Trump’s new war on Europe

What does it say?

If you are the supreme military power on earth, and the world’s largest economy, and you won the Second World War and reordered the world in your image, your strategy is supposed to be “grand”. But this one is not. In fact, it begins by taking a swipe at all previous US grand strategy:

“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

That last sentence, in black and white, signals the Trump administration’s determination to retreat from global leadership. That first sentence could have been written by Vladimir Putin or Xi Jin Ping.

The whole document is premised on the Putin-Xi vision of a “multipolar world” in which the US sphere of influence is the Americas and the Western Pacific and Europe is the battlefield between three powers.

We may lament the demise of American global ambition – because our entire security has depended on it up to now – but we have to read this signal strategically, and as Europeans, existentially.

From its premise – we wrongly tried to order the world with rules and laws – flows the practical conclusion:

• An enhanced Monroe doctrine in which the US will claim the right to order the “Western Hemisphere” – i.e. the Americas, Caribbean and the Western Pacific – to guarantee US security and access to raw materials and reduce narcotraffic.
• To preserve freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific and secure US access to critical materials, while countering Chinese influence.
• To prevent Iran dominating the Middle East while opting out of military commitments that keep the US “bogged down” in the region.
• To ensure that US technology and tech standards “drive the world forward” (dominate) – especially in AI, biotech and quantum technologies.

And finally the paragraph that has rightly got European diplomats chewing their MontBlancs with anxiety:

“We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”

Making America diminished again

The 2017 NSS, issued in Trump’s first term, was calm, analytical and written in professional language. But now Trump has issued a list of demands on the rest of the world, combined with a litany of insults. The problem is, with American power both physically and morally diminished by America’s democratic decay, you just don’t get to run the world this way.

The message of this strategy is: do what we tell you, buy our technology, adopt our standards, keep the Gulf and Taiwan Strait free, give us your critical minerals at knock down prices, buy our exports, lend us money but we’re not going to shoulder any global responsibility other than what delivers immediate bottom line benefits for the techbro oligarchy and some Atlantic City casino owners.

These demands are unlikely to be fulfilled. Like Trump’s central economic demand – for the world to go on buying US debt while avoiding the trade surplus needed to balance that transaction – the strategy is unrealistic and will therefore fail.

But it at least allows the rest of the world to calibrate against something we didn’t have before. It has been common for US diplomats and security professionals to say quietly to their European and Canadian interlocutors: we don’t really know what Trump wants, from one day to the next. 

But now we do. And what it means for us here in the UK can only be calibrated once we understand the intent with Russia, Ukraine and the European Union.

Trump’s Grand Bargain with Putin

The Strategy outlines a proposed grand bargain with Vladimir Putin, which coincides roughly with what Putin wants.

• “A predisposition to non-intervention” – America will stay out of conflicts wherever possible.
• “Primacy of nations” – transnational institutions are to be disparaged, ignored and reformed to the point where international law doesn’t work
• “A readjustment of military presence” away from theatres whose importance to US national security is deprioritised

But even as it turns away from the European theatre, Trump’s America wants to reshape it and reorder it. The logic is that Europe is declining economically and civilisationally, because it is over-regulated and has let in too many immigrants. As a result it has come to see Russia as an existential threat, following the invasion of Ukraine.

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America intends to “manage” European relations with Russia, “both to establish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states”.

In the worst case scenario that means Nato’s Article V is dead. Because Article V states that if Russia were to attack Estonia tomorrow the US should fight on Europe’s side, not “manage its relations” with the adversary.

Even in a less doom-laden reading, this means the Trump administration will seek to force Ukraine into an unjust peace and coerce the European powers into accepting it, while at the same time using overt political interference to topple centrist governments who want to preserve the international rule of law.

The Strategy continues:

“It is a core interest of the US to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.”

The commitment to Ukraine as a viable state is important. But the rest of it is a veiled threat by the US to leave Europe to confront Russia alone. Throughout the entire document there is a refusal to characterise Russia as a threat either to the rules based order (which Trump rejects) or to the interests of Europeans.

And here is the gross payload:

“The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.” 

That is basically an echo of what every Putinist mouthpiece on the European far right and the Stalinist left has been saying for the past four years. And it, again, leaves the ends and means of US grand strategy for Europe misaligned.

Trump wants to stabilise the Europe-Russia conflict. He wants Europe to take primary responsibility for its own defence. But he plans to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. And at the same time he expects Europe to open its markets to US goods and services.

How should we respond?

First, the strategy is right to point out that together, European states overmatch Russia in every capability except nuclear weapons.

Second, his declared intent to “cultivate resistance” to liberalism, anti-fascism, welfarism and sustainability in Europe has to be resisted – by building on every architecture of multilateral co-operation that exists and creating new ones.

Third, we need to keep Ukraine in the fight. Not just in this phase of the conflict but as a democratic European power, aligned to both the EU and Nato, and if Nato fails, then the coalition of willing democratic states that wants to resist the global collapse that Trump and the tech oligarchs revel in.

Because what is missing from this entire document – startlingly so – is an understanding of the threat. That’s the tell.

All national security strategies in an age of turbulence have to begin from an understanding of the threat, the stakes and the global dynamics.

Put bluntly, for all that they rail against Europe, its culture, the multilateral (they call them “transnational”) institutions, the authors of this document do not understand the threat to US national security. 

As I’ve said repeatedly: the multipolar world is not a new order, it is a chaos. There is a power vacuum, in which the US cannot even control its own client state, Israel, while China ran away from any form of diplomatic protection from Iran the moment the Israelis and US Air Force bombed it.

The only way of preventing “any adversary from dominating Europe”, the only way of preventing escalation between Europe and Russia, indeed the only way of keeping sea routes and supply chains open, as the US wants, is through an order where there are rules.

For all the strategy’s obsession with the principle of national sovereignty, the true interest of the US tech oligarchy, and the mineral-state oligarchs who are their prime investors, is the triumph of the corporation over the state – only in a rules-free rather than a rules-based order.

Geopolitics without gravity

Amid this new reality, there are some things we can control and others we cannot. We can control whether Europe remains united, or lets itself become carved up between Russian fascism and US tech oligarchy: and indeed the EU has fined Musk’s X $140m for breaching its laws – showing how much control we really have, if we want it.

Strategically, whether Trump is a blip or not, America is in a process of decline. All the hubris of the strategy about kicking the Chinese out of Peru’s critical mineral sector, or plundering Congo for rare earths, is just that. American power – above all the soft power Trump still thinks he can wield – depended on the US shouldering its global economic and diplomatic responsibilities. 

This manifesto for petulant isolationism signals its refusal to do so, and it requires European states to respond with their own strategy, weighing their own interests and finding the means to achieve their ends.

The most immediate thing this strategy demands is realism in the UK foreign policy and security establishments. We need a comprehensive security agreement with the EU and to rejoin the customs union.

If I look now at Britain’s own National Security Strategy 2025, released in July, what needs to change?

Trump wants to create a burden sharing network within Nato. We can live with that and should seek, with France, Germany and Poland, to lead it. Other countries in Europe – the free riders like Austria and Ireland, and the shy Atlanticists like Spain – will have read the strategy with alarm: by reaching out with a strong offer of bi- and mini-lateralism we can strengthen ties with them.

Britain’s NSS said it would: “Pursue both a deeper trade, technology and security deal with the US and a closer economic and strategic partnership with the EU.”

After today, it is not that we have to choose between one and the other, but that we need a clearer statement of how we will choose, when Trump and the EU present us with choices. It is clear that Trump intends not only to rip open the EU, enforcing “US technology and tech standards”, but to promote far right politics and Russia-friendly geopolitics. 

To the extent that he does so in practice rather than through rhetoric we just have to say: no thanks. The UK’s response to the Strategy should rest on these principles, which we need to convince the British people are vital to our survival:

• Support Ukraine
• Rearm Britain
• Become militant in defence of democracy, cohesion and tolerance
• Seek leadership in the emergence of Europe as a global power. 

Even if the GOP gets slaughtered in the mid-terms and loses the next presidential election to a centrist who wants to maintain the rules-based international system, this fascist-adjacent isolationism is now established as a magnetic pole in American foreign policy. There is every chance it will become dominant in American thinking in this century.