had no government with full powers for four months. The Bolojan cabinet fell on May 5. Since then, a caretaker government has been managing „current affairs,” the president is looking for a prime minister, and the parties are calculating who pays the price of austerity.
Who does Washington talk to when it talks to Bucharest? Who do Exxon or Westinghouse sign a 30-year contract with? An ally whose president sends messages on Fox News and in The Washington Times but cannot get a government through Parliament is exactly the kind of ally Heritage has in mind when it tactfully speaks of „an unstable region.”
Diplomacy can open doors, but it cannot fill the room. What we lack is not fixed in Washington, but at home. And it is not called lobbying, or think tanks, or op-eds. It is called stability, predictability, the rule of law, genuine justice, economic growth, development. It is called a state that fixes its big problems instead of patching them from one ordinance to the next.
What, concretely, do we offer a strategic partner in 2026? An economy that is standing still, with a chronic budget deficit we are trying to plug from the pockets of the middle class. An education system in which almost half of 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate, according to PISA, meaning a workforce that no investor in artificial intelligence can use, however many „gigafactories” we announce in Dobrogea. A health system that exports its doctors and enriches its barons. An infrastructure that cannot guarantee that military equipment would reach the front line on time. These are not „social problems,” as we sheepishly call them. They are national security problems. A country that cannot educate, treat and connect its own citizens is of interest to no one, not to Washington, not to Berlin, not to the investor choosing between Constanța and Gdańsk.
That is why the idea that the relationship with America can be repaired through diplomacy alone is a comfortable illusion. After 2001 we were admitted in spite of what we were. From now on, no one will admit us anywhere „in spite of” anything. We will be treated exactly according to what we are. And if we want to remain interesting for any strategic partnership, with the United States, with Europe, with anyone, we must have something to put on the table beyond a map: a growing market, a predictable state, an army that does not write press releases in capital letters, well-prepared people. That is what the president said on Fox News, „we are offering to do more,” and he said it well. But „more” also starts at Cotroceni, in the government, in Parliament, at the top of the judiciary, and it has to reach the entire country.
There is another, even graver reason why strengthening the country from within can no longer wait. We must be prepared for the scenario no one wants to talk about in public: a strategic realignment negotiated over our heads. A Washington-Moscow deal on Ukraine (and perhaps even on Moldova) that leaves the eastern flank in a grey zone. An American withdrawal from Europe dictated not by Russia but by the Pacific. A „NATO 3.0” in which guarantees are measured by what you bring, not by what you are owed.
If that happens, the only life insurance we will have is what we have built in the meantime: an economy that can sustain an army, institutions that work even without external pressure, a society cohesive enough not to be torn in two by a wave of propaganda on TikTok. The small countries that survived in buffer zones did not do it through lobbying alone. They did it by becoming too serious to be ignored.
I understand why some of you are skeptical that we can pull off, as a country, a reset of this magnitude. We are in perhaps the most fragile internal moment since Iliescu’s re-election in December 2000. Annulled elections, a sovereigntist wave that showed how easily a third of the electorate can be captured by a Russian operation, a fallen government, four months of caretaker rule, a fiscal crisis, a society that, as I wrote in May, is sitting on a powder keg, and serious people who explain all of this as a war between „America’s man” and „Europe’s man.”
In December 2000, Romania seemed doomed, and the awakening came from outside, from a tragedy that had nothing to do with us. We will not have that luck again. This time, the awakening has to come from within, and it has to come now, when the fragility is so visible that no one can pretend not to see it.
I wrote on September 9, 2011, in România liberă: „(…) we can say we were lucky. If the collapse of America’s pyramid-like financial system had come eight years earlier, if Europe had gone through the turbulence now shaking it five years earlier, would the same priorities have prevailed? If the fear of spending too much on alliances and military operations, or on European enlargement, had been dominant, would we still have been accepted into the two clubs?
September 11, 2001 should permanently remind us how fragile the course of history is, how easily a war with devastating consequences can begin and how important it is not to lose a single moment in strengthening our democracy and our economy. On this day, we should ask ourselves whether we are making use of the window of opportunity that opened unexpectedly, after decades of a traumatic, forced relationship with an ideology we had nothing in common with, and of cohabitation with a SYSTEM that constantly sabotaged both the interests of the majority and the national interest.
Are we making the most of the moment of calm that membership in a solid security alliance gives us, and of the chance to have partners who ask nothing of us except that we act in our own interest? Are we doing enough to consolidate our country so that we never again depend vitally on the pragmatic or cynical calculations of others?”
The answer, fifteen years later, is no. We treated the window of opportunity that opened on September 11, 2001 as a permanent state of affairs, not as a respite. I warned in 2014 too, when NATO was beginning to wake up from the shock of the annexation of Crimea, that history and our friends were doing their share of the work, but Romania was not. We believed that geography was working for us and that the shield at Deveselu spared us the effort of being a serious country.
History was generous with us once, for reasons that had nothing to do with our merits. Nothing happening now, in Washington, Moscow or Tehran, suggests it will be a second time. In 2001, America found us. This time, a new America, or its retreat from the region, has to find us ready.
Romanian original: Creditul primit de România după 11 septembrie 2001 ne-a adus un sfert de secol de progres. A venit scadența!