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The Trump administration’s new national security strategy has got lousy reviews in Europe. Nonetheless, it is a genuinely interesting document. It attempts to do something very ambitious — which is to redefine national security in civilisational terms.
Conventional takes on national security centre on military and economic imperatives. The new NSS trudges dutifully through these issues. But one senses that the author’s heart is not in it. A passage on the critical issue of Taiwan asserts flatly: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan . . . is a priority. We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan.” That is the very definition of a holding statement.
The document becomes much more energetic and innovative when it turns to civilisational issues. There is clearly a strong racial element to the administration’s definition of civilisation — even if it is not quite spelled out. The first policy priority listed is an end to “mass migration”. The NSS insists: “We must protect our country from invasion . . . from unchecked migration.”
That idea is then extended across the Atlantic to Europe. This is what underpins the NSS’s controversial claim that Europe stands on the brink of “civilisational erasure”. The strategy document argues that: “It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European.”
This claim feels like what psychologists sometimes call “projection”. It is actually the US that trends in census data suggest will become “majority non-white” by 2045. On current trends, it would be several more decades before Britain or Germany crossed a similar threshold. Nonetheless, to prevent “civilisational erasure” in Europe, the Trump administration proposes: “Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” This clearly means supporting nationalist, anti-immigration parties such as the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally and Britain’s Reform.
Where did this civilisational turn in American foreign policy come from? The most influential author of the NSS is thought to be Michael Anton, who until recently was director of policy planning at the State Department. Anton’s previous biggest claim to fame was his authorship of a 2016 article called the “Flight 93 election”. This argued that preventing the election of Hillary Clinton was a matter of national survival for the US, which needed to elect Trump to prevent the “ceaseless importation of third world foreigners”. He argued in 2016 that tolerance for mass immigration was the mark of “a civilisation that wants to die”. Sound familiar?
But how seriously should Europeans take all this? There are three broad ways of looking at the NSS. The first is that most national security strategies are meaningless flim-flam — closely studied in think-tanks but with little relationship to the real world. The fact that Anton himself has now left the administration and that Trump is not generally regarded as a systematic thinker makes it easier to shrug off the civilisational language as little more than red meat for the American far right.
A second view is that this is all part of a US effort to put intense pressure on the EU to fall in line on issues that the Trump administration actually cares about — notably cutting a peace deal with Russia and ending European efforts to regulate US tech companies.
Over the weekend, Christopher Landau, the US deputy secretary of state, published a social media post accusing America’s European allies of “civilizational suicide”. Landau suggested that the US can no longer “pretend that we are partners” with EU countries that adopt policies that are “utterly adverse” to American interests. The policies he listed included alleged “censorship”, as well as “climate fanaticism”.
This reads like a scarcely veiled threat: withdraw EU policies that the Trump administration dislikes or the US will reconsider its support for Nato. The language of the NSS, combined with Landau’s threats, could also support a third, even more radical, interpretation. It is not just individual EU policies that the administration objects to — it is the existence of the EU itself, which is portrayed as a “globalist” project that is inimical to American interests.
If that line of thinking is followed through to its logical conclusion, it could see the US detaching itself from Nato, shunning Europe’s current governments and drawing permanently closer to Russia. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has already praised the NSS and suggested it is in line with Kremlin thinking. Russians close to Putin have used X — a platform banned in Russia — to endorse the Trump administration’s claim that free speech is under threat in Europe.
The NSS makes clear that there is now a battle under way between two different versions of the west — which pits the US and Europe against each other. The Trump administration view of “western civilisation” is based on race, Christianity and nationalism. The European version is a liberal view founded on democracy, human rights and the rule of law, including international law.
In Europe, the biggest threats to the liberal version of western civilisation are the far-right parties that the US is promoting — and the Russian state that the Trump administration is courting. Little wonder that the Kremlin senses an opportunity.
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