Last week, the White House released a new National Security Strategy (NSS). It’s an annual ritual mandated by a 1986 act of Congress to ensure that the legislative branch is informed about the objectives and policies of the executive branch. In most years, the document is greeted by yawns. This year’s twenty-nine-page summary of U.S. strategic priorities generated outrage.
The news analysis published by the New York Times featured this subheading: “A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump’s long-held contempt for Europe’s leaders.” The title of a Wall Street Journal news article hit the same shrill note: “U.S. Flips History by Casting Europe—Not Russia—as Villain in New Security Policy.” The Economist dismissed the document as “Donald Trump’s bleak, incoherent foreign-policy strategy.”
To some extent, the uproar simply follows a familiar script: Donald Trump is a threat to decency, the rule of law, democracy, and everything right and good about the world. So it’s close to self-evident that a national security document issued by his administration is wrongheaded, or worse.
Timothy Snyder, the historian turned propagandist, is quoted in the Times. He sets aside his usual Trump-as-Hitler trope and takes up a new line of attack. He reads the document as channeling Putin: “The U.S. national security document is now tilting in the basic ideological direction of the Russian one.”
What gives? Some elements of the NSS reflect continuity with U.S. policy for decades: ensuring freedom of the seas, especially in the Indo-Pacific; deterring a Chinese takeover of Taiwan; preventing any foreign power from dominating or disrupting the supply of oil from the Middle East; and sustaining U.S. technological and financial dominance. The United States has asserted naval supremacy in the Pacific since Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853. We’ve been engaged in the Middle East since the end of World War II. Our Taiwan policy has been in place for decades. And the Clinton administration laid the foundations for American technological and financial supremacy in the 1990s.
Mainstream commentators have ignored these continuities (as well as the marked change in policy toward South and Central America). They fixate on the document’s statements about Europe. They are unvarnished.
The NSS notes that continental Europe has seen a relative decline in global economic power. Regulation suffocates innovation. With the exception of a few outliers like Poland, the continent has functionally disarmed. Governing coalitions in many countries suppress opposition parties.
Underneath these problems are stark demographic realities and a paralyzing civilizational malaise. The NSS does not use the word “Muslim,” but it does say: “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” This demographic change throws into question the viability of NATO as a civilizational alliance. Yet, multicultural ideologies and globalist dreams continue to dominate elite opinion in Europe. The NSS is frank. America’s national interest requires “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Some European commentators have raised the cry of neo-colonialism. But again, there’s more continuity than discontinuity in these frank statements. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States intervened to prevent communism from gaining power in Italy. Our norms were imposed on the West German constitution. After the end of the Cold War, American policy encouraged the ascendancy of the European Union. It was American end-of-history globalism that set the agenda for Europe. We exported multiculturalism, the rainbow flag, and diversity-is-our-strength utopianism. The BLM protests in European capitals during the 2020 Summer of Love offered a vivid demonstration of America’s cultural colonization of Europe. And woe unto the few who did not conform, as Viktor Orbán can attest.
The outrage focuses on Europe, not because the Trump administration threatens European sovereignty, which was diminished decades ago by the European decision to outsource military defense to the United States. Instead, Europe matters for symbolic reasons. To chastise Europe, as the NSS does, is to condemn the post–Cold War project. That project was led by American elites. The harsh words about Europe condemn those American elites.
In its introduction, the NSS targets Americans, not Europeans. It observes that American foreign policy elites “convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” This enterprise turned out to be a pipe dream that ended in failure and cost trillions of dollars and countless lives in the “forever wars.”
In the economic sphere, those same American elites—the people who still set the tone at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—“placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.”
The NSS does not address domestic policy, and rightly so, given its purpose. But the blunt statements about Europe’s civilizational malaise and misguided immigration policies apply to the United States as well. The same people who gave us open trade brought us open borders. Our universities and establishment cultural institutions embraced ideologies that at best apologized for America’s history and at worst condemned it. The United States is not unlike Europe in the erosion of civilizational confidence, just as it was not unlike Europe when, before Trump took office, DEI commissars suppressed free speech and created a climate of ideological intimidation.
Put simply, the outcry against the NSS is a bar in the long song of lament over populism and Trump’s rise to power. The Ukraine war is a condensed symbol. The Trump administration sees a defeat and wants to make the best of the bad situation. Trump’s critics believe otherwise.
The same can be said of the green transition. Trump and his supporters see failure, a vast expenditure (many trillions of dollars) that has yielded no meaningful benefits. Trump’s critics remain true believers. The same can be said of economic globalization. Populists see its effects: deindustrialization, middle-class failure to flourish, and vast wealth for the lucky few. Trump’s critics remain true believers.
The NSS takes the measure of the last thirty-five years of American foreign policy and finds it wanting: forever wars, “allies” who can’t field armies, failed democracy promotion, and more. Again, as the uproar over the NSS reveals, the critics remain true believers in the world that was constructed after World War II and then given steroids after the Cold War. That world has become increasingly dysfunctional. We can debate every detail of the Trump administration’s approach. But we should be grateful that this administration is breaking with a failed consensus.
