That’s the disturbing lesson of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) released last month.
It’s one of the ironies of the post–Cold War world that Americans, those perennially overconfident champions of democracy, now propose to save Europe from itself by encouraging Europeans to become more like them. Or at least the sort of Americans who promote the president’s divisive agenda.
Cherished homilies about human rights and the importance of a level playing field have given way to xenophobic doomscrolling.
The NSS document argues that Europe requires emergency ideological intervention. Because native birth rates are cratering, migration is eroding national identity. The European Union is suffocating individuality. And the continent faces the prospect of “civilisational erasure” in twenty years or less.
This hysterical language, which could have been co-written by a YouTube ethnonationalist or a mid-tier Hungarian think tank, is now the official prose of the American state.
It feels like a new development. American administrations have indeed criticised Europe for its regulatory practices and its lapses in defence spending. But for the most part, from Harry S. Truman to Barack Hussein Obama, they treated Europe like a slightly unreliable but well-intentioned spouse.
They might roll their eyes as the European Commission invented yet another regulatory acronym, but didn’t publicly speculate that Italy or Germany might be “majority non-European” by mid-century and thus unreliable NATO allies. That would have been gauche, more the style of Moscow than Washington.
Under Donald Trump, however, the threshold for embarrassment has been sanded down until it’s flush with the floor.
The new NSS speaks openly of “cultivating resistance” within EU member states. And it praises the “growing influence of patriotic European parties”, a euphemism so transparent that it would make an Alternative für Deutschland social media intern blush.
The most pressing question—currently being posed in tones of disbelief in Europe’s metropoles— is whether this truly represents a break with American tradition or is merely a louder, more obnoxious version of a familiar tune.
Since 1945, the American posture toward Europe has been built on two pillars: 1) that Europe is essential for its own security; and 2) that Europe becomes more secure the more liberal, integrated, and rule-governed it becomes.
Even when the US was frustrated with European autonomy—Charles de Gaulle’s theatrics, the eurozone’s masochism, Germany’s energy fatalism — it regarded the continent’s liberalism as pathological. The EU was treated as a sometimes-irritating but fundamentally stabilising achievement of civilisation. To the extent that Americans admired Europe, it was for its cosmopolitanism, a panache exemplified by its culinary sophistication.
The new NSS flips the script.
Europe’s liberalism is now described as a spiritual corrosion, its supranationalism as an authoritarian clampdown, its courts as engines of elite repression.
The document laments the “suppression of political opposition” and “censorship of free speech” in Europe — tropes borrowed from the European far right’s victimhood archives — and insists that the United States will stand up for “unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history”, as if the moral crisis of Europe were that its leaders don’t bang enough drums on national holidays.
To be sure, there is something endearingly provincial about an American government issuing political advice to Europe in the aggrieved tone of a Reddit forum. But this provincialism is precisely what makes the new policy distinctive.
The US is not merely shifting its geopolitical doctrine; it is projecting a domestic fantasy of cultural decline onto an entire continent. The sort of thinking that used to be confined to the button-pushing monologues of reactionary pundits like Tucker Carlson—anxiety about Western birthrates, conspiratorial whispers about demographic replacement, the sense that the preservation of “sovereignty” requires permanent emergency measures — is now printed in the Trump-mandated Times New Roman of the nation’s most important strategic document.
Europe is paying attention. Polling suggests that large numbers of Europeans — pluralities in many countries—now regard Donald Trump as an “enemy of Europe,” a phrase that would have sounded like a parody headline even in the bad old days of George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Instead of smothering Europe with paternalistic benevolence, Americans are now accused of actively undermining its political order.
How has Trumpian ideology managed to reshape European discourse on freedom and law so rapidly?
Whereas freedom was defined procedurally in postwar Europe—elections, courts, independent media, the whole IKEA toolkit of liberal constitutionalism—the new transatlantic far right defines freedom substantively. For them, freedom means being able to silence one’s enemies, maintain desirable demographic ratios, and separate national institutions from those favoured by globalists.
This isn’t a one-sided development. Already before Trump’s first term as president, Europe was trending in this direction.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán pioneered the rhetoric of “illiberal democracy”, in which elections provide legitimacy for constraining pluralism rather than enabling it. The Law and Justice Party in Poland perfected the manoeuvre of accusing courts of tyranny whenever they acted like courts. In France, Marine Le Pen eased the transition from overt ethnonationalism to a more polished language of “cultural continuity”.
In other words, Trump entered this drama not as an intellectual innovator but as a powerful amplifier. He granted the European far right something they had always lacked: the impression, however illusory, of being aligned with the world’s most powerful state. And the amplification is working.
When the United States declares—as the NSS essentially does —that European governments are “subverting democratic processes” by refusing to sue for peace in Ukraine, it confirms the deepest narrative of the European nationalist right: that the liberal establishment is illegitimate because it governs against the will of the people.
When Washington warns that mass migration threatens “civilisational self-confidence,” it gives permission for reactionary European politicians to say in public what they once saved for back-room fundraisers. Donald Trump is communicating the message, on a once inconceivable scale, that liberalism is merely a story elites tell themselves to justify their privileges.
This leads to a third question, one that requires a more cautious, though still ironic, response: can Trump and Vladimir Putin remake Europe?
The new NSS proposes a reverse Marshall Plan, in which the US will promote a spiritual rebirth from Lisbon to Tallinn. But that is clearly wishful thinking. Europe is not so malleable, and the EU not so easily unstitched.
What Trump and Putin can do, however, is erode the pillars of the European project.
The first pillar is the promotion of the free movement of people. This remains the EU’s most dangerous fault line, fueling the ascent of the far right throughout Europe.
The NSS’s invocation of demographic transformation is not just descriptive but performative. It is designed to legitimise anxieties and support political actors who can channel them into votes. Washington no longer plays the role of the adult in the room, keeping things cool; it now helps turn up the temperature.
The second pillar is the defence of Ukraine. Here, the Trump Administration’s alignment with Russia is not subtle. The NSS describes European governments as clinging to “unrealistic expectations” about the war, held aloft by “unstable minority governments”, and thwarting the “large European majority” that supposedly desires peace.
The implication is that Europe’s commitment to Ukraine is a democratic fraud. If Washington and Moscow both push for a settlement that ratifies Russia’s gains, Europe will be fractured between governments that feel morally obligated to support Kyiv and publics newly convinced that perseverance is folly.
Putin, who has always understood Europe as a mosaic of historical grievances waiting to be pried apart, could hardly have written a better scenario himself.
The third pillar is the promotion of a European common market as a counterweight to the economic clout of global powers like the United States and China. The NSS urges Europe to “open markets to U.S. goods and services”, abandon “regulatory suffocation”, and return to a Reagan-era vision of cheerfully unfettered capitalism.
Despite being phrased as an attempt to help Europe prosper, this argument aims to make the continent more vulnerable. The EU’s strength inheres in the ability to regulate transnationally. If you strip away its regulatory power, you also strip away its strategic coherence.
Donald Trump does not need to destroy the EU; he merely needs to encourage the forces that want to hollow it out from within.
Putin and Trump have different long-term goals. Russia wants a Europe disoriented enough to acquiesce to its imperial periphery. Trump wants a Europe pliant enough to buy American and stop lecturing their New World overlords about democracy.
But there is still considerable overlap between the NSS and its Russian equivalent. Both the United States and Russia would benefit from a less confident, less integrated, and less liberal Europe.
One of the most unsettling passages in the new NSS muses about whether future NATO members that become “majority non-European” will share a cultural commitment to the alliance. This is not an analysis, but a dog whistle dressed in bureaucratic prose. The point is to make Europeans to think of their own populations the way former Trump adviser and current podcast host Steve Bannon does: as demographic time bombs.
Still, Europe is not a blank slate. It has its own forms of inertia and its own antibodies. The EU, for all its bureaucratic stumbles, has survived the euro crisis, Brexit, and a parade of techno-authoritarians.
Polls show Europeans deeply sceptical of Trump’s intentions. They have a long memory, remembering how the United States once viewed the continent’s integration as the best insurance policy against its own civilisational nightmares.
But even if Trump cannot reshape Europe to the extent fantasised by his strategists, he can accomplish something subtler and more lasting. He can do for Europe what he has done for America, shifting the baseline so far toward pessimistic culturalism that even centrist politicians start speaking in the idioms of decline.
This would normalise the sentiment that the liberal order is already over, making the EU’s defenders sound like nostalgists for a world that never entirely existed.
This is the true significance of the transatlantic counterrevolution signalled by the NSS. It’s less a coordinated plot than a shared mood. A sense that civilisation comes with a sell-by date, that diversity is dilution, that elites are traitors, and that law is only legitimate when it flatters a nation’s self-image. Putin will surely benefit as this way of thinking spreads. And Trump is perfectly positioned to spread it faster.
Europe, which once imagined itself as history’s great laboratory of post-national democracy, must now confront the fact that the United States—the great external guarantor of that experiment—has filed for ideological divorce.
An old maxim held that the purpose of NATO was to keep the Soviets out of Europe, the Americans in, and the Germans down. These troubling times demand a new one. Europe must now learn to keep Trumpism out, Putinism down, and democracy—fraying, doubted, but still salvageable—in.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
