Trump on Europe’s 'civilizational erasure'

In its update of the United States’ national security strategy released Friday, the Trump administration says Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” and says the United States will support like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent to prevent a future in which “certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” The New York Times reports.

The strategy says the United States should be “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting political parties that fight against migration and promote nationalism. That describes several right-wing populist parties such as Reform U.K. in Britain and the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which has been classified as an extremist party by German intelligence services, the Times says.

The strategy says Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it says are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it says the policy of the United States should be to 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 strategy says.

The strategy echoes some of the language of the Great Replacement Theory, a nationalist conspiracy theory embraced by some of Trump’s top aides that warns of a deliberate effort to replace white people with nonwhite immigrants, the Times says.

“This edition of a standard exercise designed to formalize an administration’s priorities and, more broadly, its worldview marks a historic rupture,” says France’s LeMonde newspaper. “Never before had an official document of this nature demonstrated such indifference toward America’s adversaries and such disregard toward its traditional allies, especially those in Europe.”

Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt says the strategy “places itself to the right of the extreme right.”

The strategy appears to echo Russian President Putin’s language, by saying the United States should be “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance,” the Times says.

And, in fact, the BBC reports that Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said of the strategy in an interview published by Russia’s state news agency Tass on Sunday, “The adjustments we’re seeing ... are largely consistent with our vision.”

A separate Times analysis says European governments have in recent years tried to wean themselves off American military might by increasing their own defense spending and cross-border military cooperation, in anticipation of a break in trans-Atlantic relations.

“But the reality remains that Europe — lacking real military integration, key capabilities and ammunition — is hugely reliant on the United States and on an administration that professes to not like it much,” the Times says.

Here is reaction from Democratic lawmakers, compiled by The Hill.

Here is expert reaction from The Council on Foreign Relations.

And here, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Here is context in a podcast with longtime foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan on “the new world disorder.”

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