Macron, Merz, Tusk and Sandu together in Moldova in August 2025.

"About a year ago, while I was stuck in Paris, the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova.
The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would 'say good things' about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year.
This was unacceptable on several levels... it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe.
Shortly thereafter, the Telegram team received a second list of so-called 'problematic' Moldovan channels... Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments.
We refused to act on this request."

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Huckabee first visited Israel 50 years ago. "I felt an overwhelming spiritual reality of understanding this is the land that God has given to the Jews." Huckabee said he began hosting his own tours of Israel in the 1980s and has visited the country more than 100 times.

Huckabee has also long articulated staunchly pro-Israel political views. As a candidate for president in 2008, Huckabee said he believed there is "no such thing as a Palestinian." He argued that the very concept of Palestinian identity is "a political tool to try and force land away from Israel."

When he ran for president again in 2015, he held a fundraiser in one of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law. Huckabee compared the origin of Israel to the founding of the United States, saying both were started by people who moved to a new land to find peace and security.

Huckabee may be the first political appointee — as opposed to interim career foreign service officers — to come to the U.S. Embassy in Israel from a group known as Christian Zionists. Over the past 30 years, evangelicals, including Southern Baptists like Huckabee, but also growing groups of charismatic nondenominational Christians, have duly formed strong alliances with Israeli leaders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular. They give more to Israeli causes than Jewish Americans do and have formed strong support groups. Huckabee belongs to the network of supporters of Netanyahu and his government among evangelicals and is considered to be a strong supporter of Israel.

Huckabee was pressed by Israeli radio on whether he believed the Trump administration would support annexation by Israel of the occupied territories, principally the West Bank, but also Gaza. He demurred but made it clear that he sees his job as following the decisions made by the president.

"There's never been an American president that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of Israel — from the moving of the embassy, recognition of the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem as the capital, no one has done more than president Trump and I fully expect that will continue."

Mordechai Inbari, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, didn't think the new Trump administration would rush to see Israel annex the territories. Trump has shown a desire to expand the Mideast peace deal known as the Abraham Accords, inked in his first administration, to include Saudi Arabia.