The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”
Now, that hostility is official White House policy.
The Trump administration issued a national security strategy paper this week that called for European nations to take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, indicating that the United States should no longer guarantee Europe’s security. It accused the European Union of stifling “political liberty,” warned that some NATO members risked becoming “majority non-European,” and said the U.S. should align with “patriotic European parties” — code for Europe’s far-right movements.
The blunt, bracing and official nature of the document added injury to incessant insult, making clear to mainstream European leaders that they stand at a strategic crossroads. On a paper stamped with the president’s seal, the trans-Atlantic alliance was being openly denigrated by the superpower across the ocean that has ensured European security in the 80 years since World War II.
“It’s up there at whitehouse.gov staring the world in the face,” Charles A. Kupchan, who was senior director for European Affairs on the National Security Council in the Obama administration, said of the document. “And that makes it very hard to digest,” added Mr. Kupchan, now professor of international affairs at Georgetown University.
The now explicit prospect of the United States withdrawing its protection came days after Russia — whose talking points on European countries, some experts said, were echoed in the strategy document — warned that it is ready for war with Europe. It made more urgent a debate within the continent about whether its long-term interest lay in holding onto America regardless of the humiliations, or to face a new reality, arm up and go it alone.
“Is this going to be the moment of European awakening?” said Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has worked as an adviser to key European Union officials and wrote one of its strategy reports.
Anticipating a fissure in trans-Atlantic relations, European governments have in recent years tried to wean themselves off American military might by increasing their own defense spending and cross-border military cooperation. Several have introduced or expanded military service, with Germany, one of the countries best placed to defend the continent in a major land conflict, passing legislation on Friday to increase its forces by nearly 50 percent. And the European Union now has a commissioner for defense whose primary job is to boost regional arms production and cooperation.
But the reality remains that Europe — lacking real military integration, key capabilities and ammunition — is hugely reliant on the United States and on an administration that professes to not like it much. A change, some argued, was necessary.
“Till now there was no, let’s say, systemic response,” said Romano Prodi, a former president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. He said he hoped the bloc would “elaborate a policy” that made it more assertive.
“This does not mean to break the links with the United States,” he said. “This means to have a voice.”
But the lack of strong public outcry from Europe’s leaders about the strategy document indicated that they had gotten used to Mr. Trump’s tantrums — it was, Mr. Prodi said, “Nothing new: dividing Europe and despising Europe,” — and had decided the best response was to let him cry it out and then hold him and the alliance close. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, exemplified that approach on Saturday, saying in response to the document that the U.S. was “still our biggest ally.”
Mr. Kupchan, the professor of international relations, said that Europe’s leaders understood that biting the Trump bullet was the smarter, and perhaps only, long-term play. He said the document made it harder for them to stomach the humiliation and concessions necessary to keep Mr. Trump close to their position on the major issues of the day, from trade policy to Europe’s defense of Ukraine in its war with Russia.
But to keep the trans-Atlantic alliance from going kaput, “flattering Trump and keeping him on their side” was what they had to do, Mr. Kupchan said.
For Europe, analysts said, the challenge was preserving both the process of integration that had made it rich and peaceful, and the American security blanket that had kept it safe. In the 80 years since World War II, European integration, pursued in significant part to limit Germany, was “one of the great accomplishments of modern times,” Mr. Kupchan said.
“Anybody who wants to dismantle Europe should just pick up any history book of the twentieth century,” he said, adding “or any history prior to 1945.”
But dismantling seems to be precisely what the Trump administration wants to do, analysts said.
Ms. Tocci, the professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that supporting right-wing parties antagonistic to the European Union would divide and weaken the continent, leaving a “fractured Europe which is easily colonizable” by the globe’s great powers.
The effort to divide Europe is hardly new. Russia has been doing it for more than a decade, boosting euroskeptic and often far-right parties who want to weaken the European Union, strengthening Moscow’s hand. Some experts said they considered the United States national security strategy a facsimile of the Russian playbook.
“It’s striking because that is very similar to language which you’ll find in the analogous Russian national security document,” said Timothy D. Snyder, a prominent scholar of totalitarianism and Russia.
Mr. Snyder added that by suggesting that good foreign policy was about balancing between great powers rather than upholding the rule of law, “the U.S. national security document is now tilting in the basic ideological direction of the Russian one.”
He also said the paper sounded similar to “flat out Russian propaganda” in its assertions that the majority of Europeans wanted the war in Ukraine to end no matter what, and that it was continued by out-of-touch elites.
Mr. Snyder also echoed other analysts when he said he suspected that the Trump administration’s sub rosa goal in weakening Europe was to free American tech companies from encumbering European regulation, an objective it has previously stated.
Mr. Prodi, the former E.U. Commission president, argued that the Trump administration’s policy prognoses violated the very sovereignty it preached, by “entering in a very inappropriate way into the internal policy of other countries.”
But some of Europe’s sovereigntist right wing parties welcomed the intrusion and the long-awaited recognition from the White House.
“All these things are our message, our diagnosis, so we’re happy,” said Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament with Spain’s far-right Vox party, who said that during previous administrations, “we were very afraid” of the United States.
Under Mr. Trump, however, it was a source of comfort, Mr. Tertsch said, adding: “It’s a new era.”
Jason Horowitz is the Madrid bureau chief for The Times, covering Spain, Portugal and the way people live throughout Europe.
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