Reading Trump’s National Security Strategy: Europe through a distorted lens

One could certainly argue—and some have—that in the world of US President Donald Trump a document like the National Security Strategy matters little. He is unlikely to have helped drafting it; maybe he has not even have read it. In any given situation, he tends to act on impulse rather than rely on policy documents. With few exceptions, he is not known to be a man of coherent strategies.

Still, it is a document that will be read across the world—and absent any guidance beyond whatever Trump posts on Truth Social, his administration is likely to see it as gospel. They know that there is little tolerance for deviating from the line.

We can already see this. Within 48 hours of the National Security Strategy announcing that Europe is facing “civilisational erasure”, Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, proclaimed on X that the policies of the European Union—“censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba”, as he described it—are driving the continent towards “civilisational suicide”.  Landau had read the gospel and was ready to preach.

You might think that a region heading for “suicide” and “erasure” would warrant little attention. The NSS even claims that “within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European”, implying they might shift from allies to adversaries.

Yet the Trump team has not given up entirely on us. The document says that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed give cause for great optimism,” even suggesting that the US should help them by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

The rise of extremist parties is not the only supposed ray of light in Europe’s gathering darkness. Although not stated outright, the document’s formulations imply that “strategic stability with Russia” is part of the solution. One section that could well have been drafted by the Kremlin declares that the problem at present is that “a large European majority wants peace”, but that this is “suppressed” by “unstable minority governments”. Tellingly, the document does not contain a single hint of criticism of Russia and its blatant war of aggression against Ukraine. In a notable contrast with the 2017 document of the first Trump administration, which was clear on the Russian threat, the current strategy fails to mention a US commitment to NATO’s Article 5.

Whether Europeans will welcome America’s offer of “managing European relations with Russia” is highly doubtful. Europe’s appreciation for how the Trump administration has handled the Kremlin is limited; its appetite for outsourcing its relationship with Russia to the White House is likely close to non-existent.

Much more could be said about the rest of the new National Security Strategy. It seeks to establish a Trump version of the old Monroe Doctrine for Latin America, looks at China primarily in economic terms, and stays well away from concepts like freedom, democracy, international law or multilateralism. The concept of “great power competition” is dropped in favour of pursuing “stability” with both Russia and China. Even so, parts of the document display an interesting logic.

The brief European section stands out from the rest in its blatant hostility, reinforced in the X post by the deputy secretary of state. It reads as if it has been hijacked by Vice-President JD Vance and his crew—JD Vance on steroids. In another part of the document there is a brief mention of “restoring Europe’s civilisational self-confidence”.

We Europeans certainly have our challenges. We need to revive our entrepreneurial and global trading spirits, beef up our defences and extend our successful integration across the continent. Managing migration is a challenge—no less than for the United States. Much more could be listed here.

But we are successful and confident societies. Political assassination attempts here are extremely rare. Our democracies are open and vibrant. We rarely have politicised mobs storming parliaments. Our incarceration rate is about one-fifth that of the US. Our countries top global press freedom rankings. Murder rates in Europe are a fraction of US levels. We do not have a massive trade deficit with the rest of the world. Our health systems deliver better outcomes and longer lives than anywhere else. And overall, our populations are better educated than those of the US.

We are not going “extinct”, and we are certainly not about to commit “suicide”. We remain a magnet in a turbulent world. By any broad measure, no other region on our Earth provides a better quality of life to a large share of its population than Europe.