With the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy making it clear that American support to Europe is now faint, it remains to be seen how Europe responds
Hope is not a strategy. For most of this year, European leaders have hoped that the Trump Administration has not actually meant its President’s oscillating support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), its Vice-President’s berating his European hosts in Munich over their liberal values and immigration policies, President Donald Trump’s tirade against migration at the United Nations, and of course his mercurial support for Ukraine. The hope was that, all things considered, America would ultimately stand with Europe.
The Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy — a 33 page document that spends much time congratulating the President for saving America from apparently terminal decline as it charts an unapologetically MAGA-esque America-first mercantilist position — appears not to notice Africa, Australia and New Zealand. It sweeps by Asia as it focuses strongly on perceived trade imbalances with China and lands squarely on a defense of the ‘Western Hemisphere’ according to American interests while lamenting the decline of Europe. Europe is a problem, not an ally.
The stand on Europe
In ‘Promoting European Greatness’, the NSS warns of Europe’s ‘civilizational erasure’, precipitated by the European Union (EU)’s policies on migration and freedom of speech, ‘the suppression of political opposition’, and the ‘loss of national identities and self-confidence’. In case there was any doubt about which migrants were unwelcome, the NSS declares that if Europe continues on its present trajectory, ‘within a few decades … certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ The U.S. will help Europe regain its ‘former greatness’ by choosing ‘patriotic European parties’ to promote what this administration views as ‘genuine democracy’ and ‘unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history’. To most Europeans, at best this reads as a meddling in the internal politics of sovereign nations, and at worst as regime change.
Europe, the NSS states, needs to stand on its own feet, assume ‘primary responsibility for its own defense’ and re-establish ‘strategic stability with Russia’. NATO ‘cannot be a perpetually expanding alliance’, a warning of course to Ukraine, but also an interesting glossing over of Sweden and Finland’s accession to the alliance after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In this document, the threat is not Russia and its invasion of a sovereign nation, but Europe’s cultural decay. The tramp of the jackboots of 1930s Europe echoes with every mention of civilizational decline.
Of course, an administration’s national security strategy is not policy, but a guide to its thinking. They can and have been over-ridden by events, most notably George H.W. Bush’s 1990 NSS, which was overtaken by the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and the first Gulf War. Observers could chart the evolution of the administration’s thinking in the two subsequent iterations of 1991 and 1993.
As a high-level document, the NSS often provides the lens through which to interpret an administration’s foreign policy goals and is assumed to set the tone for the administration’s national defense strategy, its Quadrennial Defense Review and national military strategy. Mr. Trump’s famously mercurial nature might caution against viewing it as declared policy. However, given that this is a Congress-mandated document, it is more than just a rhetorical exercise: while it should not be taken literally, it should be taken seriously.
What Europe’s response could be
As the dust settles, Europe now faces three options in responding: it can ignore the NSS and hope that it will go away; its leaders can dial up their flattery of Mr. Trump in the hope that he will change his mind on Europe; or Europe can face up to the prospect that Mr. Trump’s America is not a reliable ally and that they will need to fend for themselves.
Europe tried a mixture of the first two strategies after J.D. Vance’s outburst at the Munich Security Conference. After some tepid talk of needing to pull together to see off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘imperialist’ ambitions in trying to ‘rewrite history’ or the need for Europe to wean itself off U.S. dependence, Europe doubled down on doing whatever it would take to keep America in NATO and Europe. Britain flattered Mr. Trump with an invitation for an unprecedented second state visit. Germany’s Friedrich Merz forgot about his observations of February this year as Chancellor-in-waiting that his ‘absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe … so that … we can really achieve independence from the USA’.
Germany has since abandoned half-explored plans of developing European capabilities and ordered more American military kit, which is dependent on American intelligence to work. NATO’s Hague Summit of June this year will be remembered as much for European states agreeing to raise their military spending to 5% of GDP as for Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s calling Mr. Trump ‘Daddy.’
The third option will not be easy. Europe has never defended itself as an entity and there is no concept of integrated European defense. Even limited projects of joint development of military kit tend not to get very far, as the stalled Franco-German project on sixth generation fighter jets demonstrates. If the U.S. pulls American troops out of Europe — as this administration has periodically hinted it might do — then Europe will have a serious manpower problem that experiments in ‘voluntary’ conscription will not even begin to address. Then there is the question of nuclear deterrence and Britain’s uneasy post-Brexit relationship with the EU and Europe.
The state of the world order
How Europe responds will have implications beyond the continent. Mr. Trump’s NSS, with its attack on transnational institutions (that he insists ‘undermine political liberty and sovereignty’), its dismantling of the post-war trading order in favor of a mercantilist America-first policy; and the signaling of a U.S. retreat into its own ‘Hemisphere’ (however that might be defined, and with the implication that China and Russia are free to carve up the rest of the world as long as they do not impinge on America’s trading footprint) have profound implications for the rest of the world. The post-war world order that America helped shape and uphold is imperfect and crumbling. The power imbalances at the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Institutions that help anchor expectations of peace, security, development and trade reflect an outdated world order. But, however imperfect this rules-based system might be, it is still a bulwark against a descent into a Hobbesian free-for-all, where might makes right.
The debate about this National Security Strategy is, therefore, not about a document that might shed light on an administration’s thinking. It is about whether Europe chooses to defend a rules-based liberal order or defers to a President whose transactional and racist view of the world will have consequences that stretch far beyond his borders.
(Priyanjali Malik writes on nuclear politics and security)
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