U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order at the White House in Washington on Thursday.AL DRAGO/Reuters
The latest United States National Security Strategy, an outline of the proposed ends and means of U.S. foreign policy, has set alarms ringing among traditional American allies, and champagne corks popping in the capitals of traditional foes. It’s not pleasant reading.
The current occupant of the White House, an idiosyncratic, instinctive and impulsive policy maker, will feel no obligation to follow the strategy. But it represents what the MAGA movement, or at least part of it, hopes and believes. It’s also a primer on where the Republican Party’s head is at – and how Donald Trump’s eventual successor may think and act.
It’s also entirely in step with a speech given last February in Munich by the likely successor, Vice-President JD Vance. European leaders looking for the reassurance of American support against Russia were instead surprised to find themselves the target of a Moscow-sympathetic, anti-woke harangue.
It was the equivalent of an earlier generation of Europeans dialling 911, hoping to hear the reassuring voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt – and instead getting Philippe Pétain, the collaborationist dictator of Vichy France. Send help? No. You are the real enemy, your society is decadent and you deserve defeat.
The national security document, released late last week, reimagines the world in light of America’s culture wars. There’s no mention of “human rights,” but multiple references to “God-given natural rights.” And one of America’s key foes is identified as “the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations.”
Which organizations? The only specific examples given of “transnationalism” are European.
Whereas America once built alliances and transnational organizations – the most important being NATO – to defend Europe against the military threat of Soviet communism, the new strategy document sees the elected, centre-right and centre-left governments of Europe, and the European Union, as somehow cultural threats to Europe and the U.S.
There is no criticism of Russia or China on human rights and democracy. The document also says that it’s time for “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring” the Middle Eastern monarchies and dictatorships “into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.”
Some realism about the limits of American power is not unreasonable. But this isn’t that. It’s a flip from targeting dictatorships to alleging that allied democracies are, in fact, not democracies at all.
Europe is portrayed as a kind of toxic woke dump. (This is beyond weird, given that woke racial categories and DEI are American inventions, exported to Europe.)
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The document worries about relative European economic decline, but quickly pivots to its real concern: the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe, due to “mass migration.”
“Over the long term,” says the paper, “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.”
It’s as if the authors read Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, in which an Islamist party takes over France, and took it as a news report.
One of the ironies of this obsession with immigration to Europe is that the U.S. has, and has always had, a much higher percentage of non-white citizens than any major European country. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that, in less than a decade, a majority of Americans will be non-white. What does this suggest about that administration’s view of that?
Much of the document is devoted to economic and military security. It hints at a return to a world of spheres of influence, with the Americas as an exclusive American sphere.
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It announces a “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine: “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
What does it all mean for Canada?
We only get a single passing mention in the document, on a list of countries who are urged to work with the U.S. to stop China from dumping subsidized manufactured goods. It’s an example of the kind of co-operation that the U.S. needs, and allies want to offer. But this document mostly disdains co-operation for America Alone – a vision of untrammelled exercise of power and imposition of national will.
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, once interviewed people in and around the administration, searching for a definition of the Trump Doctrine. The most concise and accurate? “We’re America, bitch.”
That about sums it up.