In a newly released 33-page document called “the National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” the Trump Administration details its foreign policy objectives — including its views on Europe, which Trump officials claim is in danger of “civilization erasure.”
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir analyzes the document in an article published on December 7, attacking the Trump White House’s arguments as an “unhinged” and deeply racist blueprint for “making Europe white again.”
O’Hehir draws a parallel between the arguments in the National Security Strategy (NSS) document and arguments of the Clairmont Institute, which was once a mainstream conservative think tank but has, in recent years, taken a far-right MAGA turn.
“To be fair, the poison-steeped Claremont Institute pseudo-intellectuals behind the Trump regime might well argue that their NSS is not contradictory in the least, since it can be boiled down to a straightforward message: Tyranny is awesome, but democracy sucks,” O’Hehir warns. “OK, it doesn’t actually say that, but it’s hard to imagine how else to reconcile its Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties in Europe and its high-minded refusal to lecture autocratic regimes in the Middle East and Asia about ‘democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.’ Understandably enough, it’s the unhinged and unconcealed racist panic shoveled out in the Trump NSS that has generated international headlines.”
The Salon journalist continues, “Europe, the document warns, is losing its historic cultural identity and faces the ‘stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Exactly what is meant here by ‘identity’ and ‘civilization’ is only barely left unsaid, and the Great Replacement rhetoric is not so much borrowed as copied and pasted: It is ‘more than plausible,’ we are told, that in coming decades, ‘certain NATO members will become majority non-European,’ and may no longer ‘view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way’ they used to.”
The “point” of the NSS, O’Hehir laments, is to “rip the liberal democracies of the EU a new one for their perceived wokeness.”
“If we try to map the NSS claims onto the realm of reality,” O’Hehir writes, “they fall apart. But that’s hardly the point: It is not, in fact, plausible that any European nation will have a Muslim-majority population, or a mostly nonwhite population, or anything close to that, in the foreseeable future. Second and far more important, what message is being sent when the government of a multiethnic democracy built on three centuries of immigration — roughly 99 percent of the U.S. population has ancestral ties to other continents — makes the official claim that ‘immigrants will corrupt the values of the societies they move to,’ as The Economist puts it?”
According to O’Hehir, the NSS “is dangerous because no American president, whether good, bad or indifferent, clear back to roughly the days of Andrew Jackson, would have published such blatant racist fiction as an official statement of U.S. foreign policy.”
Andrew O’Hehir’s full article for Salon is available at this link.
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