Eurasia Press & News
Unsurprisingly, the National Security Strategy (NSS) has set off a storm across the Atlantic. The German chancellor called parts of the document “unacceptable,” while the president of the European Council warned that Europeans must now “protect themselves even against the allies who defy them.” For Manfred Weber, head of the European Parliament’s largest group, “the US is abandoning its role as the leader of the free world,” while Iratxe García, leader of the second largest faction, lamented that the NSS suggests that “Europe has ceased to be an ally and has become an adversary.” Even Pope Leo XIV urged the Trump administration “not to break apart the transatlantic relationship.” Yet does Washington really intend to do that? On closer examination, the picture is more nuanced. The NSS makes it clear that the Trump administration views Europe as rushing toward collapse—and that Washington would prefer to prevent this, if only for reasons of strategic self-interest.
An Unflattering Mirror
The new NSS paints a grim picture of the Old Continent. It warns that Europe is on course toward “civilizational erasure,” adding that “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” This applies in both a cultural and a political sense. Culturally, mass migration is identified as the decisive factor: “within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” This assessment is hardly unique to the Trump administration. Singaporean scholar Kishore Mahbubani, in his 2020 bestseller Has China Won?, predicted that Europe “can expect tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Africans” to arrive on its shores—an “existential challenge” that would “drastically change the social and political texture of European societies.” The transformation is already perceptible.
Across the continent, anti-immigration parties have been gaining momentum along with the sentiment that the “European way of life” is under pressure. In Germany, the Berlin police chief has advised Jewish and openly gay citizens to avoid certain districts for their own safety. In the United Kingdom, a former home secretary acknowledged that authorities had long ignored organized child-abuse networks to avoid accusations of “Islamophobia.” In France, Emmanuel Macron’s first interior minister warned that “this will end in a direct showdown between communities,” while former president François Hollande has voiced concern that the country might be “partitioned” one day.
The NSS extends its observations to the broader political realm. Unlike its stance toward partners from culturally different regions—whom Washington says it does not seek to impose democratic or other social change on—the United States expects “like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms.” As the document puts it, America will “oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe.”
That same approach caused particular uproar when Vice President J. D. Vance voiced it at the Munich Security Conference last February. Citing concrete examples, he accused European governments of curbing free speech and constraining major opposition parties. Seen from the United States, Europe’s ever-broadening notion of “harmful content” appears increasingly strange. A CBS 60 Minutes report from Germany showed early morning police raids on the homes of citizens accused of online “speech offenses.” France’s digital-affairs minister, in a slip of the tongue, praised regulations that allow the removal of “false opinions” from the internet. Belgium’s French-speaking public broadcaster decided to air the US president’s inaugural address with a few minutes’ delay, on the grounds that prior review was necessary to shield viewers from possibly “racist, xenophobic or hateful” content.
This mirrors the long-established practice in Europe known as the cordon sanitaire, or firewall. The term refers to the coordinated strategy of mainstream parties to isolate and exclude “extreme” or “populist” political forces. As Vance observed, even the Munich conference itself barred politicians from the AfD, Germany’s largest opposition party. “We don’t have to agree with everything or anything people say,” he argued, “but when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialog with them.” The implication was clear: in the Trump administration’s eyes, European governments are infringing on core liberties. Washington’s concern, however, goes beyond ideological considerations and moral lecturing—these democratic shortcomings are seen as carrying security risks.
Basis for Interfering
As was the case after Vance’s Munich speech, European leaders now complain, with regard to the NSS, of “foreign interference” in their internal affairs. On the face of it, they might have a point. As long as NATO’s Article 5 stands, however, and with it America’s role as Europe’s ultimate security guarantor, Washington’s interest in Europe’s domestic developments is to be expected, for defense-related reasons alone.
The transatlantic alliance has always been portrayed as being based, first and foremost, on shared values. If, in Washington’s view, those values are now “in retreat” in Europe, then the very foundation of NATO is called into question. Why should allies honor a “one for all, all for one” commitment to each other, if they believe the other side has renounced their core principles? How can an American citizen be persuaded to risk Philadelphia for Paris, Berlin, or London, when in those European capitals they may be fined or arrested for practicing free speech as enshrined in the Constitution, and parties with a platform similar to what the American people voted for at the last presidential election are demonized and obstructed from proportionate participation? This is what the Vice President referred to in Munich, when asking to clarify “what we are defending ourselves for.”
The alliance may also be weakened as a result of the ongoing demographic transformation. The NSS puts it rather bluntly: when, in some NATO countries, the majority will no longer be of European origin, “it is open to question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way” as before. Already, speculation abounds that the rush, by certain European governments, toward recognizing a Palestinian state—seen in Washington as at odds with US peace efforts—may reflect new voter dynamics. Behind closed doors, European defense planners go further. In Scandinavian countries, where mass mobilization is a crucial element of national defense, military leaders are aware that the uncertain loyalty of the rapidly growing immigrant population could complicate a wartime response.
In Munich, Vance highlighted another connection between allies’ domestic policies and their performance in the defense field. National defense requires sometimes painful resource allocation, sacrifice and resolve—decisions sustainable in the long term only with a strong democratic mandate. When governments censor dissent and disregard the will of millions of voters, that mandate erodes. In Washington’s reading, Europe’s current trends—from mass migration to election “firewalls” and free speech restrictions—risk undermining its allies’ democratic resilience. Thus, when the NSS declares that US policy should prioritize “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” it does so, at least in its own logic, to counter Europe’s current self-weakening policies.
Strategic Imperatives
But why would Washington suddenly want a stronger Europe? While this has always been its stated policy, American diplomacy, in practice, has been more in line with former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s thinking. In his 2004 book, The Choice, Brzezinski cautioned that “a militarily emergent Europe could become a formidable rival to America. It would inevitably pose a challenge to American hegemony.” For years, Washington quietly did its best to prevent that. However, the global balance of power has dramatically shifted. At the turn of the millennium, US defense spending nearly equaled that of all other countries combined. Today, as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby notes in The Strategy of Denial, published in 2021, the United States “spends as much as the next seven combined, and China, which has leapt into second place, has increased its defense spending by around 10 percent every year for the past twenty-five years.”
With the unipolar moment over and revisionist powers China and Russia on the rise, the United States finds itself in a much more unfavorable geopolitical position. The strategic rationale remains the same: American security, freedom, and prosperity would be put in peril, should any adversary achieve hegemony in one of the world’s key regions. If Washington is intent on preventing that from happening, it must now be able to prevail in simultaneous conflicts, against peer or near-peer adversaries, on multiple fronts. The bipartisan 2024 report by the Commission on National Defense Strategy warned that the “new alignment of nations opposed to US interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflicts anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.” The report noted starkly: right now, the United States is “not prepared” for such a scenario.
Two conclusions follow for Europe. First, it must rebuild its conventional military strength so that US forces can be redeployed where they are needed most, without creating glaring gaps in NATO’s deterrence posture. Colby, at his Senate confirmation hearing, advocated for a return to the Cold War-era NATO model, in which Europeans were prepared to assume the bulk of conventional defense on the continent. In 1988, he noted, the West German military—two-thirds the size of current Germany—“had twelve active divisions. The Germans can’t put a single division together now. It’s not tenable.” Second, Europe can take cautious comfort: America is not about to abandon it. NATO is the textbook example of the anti-hegemonic coalitions the United States needs, now more than ever, to meet the multitheater, near-peer challenge. The NSS affirms this: “Europe remains vital to the United States. Not only can we not afford to write Europe off—doing so would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve.”
A Multiply Flawed Tactic
Washington is, therefore, aware that, for reasons of its own strategic interest, it needs to preserve the alliance as strong as ever. Yet that very goal is often undercut by the Trump administration’s ill-considered methods. First, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty—the Alliance’s collective defense clause—is not a bargaining chip. It is the bedrock of the transatlantic relationship, not a tool for dealmaking. When the American president wields it as leverage, the effect is precisely the opposite of what is intended: European trust erodes, and the willingness to align with Washington diminishes. Other issues of high signaling value should be treated with caution as well. Suggesting, as Amb. Matthew Whitaker recently did, that the post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe might one day no longer be held by an American general further fuels doubts about US commitment.
Second, the all-front offensive we have seen so far is bound to backfire. When the administration presses Europe simultaneously on defense spending, transatlantic trade, relations with Russia, migration, and free speech, it risks driving even its natural partners, on this or that topic, together against the United States. Europe’s capitals are far from united. Some are closer to Washington than to Brussels on migration, yet view its perceived leniency toward Moscow with deep suspicion. Others chafe at American sermons on democracy, but would gladly side with the United States when it comes to trade, against the European Union’s new “Buy European” initiatives. By making exacting demands on everything at once, Washington ends up uniting those who disagree with it on various specific issues—pushing them into one another’s arms.
Third, the open embrace of opposition forces in Europe is perhaps the most certain way to halt the very political changes, already underway, that Washington would like to see. It gives the current leaders a convenient excuse to discredit opposition forces as instruments of foreign influence. All the more so given that the United States has got less than a flawless record in these matters. The 2010 WikiLeaks scandal—revealing how deeply US diplomats kept their hands on European processes—and the 2013 NSA-Snowden affair—showing that whatever escaped the diplomats’ grasp was simply intercepted—were only the tip of the iceberg. For decades, Washington’s remote control of globalist, pro-migration, and ever-expanding EU and NATO policies went specifically against sovereigntist parties. Voters are now wary of any outside influence. For the Trump administration, the wiser course is not to support or oppose any particular camp, but simply to stick—firmly and consistently—to core liberties, such as free speech.
Finally, the openly hostile rhetoric toward the European Union is also counterproductive. The application of the old divide-and-rule logic to Europe is hardly new for Washington. Behind pro-EU slogans, every administration has in practice found it more beneficial to work one-on-one with national capitals. But to proclaim this openly hands an excellent pretext to those within the European Union who can now present themselves as defenders of European sovereignty against American intrusion. This was exactly how most EU leaders reacted to the NSS. Across the bloc, the same talking points echoed: Washington’s position only reinforced the resolve to make the European Union more unified and more autonomous. From the US standpoint, the problem, for the moment, is not even the feasibility of this ambition, but that right now such a focus weakens rather than strengthens its European allies. The EU push for more integration inevitably brings up deep-seated divisions—conflicting national priorities, philosophical disputes over sovereignty, institutional turf wars, and the increasing rivalry between France and Germany.
This kind of European dynamic, supposedly moving toward more unity and more autonomy, is fraught with risks. Not only because it usually comes with a slight anti-American undertone, but also because it consumes a lot of time, attention, and political energy. The result would be not a stronger Europe, but a distracted one—and a weaker alliance when Washington can least afford it.
