When President Donald Trump’s second-term national security strategy arrived last Friday, it landed like a lead balloon across the Atlantic. Yet while the unnecessarily harsh vitriol toward Europe is an American problem, the persistent shock and confusion among Europeans anytime Trump and his team say anything damning is very much a European one.
For the better part of a decade, Trump has been signaling, explicitly and implicitly, that the trans-Atlantic relationship will have to look fundamentally different going forward. Just how it will look is still up in the air.
When comparing Trump’s second NSS to his first one, the tone toward Europe has shifted markedly. The first term strategy focused on forcing and then taking credit for increased burden sharing and burden shifting. The second has a focus on Europe’s supposed “civilizational erasure” due to mass migration and the European Union’s bureaucratic overstepping.
Although the new NSS notes that NATO members have boosted defense spending, its treatment of the alliance is far narrower than in 2017. Rather than emphasizing capability-building or reaffirming Article 5 commitments, it concentrates on the prospect that European NATO members could become majority non-European in the coming decades and what that might mean for collective defense. The document’s call to “end the perception, and prevent the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance” also marks what appears to be the first explicit endorsement by a U.S. administration of closing NATO’s open-door policy.
The NSS casts the EU as a power-hungry bureaucracy, one that tramples personal freedoms under the banner of “protecting democracy,” a phrase that makes Trump’s administration recoil in disgust. In Trump’s eyes, the EU has evolved from a mere protectionist racket designed to “screw” America into something far more menacing: an existential threat to Western values themselves.
So how should Europeans interpret this document?
First, and most importantly, it’s time for Europeans to come to terms with the fact that this administration in no way wants to be challenged by the EU, either economically or in terms of so-called “values.” This means Europeans should expect more explicit support by the Trump administration for parties in Europe that share both its vision and values. While this will justifiably be viewed as interference in European domestic affairs, there are few realistic means of preventing it. European governments will object; the Trump administration will dismiss these concerns and continue regardless.
Second, the NSS conspicuously omits any reference to Russia as a threat. This signals that Europe must now develop its own defense capabilities—both to deter potential conflict and to defend the continent should one occur.
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The era of relying on U.S. security guarantees is effectively over. Europeans should have already known this before the publication of the NSS, but if there are any lingering doubts, this should take care of them.
Overall, the new NSS should be the wake-up call Europeans need. The syrupy “America is back” message of the Biden administration is firmly in the past, and a new era of U.S.-European relations is upon us. It’s time for Europe to come to terms with this and meet the moment with strength rather than hand-wringing.
Rachel Rizzo is a senior fellow in the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.
