Trump’s security document lands like a bucket of cold water on Europe – Firstpost

The Trump administration’s newly released National Security Strategy has delivered an unexpectedly sharp rebuke to America’s closest allies in Europe.

The annual US security blueprint — traditionally focused on major threats such as China, Russia, and Latin American drug-trafficking — this year directed some of its harshest language at European partners.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the 30 pages document portrays European nations as weakened, drifting powers that have surrendered key elements of sovereignty to the European Union, governed by leaders who stifle democratic debate and marginalise voices pushing for a more nationalist direction.

The document says the continent faces “civilizational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognisable” in two decades — as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies”, added the report.

The strategy document highlights just how dramatically the Trump administration is redefining long-standing US foreign policy, and it is poised to further strain the trans-Atlantic alliance — a partnership that has helped preserve peace in Europe since World War II and championed Western values globally.

The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals.

European leaders reviewing the document should “assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” WSJ quoted Katja Bego, a senior researcher at the London-based think tank Chatham House, as saying.

Timothy Garton Ash, a prominent British historian, described the document “as the mother of all wake-up calls for Europe.”

“We’re in this extraordinary position where the US is still objectively an ally of Europe, but subjectively at least in the Trump administration and the view of many Europeans we’re no longer seeing each other that way,” Garton Ash told WSJ.

Trans-Atlantic tensions

Since President Trump returned to office in January, many European leaders have tried to accommodate his priorities and stay in his good books. While Trump has responded with occasional praise, other members of his administration have shown open disdain for Europe and opposition to key European policies.

Several themes in the National Security Strategy mirror critiques Vice President JD Vance voiced just weeks into the new administration at a security conference in Munich in February. The document amplifies long-standing MAGA criticisms of Europe and highlighting widening trans-Atlantic divides.

“It essentially declares outright opposition to the European Union,” said Garton Ash. “It’s JD Vance’s notorious speech in Munich but on steroids, and as official US policy.”

The strategy argues that the EU, an institution the US helped build, and other multinational bodies “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” It further accuses several European governments of “subversion of democratic processes,” without clarifying the charge, reported WSJ.

European leaders have long acknowledged the need to revamp their slow-growing economies and strengthen defence spending, though progress has been uneven.

Many have also tightened immigration rules, contributing to a recent decline in arrivals. Yet Europe remains a core global center of democracy and capitalism — and America’s closest cultural and historical partner.

In fact, every Western European country ranks higher on Freedom House’s democracy index than the US, based on metrics such as elections, rule of law, and individual rights.

Despite these facts, the document adopts an almost paternalistic tone, offering Europe “tough love” under a section titled “Promoting European Greatness.”

Its criticisms of America’s allies stand in stark contrast to its treatment of strategic rivals: Russia is not mentioned once as a threat.

Splits over Ukraine war

The section on Europe also spotlights splits over the war in Ukraine, accusing European officials of holding “unrealistic expectations.” Notably, it casts the US more as a mediator between Europe and Russia than as Europe’s partner in opposing Moscow, a role Washington has played since World War II.

It also calls for ending Nato’s “perpetually expanding alliance.”

“The document reads like a brief in favour of the Russian position, calling for European states to get back to work with Russia and offering up the USA as the vehicle to do this,” WSJ quoted Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, as saying in his daily newsletter.

“This is a strategy to destroy the present Europe, to make it MAGA,” O’Brien added.

Rather than signaling a turn inward, the document suggests the Trump administration aims to reshape Europe to mirror its own worldview, said Bego of Chatham House.

“Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” it says, urging the continent to “regain its civilisational self-confidence” and abandon “regulatory suffocation.”

One section openly calls for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” which analysts interpret as US meddling in European politics and tacit backing for far-right or anti-immigration parties across major EU states. No similar ambitions are outlined for other regions.

Nathalie Tocci, director of Rome’s Institute for International Affairs, said the strategy sketches a world divided among three dominant powers — the US, China, and Russia — with Europe treated as a sphere to be claimed.

“It’s fairly clear that Europe is on the colonial menu,” WSJ quoted Tocci as saying.

Europe pushback

A European Commission spokeswoman declined to address the entire document but rejected claims that Europe supports harmful migration policies or stifles free speech, noting that the US strategy breaks sharply from the traditionally strong trans-Atlantic partnership, reported WSJ.

“The US national security has been very much linked to Europe’s security, which explains also all the work we are doing with the US as our key ally and partner,” including on Ukraine, Paula Pinho, chief spokeswoman for the Commission, told WSJ.

Vance and other administration officials have attacked democratic norms in countries like Germany and France, where mainstream parties uphold a “firewall” against forming coalitions with far-right groups—a stance shaped by Europe’s history with fascism.

While Vance calls this practice undemocratic, most democracy experts note that parties are free to decide their coalition partners and values, and that voters can still hand far-right parties outright majorities if they choose.

Vance and his allies have also faulted Europe for hate-speech laws rooted in the continent’s wartime past. Analysts counter that Europe broadly protects free expression—including criticism of leaders—in ways that stand in stark contrast to restrictions in Russia and China.

With inputs from agencies