Trump Is Not Attacking Europe. He’s Attacking Something Else.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In Paris on Sunday, Le Monde led its coverage with an article on what it called the consummation of a divorce. Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran the headline “Trump Declares War on Europe.”
The president’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week, sent a message to the continent that shocked the world. Drowning under mass migration, mismanaged and bullied by the European Union’s leaders, increasingly incapable of producing children, Europe’s ancient nations, the document argues, face not just economic decline but also the prospect of imminent “civilizational erasure.” In the near future, it adds, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
President Trump’s detractors on both sides of the Atlantic blamed him for rupturing the NATO alliance and for straying into matters far removed from national defense — such as migration, culture and demography — that are the province of racists and xenophobes.
That is the wrong way to understand the document. Read carefully, in fact, the passages about Europe sound more like a defense of the continent. They include a description of Europe as “strategically and culturally vital” to the United States. Few of those outraged by the document have bothered to distinguish between Europe — a geographical area that is also shorthand for the culture that arose over the centuries from a mix of Greek rationalism and Middle Eastern monotheism — and the European Union, a 33-year-old experiment that aims to replace the continent’s nation-states with a novel form of transnational governance based in Brussels.
In certain quarters the European Union has become synonymous with a postdemocratic permanent ruling class of regulators and bureaucrats. It has proved more successful at delegitimizing national governments in, say, Paris and Rome than at shifting their responsibilities for defense, budgeting and border policing to Brussels. That is because European voters have not conferred on it the legitimacy to do so. What powers Brussels has been able to claim, it has snatched piecemeal from voters when they were distracted by the euro crisis, Covid, the Ukraine war and other emergencies.
That is how the Trump administration sees things. Its document identifies the European Union as a danger to the United States — albeit for its incompetence rather than its antipathy. Brussels saps the economic power and the morale of our European allies while purporting to unite and strengthen them. Even more seriously, it has melded 27 countries into a largely borderless zone in which mass migration has proved almost impossible to stem.
The document forthrightly links this demographic shift to changes in national character. “It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the document holds. “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”
Since this is the claim that threw critics into the greatest rage, it is worth looking at the modesty of it. The administration is not arguing that people of this or that national origin are better than others. It argues that we have arrived at the end of the politics of the blank slate: The nations of Europe are actual places, with distinct cultural and civilizational qualities, on the basis of which they make peace and go to war. They’re not just arbitrarily bounded zones that can be expected to remain always the same, no matter who lives there.
Look at France, where a growing population of Arabs and Muslims is increasingly vocal and increasingly politically effective. La France Insoumise led a coalition that won the country’s national elections in 2024, although its plurality of seats did not permit it to take power. Led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party espouses a kind of Mamdani-ism gone national. It advocates for the country’s Muslim and non-European immigrants around a platform that includes redistribution of income and wealth and ferocious criticism of Israel.
There’s nothing illegitimate about that. But if France remains a democracy, it will increasingly be a country that fights Zionism. And it is reasonable to expect that that will make it a less compatible and less reliable ally for the United States. To acknowledge this is not to claim all Muslims are closed to persuasion or that they are worse than the Christians who once dominated the culture of France. It is merely to open one’s eyes and see that the common ground on which an alliance can be built is shrinking.
It is possible to share Mr. Trump’s diagnosis and recoil from his prescription. The president proposes rebuilding the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” This means backing “patriotic” forces that oppose further E.U. integration, including, presumably, the national populist party Alternative for Germany, which some in Germany’s older parties are proposing to ban as extremist.
In the wake of the strategy document’s release, Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York, deplored the way the strategy “discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”
It doesn’t, though. It just elaborates a different set of values and principles. While Mr. Trump is taking sides, he is not more anti-E.U. than his predecessors were pro-E.U. In 2016, President Barack Obama campaigned against Brexit, threatening to send Britain to “the back of the queue” on trade deals if it chose to secede from the European Union.
If you look back at earlier National Security Strategies, you find that attitudes toward migration, culture and demography guided America’s approach to alliance building every bit as much as they do in Mr. Trump’s. These attitudes, again, were just different. Mr. Obama proclaimed in 2010 that “our diversity is part of our strength” in a global economy to which he considered the United States “inextricably linked.”
The global economy still has its defenders, but it has social downsides that were not evident — or at least not much discussed — 15 years ago. A national security strategy for today is bound to look different. Mr. Trump chides his predecessors for having made “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 pre-eminence depend.” Mr. Obama wanted to protect universal norms. Mr. Trump wants to ensure the survival of the United States and like-minded nations and their way of life.
There may appear to be an inconsistency here. The new National Security Strategy calls for a “flexible realism,” the opposite of the misplaced idealism that has led the United States into too many failed foreign interventions. But if you are now going to make allowances for, say, Saudi tribalism in order to keep up good relations, then why not do the same for European preferences for transnational governance and passport-free transit? How is it anything but hypocritical to overlook Saudi values while picking through those of Europeans with a fine-toothed comb?
There are two answers to this question. The first is that the values of European civilization, as traditionally understood, are a large part of what the United States signed up to defend in 1949 with the founding of NATO. That traditional understanding provided not only a purpose but also a source of cohesion that made the alliance viable. By contrast, no matter how important you think our alliance with Saudi Arabia is, the values of its polygamy-indulging, Sharia-enforcing Wahhabi monarchy had absolutely nothing to do with why the United States entered that alliance.
Then there is the other, simpler answer to why the Trump administration now makes it a priority to lead Europe back to a more traditional understanding of itself: because the United States is so intimately involved in its decline. Europe has undergone many periods of decadence before but somehow endured. It stopped the Moors at Poitiers and the Turks at Vienna, withstood a series of plagues, survived Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin. But none of those episodes vitiated its culture and enfeebled its sinews and threatened its historic continuity quite so thoroughly as three and a half decades of American-style liberal international order, under the banner of “C’mon, people now, smile on your brother.”
The main source of Europeans’ anger at seeing their vanishing civilization mourned by the United States may be this: that it was at America’s urging that they undertook this work of self-destruction in the first place.
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Best analysis of the NSS I've seen yet.
I haven't read the NSS. So far, the response to the document is reminiscent of Brexit. Europeans express outrage over the characterization of a European decline and then point out how their country is falling behind.
The NSS seems to have renewed questions about the value of the EU on the continent. That shouldn't be surprising since a national populist political movement would of necessity be anti-European Union. Immigration issues (and problems) have put national sovereignty in the spotlight. Rejection of an undemocratic EU technocracy would be the same as rejection of globalization.
This is a disgusting piece of trash dressed up in the pretty language of euphemisms to cast immigration as civilizational decline.
This article, after removing the polite patina for publication in the Old Grey Lady, is just another framing of the "Great Replacement" theory. It is sanitized and covered thickly with heavy layers of euphemistic language and pseudo-intellectualism, but that is only to get the poison past your lips and inside where it can do its best to eat away at reason.
Throughout the article immigrants are assumed to be liabilities to both the European nations individually, as Europe, and as the EU because they are diluting the "civilized" qualities of the population. Or put more bluntly: because they vote. It is a sneaky way of saying, "Immigrant bad! Go away!"
To wit:
The translation for this bit of toxic candy: Who lives in a country is deterministic of the nations' remaining worthy of both itself (ie. heritage) and worthy of alliance. I will wait while the reader processes that little gem.
One could be excused for nodding along with the language because the article is structurally competent and published in the New York Times, but if one uses those criteria for the determination of plausibility, they are not being discerning, they are being credulous. Beneath the smooth prose lies the claim that Europe is now less defensible, less reliable, and less civilized simply because its population demographics have changed.
The recasting of immigrants into corrosive forces antithetical to culture is xenophobic on its face, no matter if the seeming politeness of its presentation.
And then comes the understatement that reveals the whole game:
The above indicates the degree of categorical understatement observed in the whole article.
Just different.
You know, like a totally opposite kind of just different. One cannot get from “diversity is strength” to “demography is decay.” without passing through hell to pick up a couple of demons on the way. Maybe some forked tongues, too.
And because I am playing on my day off, I asked ChatGPT to give me a "version that sounds like it was delivered from a podium with a measured pause after every other sentence". to which it replied:
Who lives in a country is deterministic of the nations' remaining worthy of both itself (ie. heritage) and worthy of alliance
OF course that's true. Had the Vichy government remained in charge of France must the US remained an ally forever in thanks to the geographic region that supported our revolution? The world evolves. Countries evolve. And claiming some right to alliance because of historic ties to a previous culture that occupied the same geographic space and uses the same name as the current occupants is about as far from a rational argument as one can make.
Your hyperbolic, almost fact free conclusory attack on the piece drives home just how far the left has radicalized in the last 15 years. Just a few years ago, Obama could point out that large scale, multi ethnic democracy is an Experiment that we don't know whether it will work. Now dealing with the real world implications of that based upon the early returns in Europe is treated as heresy by the left. "How dare anyone suggest that mass immigration of cultures with different values could change the culture of the host country!! " I half expect progressives to start burning people at the stake for suggesting such things sometime soon.
Do you even recognize the possibility that the net effects of mass immigration could be negative for the host country? And if they are, how does a host country fix the problem?
So you are sticking with the defense of the proposition that the addition of a new demographic to an established democracy is definitionally bad? I hope so.
Your use of Vichy is deceptive.
So of course we changed our Status: We were at war with the Vichy regime.
The makeup of the French population, the so called culture, remained relatively constant. Therefore, your attempt to use Vichy as evidence that alliances turn on population or culture is a non sequitur. France did not lose credibility because its people changed. France lost credibility because its government collaborated with an enemy power and actively fought Allied forces.
The problem you face in invoking Vichy (and in similar examples elsewhere) is one of conflation. You start with an uncontroversial claim: alliances can change. From there,you use Vichy as cover to say, “we change alliances,” and then quietly smuggle in a very different proposition: that changes in alliance can be based on demographic change. That leap would only work if there were any historical examples of the United States doing this.
There aren’t.
The United States has never altered alliances because a population changed, only because governments, regimes, alignments, or behaviors changed. The only historical precedents where population itself was treated as disqualifying lie much further back, in the era of indigenous removal and displacement. You don’t want to rest your argument there.
Do you?
Hahahahahaha! When you can't hit the pitches over the plate, I guess you have to swing at anything.
"It's a conspiracy! The Left is Radical in their defense against tearing up the Constitution and affixing it to other pieces of paper like a ransom note so that we can get it to say what we want!"
See? I can make shit up, put quotes around it, and attribute it to some phantom reactionary persons too. Too bad it does nothing to advance your argument. But, hey, if you have to do it...
As for President Obama, if you’re going to make a claim based on something he said, then you owe it to the argument and yourself to include the context.
He was not declaring multi-ethnic democracy a failed experiment. He was acknowledging the challenge of sustaining it, and doing so in the service of strengthening democratic institutions, not delegitimizing them. He was certainly not arguing that demographic change renders democratic outcomes suspect or alliances less worthy.
Mr. Caldwell is:
The issue here is not whether immigration can change culture. Of course it can.
The issue is whether those changes are treated as presumptively corrosive, whether democratic outcomes produced by demographic change are treated as strategically suspect, and whether populations themselves are recast as alliance liabilities.
That is the logic of the NSS.
That is the logic of Mr. Caldwell’s article.
And that is the logic you are defending.
If you are not defending that claim, then what exactly are you defending?
As Mama used to say, "Shit or get off the pot."