U.S. President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last week, is a clear break from previous iterations of the NSS and outlines a new type of U.S. foreign policy. Gone is the idea of a post-Cold War liberal international order underpinned and led by the United States. Or as the NSS puts it, “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” Instead, the Trump administration identifies the Western Hemisphere as America’s main strategic focus, implicitly leaving China and Russia with their own respective spheres of influence as well. The most fundamental break outlined in the strategy, however, is in America’s relationship with Europe.
The picture the NSS paints of the continent is bleak. It points to European economic stagnation, blaming it primarily on what it portrays as the European Union’s stifling regulations, and criticizes insufficient military spending. But it gets worse. The continent’s economic decline, the NSS warns, “is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, 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.”
The entire paragraph functions like a bomb thrown into the middle of the trans-Atlantic relationship. It criticizes how Europeans conduct their own affairs and organize their domestic politics. Strikingly, it directly blames the EU, long a partner of the United States, for the policies leading to European “civilizational erasure.”
