The Trump administration has released a new National Security Strategy for the United States in which it describes Europe as a continent in decline, warns that European nations are facing “civilisational erasure” because of migration and proposes to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
Published on Friday, the strategy spells out the administration’s vision for the US’s role in the global order, doubling down on President Donald Trump’s “America First” mantra and insisting that he is a “president of peace” who will err on the side of non-interventionism.
However, it also accuses European governments of “subversion of democratic processes” and condemns supranational and multilateral institutions – among them the European Union – which it says “undermine political liberty and sovereignty”
It also warns of a “civilisational” in Europe stemming from “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”.
These are ideas the Trump administration and its intellectual associates have been pushing hard on the domestic front. The tone, however, is unusually harsh and is likely to irritate European governments.
Trump and many of his appointees and advisers have complained of what they claim are efforts to “censor” right-wing voices, described left-wing and anti-fascist campaigners as terrorists and promised “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants.
The administration has also presented ethnic groups of non-European background (among them Hatians and Somalis) are dangerous and unwelcome in the US and cut the number of permitted refugee admissions per year by 94% while prioritising white South Africans for refugee status on the grounds that they are victims of “genocide”.
On the European front, the strategy warns that “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less”, an echo of rhetoric from various right-wing and far-right figures and movements in Europe who have put anti-migration ideas at the centre of their politics. Across the EU, far-right parties argue that Europe will lose its identity unless tough migration policies are put in place. Their line has resonated with the US administration at the risk of alienating some its traditional continental allies.
The Trump administration’s strategy says it will prioritise “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and says that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”.
It is unclear what this will mean in practice, but President Trump and various administration officials have previously expressed their approval of various anti-migration and anti-Brussels political leaders across Europe.
After a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February this year, in which he warned that “mass migration” was the most urgent threat to “our shared civilisation” and blamed an openness to non-European asylum seekers for terrorist violence in European cities, US Vice President JD Vance met with Alternative for Germany leader Alice Weidel – shunning Germany’s then-chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
The speech sparked a debate among European leaders who argued that the US Vice President had gone too far in his criticism of sovereign allies.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pushed back saying Europe protects fundamental rights and democracy as “core values and would fight to preserve them”.
The Ukraine factor
The strategy also blames Europe’s alleged deficit of “civilisational self-confidence” for what it calls “unrealistic expectations” for ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, which it says cannot be achieved due to “unstable minority governments” and their “subversion of democratic process”.
The document underscores that America’s “core interest” is to negotiate an “expeditious cessation” of the war, prevent “unintended escalation” of hostilities and “re-establish strategic stability” with Russia.
This framing of the war is another signal of a widening gap between the Trump administration and Ukraine’s European allies, who are redoubling their efforts to put Moscow under pressure to end its invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory while Washington attempts to negotiate directly with the Kremlin.
While the strategy makes clear that Europe “remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States” and insists that it is in Washington’s interest to “prevent any adversary from dominating Europe”, it also frames this security priority in ethnic terms.
“Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the document reads. “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.”
