America’s new doctrine of Empire Can Trump save Europe from itself?

When I was a child, I once, after being told off by my mother, conspicuously gathered together some treasured toys into a tea towel, and wrapped them onto the end of a broom handle, as I had seen tramps do in cartoons. Declaring that I was running away, I made it as far as the garden gate, where I lingered for some long minutes, waiting for my mother to rush out and usher me back into the warm security of home, torn between the certainty that she would — and a dread anxiety that I was, as I had declared I wanted, now truly on my own. So it is today with Europe’s political elites, endlessly declaring that this time everything has changed, and the continent must now stand on its own in a harsh and frightening world, while secretly anticipating, with mounting dread, to be ushered back into America’s stifling if protective embrace. Yet in this instance, our rulers must be careful what they wish for.

The European reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has overwhelmingly been one of horror: at being cast out, weak and under-equipped, into a grown-up world full of terrors. Yet the framing that the NSS represents America’s “divorce” from European concerns seems precisely wrong. Instead, it marks the opposite. Walking back its Pacific commitments in the interests of a stable equilibrium with China; its “spreading [of] liberal ideology” in Africa; and its “misguided experiment” in urging Middle Eastern regimes into “abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government”, Washington’s new strategic doctrine is explicit in retreating to core interests. In its declaration of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, Washington reasserts its traditional right to dominance over the Western Hemisphere. When it comes to our own continent, it makes clear that rather than casting us adrift, Europe is to be drawn closer into America’s now openly civilisational empire.

When I was a child, I once, after being told off by my mother, conspicuously gathered together some treasured toys into a tea towel, and wrapped them onto the end of a broom handle, as I had seen tramps do in cartoons. Declaring that I was running away, I made it as far as the garden gate, where I lingered for some long minutes, waiting for my mother to rush out and usher me back into the warm security of home, torn between the certainty that she would — and a dread anxiety that I was, as I had declared I wanted, now truly on my own. So it is today with Europe’s political elites, endlessly declaring that this time everything has changed, and the continent must now stand on its own in a harsh and frightening world, while secretly anticipating, with mounting dread, to be ushered back into America’s stifling if protective embrace. Yet in this instance, our rulers must be careful what they wish for.

The European reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has overwhelmingly been one of horror: at being cast out, weak and under-equipped, into a grown-up world full of terrors. Yet the framing that the NSS represents America’s “divorce” from European concerns seems precisely wrong. Instead, it marks the opposite. Walking back its Pacific commitments in the interests of a stable equilibrium with China; its “spreading [of] liberal ideology” in Africa; and its “misguided experiment” in urging Middle Eastern regimes into “abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government”, Washington’s new strategic doctrine is explicit in retreating to core interests. In its declaration of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, Washington reasserts its traditional right to dominance over the Western Hemisphere. When it comes to our own continent, it makes clear that rather than casting us adrift, Europe is to be drawn closer into America’s now openly civilisational empire.

With Washington confronted by two overt civilisation states — China and Russia — the NSS makes clear a division between the world without, in its declaration to maintain “good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours”, and its new assertiveness in dominating the world within — the sphere that was, until recently, unabashedly called “Western civilisation”. So, the NSS declares, Washington will “push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms” in a process of cultural retrenchment limited to the “countries that share, or say they share, these principles” of Enlightenment liberty, drawn from Europe’s unique civilisational path. The NSS cannot be clearer that this is Washington’s aim: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Again and again, the document emphasises its civilisational focus: Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”, it declares. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence”, because “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.”

Yet rather than a civilisation state, Europe’s current form of governance looks more like a civilisational suicide note to the Trump administration. Like a stern parent gathering its wayward charge back into the family fold, the United States now limits its interest in the domestic politics of foreign nations to that of its European kin. As the Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared after leaving Brussels: “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”

How much more explicit could Washington be over its determinedly civilisational ethos? Perhaps it is because such a worldview is now so alien to Europe’s rulers that this clearly and repeatedly expressed focus has been glossed over in European commentary so far. Or perhaps it is because they fear, while “perched in unstable minority governments” as the NSS cruelly if accurately observes, that it may strike a chord among the European peoples they so waveringly rule. Though expressed snarkily, The Economist’s defence editor Shashank Joshi is perhaps closer to the mark than most in tweeting “Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.” Likewise the comment by the EU’s former high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, that Trump “wants a white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands and voting preferences”. What both Joshi and Borrell frame pejoratively as a “white” Europe is, of course, the until-very-recently uncontroversial belief that individual European countries should remain the homeland states of their titular peoples: that Finland should be predominantly composed of Finns, for example, and Italy of Italians. This is, after all, the organising principle by which almost every European state was founded, and over which many bloody wars have been fought.

As the NSS declares, in a frank manner that would invite censure if not police attention in Europe itself: “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. 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.” A Trump administration that has rejected any interest in the internal affairs of Asia, Africa and the Middle East has no desire to manage the tumultuous affairs of their diasporas in Europe itself. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, for America in the total “Birminghamisation” of Britain, or the replacement of Europe’s wider population by non-Europeans, especially after the failure of America’s experience of world hegemony, in which advocates of distant peoples were permitted to “suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own”.

Such a worldview is of a piece with Trump’s recent declaration that he will ban Third World migration to the United States, coupled with his preference for European immigration, and preferential asylum for white South Africans. Even within the Western Hemisphere, it is Canada that the Trump administration expresses the desire to annex, and not Latin America, where, the NSS declares, America’s interest lies in ensuring the region “remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. The Trump administration is increasingly strident in its declarations that the Hart-Celler Act, which opened the United States to non-European migration, was disastrous. In the President’s overt support of “remigration” — seen in its current, explicitly hostile focus on America’s Somali minority — the terminology of Europe’s Nouvelle Droite has entered the Oval Office, just as the Department of Homeland Security now spends its time tweeting openly Dissident Right memes. The borderless Utopianism of the 2000s, and the radical, racialised discourse and policymaking of 2010s liberals have brought about precisely the nativist reaction they were always warned against. Just a decade ago, all of this seemed unthinkable: now the rhetoric and policy goals of a few dozen Austrian, French and German Identitarian students are returning to Europe via the White House. For European Rightists, this may prove a mixed blessing.

The NSS declares that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”, and that “our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory”. An unpublished version of the document seen by the Defense One website adds that “we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life… while remaining pro-American”, and focus on specific countries such as Poland, Austria, Hungary and Italy “with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union]”. The document’s assertions that Europe’s elites survive through “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” — and “subversion of democratic processes” which “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” — imply that Washington will not look kindly on quasi-constitutional attempts to prevent Right-wing parties from gaining power: such as the forthcoming state elections in eastern Germany. Rather than actively helping Right-wing governments into power, then, it is more probable that the Trump administration will prevent faltering liberal administrations from clinging onto by dubiously undemocratic means.

Yet while it is difficult to imagine the Brussels clerisy, already faltering against a populist upsurge driven by unwanted mass migration, rallying angry European voters against Trump on this exact matter, there are nonetheless risks for Europe’s Right-wing parties. Deepened integration — or rather subjugation — within America’s imperial realm would pose fewer immediate risks if a Republican victory, and a Vance administration, after Trump were a more certain prospect. But a win for a Democratic Party that is now increasingly Third Worldist in both composition and aspiration would surely mean that Washington’s might and influence would be deployed against the European Right just as nakedly and unsparingly. In any case, the gulf between rhetoric and action within the Trump administration has often been a wide one. Europe’s current elites can perhaps be forgiven for their “wait and see” approach: perhaps the Republicans will lose the midterms, and with them the opportunity to reset the empire according to their vision.

Yet the looming and unsatisfactory conclusion to the Ukraine War adds extra time pressure to Europe’s leaders, a sense of jeopardy which works in Washington’s favour. The war initially seemed, in a strange way, a blessing to Europe’s leadership: a chance to preserve their legitimacy, in demonstrating the strength, will, and autonomy of a united Europe and so stave off their reckoning at the hands of their voters. Instead, due to their incompetence, it has accelerated their downfall. Europe is simply not ready to confront Russia alone, and so must cling tighter to Washington’s skirts even as Trump mocks and reviles its leadership. A Europe that can defend itself against external threats — as the Trump administration claims to want — will, eventually, summon up the hard power to become an autonomous actor in a world of predatory empires. Some measure of independence may yet be found, in decades to come, from this terminal point of Europe’s century of humiliation.

It would, though, have been better to have asserted our autonomy before this moment of existential crisis, as France has long urged. Yet the Atlanticist elites too long insisted otherwise, and now bewail, with genuine bewilderment, the kicking they receive from the boot they were installed to lick. Now, faced with aggression from the East, they must subject themselves to humiliation from the West. Like the Byzantine officials who, at the Eastern Roman Empire’s lowest ebb, declared the Ottoman turban to be a better fate than the Papal tiara, the choice at this perilous moment is which subordination will prove less painful. The price of American protection, the NSS makes clear, is ideological conformity: it is not Europe being discarded by its imperial master, but its current leadership. For us Europeans, whom they have dragged to this civilisational nadir, their removal will at least be some small consolation.