Trump's National Security Strategy and the European Union, or: A sly plan to make life much, much harder for the Eurotards in Brussels

On 5 December, the Trump administration released a concise 29-page document outlining their National Security Strategy as required by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Mostly these documents are a snooze, but the Trump NSS is remarkably readable and at points also pretty provocative. This week it succeeded in drawing waves of aneuristic doomerism from the impotent Eurocracy, which in itself is enough to motivate a close read.

I’m not going to compile all the vague repetitive screechy verbiage of our political and journalistic overlords, but Chancellor Friedrich Merz is always a good barometer for the Continental mood. In a speech on Tuesday, Merz said that the Trump administration with this document has effectively abolished the entire “normative West”:

What we once called the normative West no longer exists in this form. At best, it is still a geographical designation, but no longer a normative bond that holds us together. With the publication of the new security strategy of the United States of America last week, it has become clear that J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February this year was not a one-off, but the beginning of a strategic reorientation of the United States of America. This affects foreign policy, security policy, economic policy and also European policy, insofar as it exists.

Merz just throws in random phrases to increase his syllable count, but I like his concluding allowance that “European policy” may not even be a thing. Separately, Merz called “some aspects” of the NSS “unacceptable … from a European perspective” and professed to see “no need for the Americans to now want to save democracy in Europe” because “if it were possible to save” democracy “we could manage that on our own.”

In my discussions with the Americans, I say: “America first is fine,” but “America alone” cannot be in your interest … You also need partners in the world, and one of those partners can be Europe. And if you can’t get along with Europe, then at least make Germany your partner.

A direct partnership with Germany, bypassing Merz’s “Europe,” is as we will see exactly the kind of thing the United States is aiming for. And it should make establishment politicians like Merz very, very nervous – perhaps even more nervous than they are.

Many European commentators have expressed puzzlement about establishment despair over the NSS. This is, after all, a document with an entire section on “Promoting European Greatness,” which affirms that “Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States” in part because “America is … sentimentally attached to the European continent.” Isn’t that what we Euros like to hear? This was my view too at first, but then I reread the NSS, and I reread it again, and I read other things, and now I understand it more fully. Trump’s NSS is overtly hostile to the European Union, and it sketches – sometimes openly and sometimes between the lines – an aggressive strategy to undermine the Eurocrats in Brussels and expand Trumpist influence on the Continent, in part by using their own repressive strategies against them.

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