The Trump administration said on Friday that Europe is facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” and pledged that the United States will support like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent to prevent a future in which “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
The dark assessment of Europe’s future was released overnight as part of an annual update to the United States’ national security strategy around the world.
Without naming them directly, the document says the United States should support political parties in Europe who fight against migration and promote nationalism. That describes several far-right parties like Reform U.K. in Britain and the Alternative for Germany, known as the A.F.D., which has been classified as an extremist party by German intelligence services.
“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” Mr. Trump wrote in a foreword to the document, which he called a “road map to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”
In a section called “Promoting European Greatness,” the document offers a searing critique of America’s closest allies.
It warns that Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it said that it should be the policy of the United States to help Europe “correct its current trajectory” over the course of the next several decades.
“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the 33-page document says.
Mr. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the political leadership in Europe and he has repeatedly pressured them to bend to his will on funding for NATO, trade and tariffs, and other economic matters. Vice President JD Vance issued a broad critique of Europe’s mainstream political parties in a speech in Munich in February, and urged them to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent.
But the document released overnight is the clearest statement yet of how the president wants his America First foreign policy to be a clarion call for other nationalist politicians to overhaul their political systems. And it echoes some of the language of the Great Replacement Theory, a nationalist conspiracy theory embraced by some of his top aides that warns of a deliberate effort to replace white people with nonwhite immigrants.
The document accuses the European Union and other “transnational bodies” of undermining liberty and sovereignty, censoring free speech, trampling on basic principles of democracy to suppress political opposition and losing their self confidence.
“The growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism,” the document says. “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”
Within hours of its release overnight, the document was already provoking sharp retorts from across Europe.
Johann Wadephul, the foreign minister for Germany, responded to the document on Friday morning by saying that the countries of Europe “don’t believe that we need to get advice here from any country or party.”
He told journalists in Berlin on Friday that the United States was Germany’s most important ally in NATO but that “questions like freedom of expression, freedom of opinion and how we organize our liberal society here in the Federal Republic of Germany are not part of that.”
Ian Lesser, who heads the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund, said that “many Europeans will find this highly disturbing.”
In addition to calling for a new political trajectory in Europe, the document is also likely to raise fresh concerns about Mr. Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the United States’ approach to ending the war in Ukraine.
The document criticizes European governments for holding “unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”
And it appears to echo Mr. Putin’s language by insisting that the United States should be “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
Mr. Lesser said that the document would reinforce Europe’s existing concerns about the state of the trans-Atlantic relationship and the U.S. position toward Russia, and that it might further embolden the far right in Europe.
“The piece treats Europe as a sort of other, one that is a model of what not to do,” he said, adding that it underscores that the United States is not isolationist, but rather “unilateralist.”
“It really reinforces existing concerns and puts a sharper edge on them,” he said.
Carlo Calenda, a center-left pro-European senator in Italy, said Friday that the document shows that Mr. Trump is an “enemy of Europe, is an enemy of democracy.” He said that efforts by European politicians to try and flatter Mr. Trump have not worked to promote their own interests.
“He’s a bully, and you cannot face a bully by being warm and kind,” he added. “It’s not the way in which you can manage him.”
Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.
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