The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy is a handbook of subversion directed against liberal internationalism – and especially against the European Union. That remarkable fact is now sinking in among European leaders as they evaluate changed US foreign policy during fateful days for the future of Ukraine. They need to draw the relevant political and security conclusions about strategic autonomy rapidly and clearly. An interview by Donald Trump describing his supposed European allies as weak and supporting their far-right opponents should stiffen their resolve.
This security strategy is brutally direct and succinct about US foreign policy priorities. That puts it in line with other documents and decisions of the Trump administration. Hence the security strategy should be taken seriously as a guide to US actions. It portrays a world of sovereign nation-states in which “the outsized influence of larger, richer and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” It opposes the “sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organisations”, notably the European Union.
Europe is allegedly threatened with “civilisational erasure” because of its over-reliance on migration, leading to “loss of national identities and self-confidence”. Free speech is threatened, economic decline looms as birthrates fall. These themes of white nativist racism are sanctioned as US foreign policy towards Nato allies, reversing 80 years of transatlantic cooperation.
Accompanied by explicit commitments to support far-right parties in the largest European states, it is a powerful wake-up call to European leaders to say Trump’s hostility is serious. He still needs Europe as a transactional partner, but US relations with Latin America and the Asia-Pacific are prioritised.
RM Block
Trump’s targeting of EU regulation with tariffs and his convergence with Russia on Ukraine bear out that hostility. He has sidelined European leaders on Ukraine and demanded they provide it with security guarantees before they are militarily ready for that. It is part of wider events which led Nato secretary general Mark Rutte to warn yesterday in a speech in Berlin that Europe needs to step up defence efforts to prevent a war waged by Russia that could be “on the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”.
Historical experience advises that rapid change and potentially irreversible tipping points can creep up unexpectedly on unprepared social and political actors. To preserve their liberal internationalist beliefs and credentials and develop them to fit this more multipolar world European leaders need to create a properly functional strategic autonomy from the US across economic, social and cultural fields as well as the indispensable security and military ones.
