Making Europe great again is now officially a vital interest of the United States. The ambitious policy was codified in the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), which the White House published last week.
Europe faces “civilizational erasure,” the document warned, and “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” over the next few decades, possibly undermining their alliances with America. The NSS depicted a Europe suffering from out-of-control migration, over-regulation, and restrictions on free speech. It said the Trump administration would cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
The document has met a negative, even apoplectic, reaction from mainstream European leaders and American media. An article in Axios said the NSS had cast Europe as a “geopolitical villain.” Josep Borrell, a former top diplomat of the European Union, called it a “declaration of political war on the EU.” Many European politicians saw the NSS as proof that Trump was abandoning European allies in favor of Russia.
But right-wingers across the old continent take a very different view, seeing Trump as a useful ally for European nations that have already been betrayed—by their own leaders. Their warm reception of the NSS comes as no surprise, yet is more significant than suggested by most American media, which has tended to vilify or ignore European nationalists.
The high-ranking Polish parliamentarian Krzysztof Bosak told me in an interview that he agreed completely with the criticisms of Europe laid out in the NSS. “Maybe Europe needs a shock from our good old friend America to start a true debate,” he said. In the view of Bosak and other “Euroskeptic” figures, the NSS was not a challenge to Europe per se, but to a bloated EU bureaucracy that has grown ever more oppressive and liberal since its founding in 1993.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk offered a very different reaction. Writing on X shortly after the NSS was published, Tusk gave voice to anxieties that have gripped European capitals since Trump returned to the White House this January. Tusk wrote:
Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.
That post went viral, and in the days following, European leaders normally reticent about their negative opinions of the U.S. president found the courage to speak out. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Tuesday that certain passages were “unacceptable to us from a European perspective.” But in Germany, as in Poland, the political establishment differs markedly from the nationalists who challenge it—and who are growing ever more popular amid economic stagnation and a worsening immigration crisis.
In an interview and subsequent email exchange, Filip Gaspar—a political advisor and parliamentary assistant in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—sounded just as positive about the NSS as Bosak had. When I recited its warnings about Europe’s political oppression and rapid demographic transformation, Gaspar replied, “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Gaspar highlighted a deep compatibility between the NSS and the AfD’s political program, which centers the interests of Germans in both foreign and domestic policy.
Pointing to harsh criticisms of the NSS from figures in the Berlin establishment, Gaspar maintained that the AfD was the only German party able to navigate the new paradigm of transatlantic relations inaugurated by Trump. “While the German mainstream reacts to the National Security Strategy with moral outrage and defensive rhetoric,” he said, “the AfD has long developed a coherent doctrine built on sovereignty, controlled migration, cultural stability and realist statecraft.”
Over in France, the same divide is on display: The political establishment has lambasted the NSS—one official called it a “brutal clarification of the United States’ ideological posture”—while Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s National Rally party, told the BBC that he broadly agreed with it. “Mass immigration and the laxity of our governments in the last 30 years with regards to migration policy are shaking the balance of European countries, of Western societies, and namely French society,” Bardella said.
And yet, Bardella also expressed wariness about the Trump administration’s efforts to influence European politics. “I’m French, so I’m not happy with vassalage, and I don’t need a big brother like Trump to consider the fate of my country,” he told the Telegraph in an interview published Tuesday.
Of course, an undercurrent of anti-Americanism has long tugged at the French right wing. But nationalist parties in other European countries, too, won’t simply bow down to the Trump administration, however much they agree with its diagnosis of European decline. Even Bosak suggested that the criticisms of Europe in the NSS were one-sided and out of place in an official strategy document. “I can imagine a European strategic document with some criticisms of America,” Bosak said with a smile.
András László, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament and president of the Patriots for Europe Foundation, offered a similar view as Bardella and Bosak. The NSS, László said in an interview, offered a surprisingly accurate view of Europe’s civilizational crisis. “There’s a profound change going on in Europe, and that’s the exact change reflected in this National Security Strategy,” László said. “But this is something we need to fix ourselves, not because it’s something the U.S. wants us to.”
The Trump administration may find that a civilizational grand strategy, especially one that seeks to boost Europe’s right-wing parties, runs up against international divisions. Right-wing parties in Poland and Hungary, for example, sometimes clash over the Russia–Ukraine war. But the European right should be able to overcome such disagreements, László told me. “There are of course differences, but we are united by the view that the EU is going in the wrong direction,” László said. “That’s absolutely a common perspective between us.”
But other, deeper tensions arguably exist between the civilizational framework expounded in the NSS and Trump’s America First foreign policy, which seeks a retrenchment from Europe and eschews lecturing other countries about their values. The foreign policy analyst Sumantra Maitra—a contributing editor of The American Conservative and founder of Clio Strategic Consulting—says the NSS departs in some ways from the pragmatic realism of America First.
“If the U.S. wants to burden-shift, which is a prudent instinct, Washington, DC must be prepared for a relatively independent Europe, which is also good for us,” Maitra told me. “President Trump says he doesn’t want to run Europe. VP Vance says U.S. foreign policy shouldn’t be about hectoring. Well, guess what, stop hectoring Europe then. Let them take their own responsibility.”
Of course, America First conservatism is not inherently at odds with a civilizational vision of world affairs. Pat Buchanan, cofounder of this magazine and an ideological precursor to Trump, often thought in civilizational terms and expressed affection for Europe as the wellspring of America’s own heritage. But translating that sweeping vision into foreign policy may prove a hard trick to pull off. With the NSS, the Trump administration has, rather boldly, signaled an intention to try.
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