Trump Warns Europeans Against Loss of National Identities

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The Trump administration on Dec. 6 warned that Europe was facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” The United States should be “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting political parties that fight against migration and promote nationalism. It is now, it seems, America’s official policy to support populists like Britain’s Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen in France, and Alice Weidel in Germany.

The National Security Strategy (NSS), a 33-page document released to lay out his administration’s foreign policy priorities, “a road map,” according to the president’s own introduction, “to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”  The NSS does not determine policy but rather sets out the government's foreign policy vision. It can, of course, be overtaken by world events.

It states that Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it recommends that American policy should help Europe “correct its current trajectory” over the course of the next several decades. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

The document also accuses the European Union and other “transnational bodies” of undermining liberty and sovereignty, censoring free speech and trampling on basic principles of democracy to suppress political opposition. U.S. government officials and tech tycoons like Elon Musk have launched an assault on the EU over the European Commission’s decision to levy a $140 million fine on X for violating EU transparency rules, which was widely derided as an attempt at “censorship” of Americans. (Musk suggested Dec. 7 that the bloc should be “abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries.”)

Trump doubled down on his view, denouncing Europe as a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people, in an interview with POLITICO Dec. 12, belittling the traditional U.S. allies for failing to control migration and signaling that he would endorse European political candidates aligned with his own vision for the continent. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct,” he added.

Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23 had already foreshadowed the contents of the NSS document. “Europe is in serious trouble. They have been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody has ever seen before,” Trump remarked. “It's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. Your countries are going to hell.” He referred to the situation as an “unmitigated immigration disaster.” He also attacked the UN for the aid it gave to asylum seekers. “The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.”

Europeans reacted to the document with horror regarding the threat to cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt claimed the document “places itself to the right of the extreme right.” The president of the European Council, Antonio Costa, admonished Trump against interfering in Europe’s affairs. On Dec. 8, he said the idea that Washington would back Europe’s nationalist parties was unacceptable.

Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia, Eurasia programme at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, concluded that political meddling in Europe to back far-right nationalists was now “a core part of America’s national strategy. This isn't just a speech from a novice VP weeks into a new term. It is U.S. policy and they will try to implement it.” The first election Washington might try to influence would be Hungary’s parliamentary ballot in April next year. (Hungary’s Trump ally Prime Minister Victor Orban also criticized the EU’s fine for X.)

Nathalie Tocci, the director of Italy’s Instituto Affari Internazionale, in “Does Europe Finally Realize It’s Alone?” an article published Dec. 5 in Foreign Policy, wrote that Europeans had “lulled themselves into the belief” that Trump was “unpredictable and inconsistent, but ultimately manageable. This is reassuring, but wrong.”

The Trump administration has “a clear and consistent vision for Europe: one that prioritises U.S.-Russia ties and seeks to divide and conquer the continent, with much of the dirty work carried out by nationalist, far-right European forces,” she contended. In Russia, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov did indeed welcome the document as “largely consistent with our vision” and a “positive step.”

The U.S. has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the European Union. There are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly opposed to U.S. interests and security, including censorship, economic suicide, climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty, promotion of multilateral governance, and so on. For Trump, this inconsistency cannot continue.

But Trump knows he has the upper hand. The NSS pinpoints Europe’s decline. Europe constituted 25 per cent of global economic output in 1990; today, that figure has fallen to 14 per cent. The document notes that Europe’s economic and political weakness has given rise to a general lack of self-confidence. The Atlantic alliance is now in uncharted waters.