WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s latest “National Security Strategy” is slamming European countries for their environmental and anti-free-speech policies — and warning that the continent’s current path risks “civilizational erasure.”
“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” reads the Trump-signed document, posted online Friday.
“We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies,” the report says.
“We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”
The annual assessment, which typically dwells on US adversaries, warned Europe’s trajectory is weakening the NATO alliance.
“American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper,” the document says.
“Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP — down from 25[%] in 1990 to 14[%] today — partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness. But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.
“The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are 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.”
Trump-approved remedies listed in the report call for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
The strategy file also calls for “[e]nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance” — a likely reference to attempts by countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, both partially occupied by Russia to join the bloc and commit Washington to their military defense.
Vice President JD Vance has been a particularly fervent critic of European policies, particularly on mass immigration and the criminalization in countries such as the UK of online postings deemed to be “offensive” or “false.”
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said in a February speech to the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
“And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values— values shared with the United States of America.”
‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine
The 29-page policy document also announced a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which asserted US dominance over the Western Hemisphere, as the president orders the bombing of alleged drug-smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia.
The Trump Corollary is defined as seeking to ensure the Americas are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States,” that its governments “cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations” and remains “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.”
These goals, the report says, are “a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.
“Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as ‘Enlist and Expand.’ We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.”
The vision calls for “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere, especially the missions identified in this strategy, and away from theaters whose relative import to American national security has declined in recent decades or years.”
Proposed changes include “a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes, to thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis,” as well as “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.”
US diplomats are further charged with drumming up business for American companies.
“Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between the US Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts,” the report says.
“Every US Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”
China is also addressed at length, with the strategy focusing heavily on trade and deterring conflict with Taiwan.
“We must encourage Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and other prominent nations in adopting trade policies that help rebalance China’s economy toward household consumption, because Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East cannot alone absorb China’s enormous excess capacity,” it says.
“There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters. Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the US economy.”
The section on the Middle East, meanwhile, gives virtually no mention of the radical Islamic terrorism that beset the region for decades.
“Middle East partners are demonstrating their commitment to combatting radicalism, a trendline American policy should continue to encourage,” it says.
“But doing so will require dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without.
“The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.”
The Trump-approved strategy says “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over — not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment — a trend that should be welcomed and encouraged.”
