THE GUARDIAN: Don’t say you weren’t warned: Trump’s new national security strategy seeks to destroy liberal democracy as we know it
On the same day that Donald Trump received his made-to-order “peace prize” from his newest pal, Fifa president “Johnny” Infantino, his administration published an equally gaudy national security strategy. The relatively short document oozes Trump and Trumpism. It starts out with the typically modest claim that the president has brought “our nation – and the world – back from the brink of catastrophe and disaster”.
Even if the strategy mostly formalises the ongoing actions and statements of Trump and his administration, it should be heeded as a warning for the world, and Europe in particular.
The document espouses an aggressive form of foreign-policy interference in which the US explicitly sets itself the goal of “promoting European greatness”. Its language could have been directly lifted from Viktor Orbán’s speeches during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015-16: “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilisational self-confidence.” Even more ominously, the document claims that Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure”.
The whole section on Europe is steeped in decades of European far-right ideology and propaganda. The EU and migration policies are held responsible for “transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”. According to the document, if “present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies”. Indeed, the Trump administration believes that “within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European”.
Expanding on this theme in an interview with Politico, Trump claimed this would make these countries “much weaker”. » | Cas Mudde | Wednesday, December 10, 2025
