In Paris on Sunday, Le Monde led its coverage with an article on what it called the consummation of a divorce. Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran the headline “Trump Declares War on Europe.”
The president’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week, sent a message to the continent that shocked the world. Drowning under mass migration, mismanaged and bullied by the European Union’s leaders, increasingly incapable of producing children, Europe’s ancient nations, the document argues, face not just economic decline but also the prospect of imminent “civilizational erasure.” In the near future, it adds, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
President Trump’s detractors on both sides of the Atlantic blamed him for rupturing the NATO alliance and for straying into matters far removed from national defense — such as migration, culture and demography — that are the province of racists and xenophobes.
That is the wrong way to understand the document. Read carefully, in fact, the passages about Europe sound more like a defense of the continent. They include a description of Europe as “strategically and culturally vital” to the United States. Few of those outraged by the document have bothered to distinguish between Europe — a geographical area that is also shorthand for the culture that arose over the centuries from a mix of Greek rationalism and Middle Eastern monotheism — and the European Union, a 33-year-old experiment that aims to replace the continent’s nation-states with a novel form of transnational governance based in Brussels.
In certain quarters the European Union has become synonymous with a postdemocratic permanent ruling class of regulators and bureaucrats. It has proved more successful at delegitimizing national governments in, say, Paris and Rome than at shifting their responsibilities for defense, budgeting and border policing to Brussels. That is because European voters have not conferred on it the legitimacy to do so. What powers Brussels has been able to claim, it has snatched piecemeal from voters when they were distracted by the euro crisis, Covid, the Ukraine war and other emergencies.
That is how the Trump administration sees things. Its document identifies the European Union as a danger to the United States — albeit for its incompetence rather than its antipathy. Brussels saps the economic power and the morale of our European allies while purporting to unite and strengthen them. Even more seriously, it has melded 27 countries into a largely borderless zone in which mass migration has proved almost impossible to stem.
The document forthrightly links this demographic shift to changes in national character. “It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the document holds. “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”
Since this is the claim that threw critics into the greatest rage, it is worth looking at the modesty of it. The administration is not arguing that people of this or that national origin are better than others. It argues that we have arrived at the end of the politics of the blank slate: The nations of Europe are actual places, with distinct cultural and civilizational qualities, on the basis of which they make peace and go to war. They’re not just arbitrarily bounded zones that can be expected to remain always the same, no matter who lives there.
Look at France, where a growing population of Arabs and Muslims is increasingly vocal and increasingly politically effective. La France Insoumise led a coalition that won the country’s national elections in 2024, although its plurality of seats did not permit it to take power. Led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party espouses a kind of Mamdani-ism gone national. It advocates for the country’s Muslim and non-European immigrants around a platform that includes redistribution of income and wealth and ferocious criticism of Israel.
There’s nothing illegitimate about that. But if France remains a democracy, it will increasingly be a country that fights Zionism. And it is reasonable to expect that that will make it a less compatible and less reliable ally for the United States. To acknowledge this is not to claim all Muslims are closed to persuasion or that they are worse than the Christians who once dominated the culture of France. It is merely to open one’s eyes and see that the common ground on which an alliance can be built is shrinking.
It is possible to share Mr. Trump’s diagnosis and recoil from his prescription. The president proposes rebuilding the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” This means backing “patriotic” forces that oppose further E.U. integration, including, presumably, the national populist party Alternative for Germany, which some in Germany’s older parties are proposing to ban as extremist.
In the wake of the strategy document’s release, Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York, deplored the way the strategy “discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”
It doesn’t, though. It just elaborates a different set of values and principles. While Mr. Trump is taking sides, he is not more anti-E.U. than his predecessors were pro-E.U. In 2016, President Barack Obama campaigned against Brexit, threatening to send Britain to “the back of the queue” on trade deals if it chose to secede from the European Union.
If you look back at earlier National Security Strategies, you find that attitudes toward migration, culture and demography guided America’s approach to alliance building every bit as much as they do in Mr. Trump’s. These attitudes, again, were just different. Mr. Obama proclaimed in 2010 that “our diversity is part of our strength” in a global economy to which he considered the United States “inextricably linked.”
The global economy still has its defenders, but it has social downsides that were not evident — or at least not much discussed — 15 years ago. A national security strategy for today is bound to look different. Mr. Trump chides his predecessors for having made “hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military pre-eminence depend.” Mr. Obama wanted to protect universal norms. Mr. Trump wants to ensure the survival of the United States and like-minded nations and their way of life.
There may appear to be an inconsistency here. The new National Security Strategy calls for a “flexible realism,” the opposite of the misplaced idealism that has led the United States into too many failed foreign interventions. But if you are now going to make allowances for, say, Saudi tribalism in order to keep up good relations, then why not do the same for European preferences for transnational governance and passport-free transit? How is it anything but hypocritical to overlook Saudi values while picking through those of Europeans with a fine-toothed comb?
There are two answers to this question. The first is that the values of European civilization, as traditionally understood, are a large part of what the United States signed up to defend in 1949 with the founding of NATO. That traditional understanding provided not only a purpose but also a source of cohesion that made the alliance viable. By contrast, no matter how important you think our alliance with Saudi Arabia is, the values of its polygamy-indulging, Sharia-enforcing Wahhabi monarchy had absolutely nothing to do with why the United States entered that alliance.
Then there is the other, simpler answer to why the Trump administration now makes it a priority to lead Europe back to a more traditional understanding of itself: because the United States is so intimately involved in its decline. Europe has undergone many periods of decadence before but somehow endured. It stopped the Moors at Poitiers and the Turks at Vienna, withstood a series of plagues, survived Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin. But none of those episodes vitiated its culture and enfeebled its sinews and threatened its historic continuity quite so thoroughly as three and a half decades of American-style liberal international order, under the banner of “C’mon, people now, smile on your brother.”
The main source of Europeans’ anger at seeing their vanishing civilization mourned by the United States may be this: that it was at America’s urging that they undertook this work of self-destruction in the first place.
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