America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe

Trump's new National Security Strategy: what if groypers cosplayed George Kennan?

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Italy at the Grand Continent Summit, a geopolitics meeting which takes the word summit seriously. It culminated in a trip to the Matterhorn glacier, 4,000 meters or so above sea level (I should be clear that this isn’t the kind of event that I usually get invited to). There was a lot of discussion, much of it skeptical, about the U.S.-Europe relationship, but no-one I talked to on the closing day had any idea of how wild the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy would get.

Back when I taught “Intro to International Relations," I always did a week on “grand strategy." Half the lecture talked about international relations theorists who dreamed of becoming the new George Kennan, drafting some sweeping and comprehensive approach to world order that would remake US foreign policy making for decades. The other half described the more mundane and important activity of crafting America’s National Security Strategy, a document that does its best to spell out a broad strategic vision, but inevitably gets pulled into the awkward realities of complicated issues, different factions in US politics, ally politics etc.

The Trump administration’s new strategy for the world is a kind of Groyper Grand Strategy Cosplay, which simultaneously purports to be a guide to specific policy.* It is set to fail, even by its own ludicrous and wildly offensive standards. As I used to tell my students, a National Security Strategy speaks to three audiences: the U.S. government itself; allies and friends, and adversaries. The new strategy can’t be coherently implemented by the first, will alienate the second still further, and open up opportunities to the third.

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As mentioned, a National Security Strategy (NSS from here on in), sets the government’s national security priorities. New administrations have new goals and approaches to the world - each at some point comes up with its own NSS.

The NSS doesn’t have any binding force, but it is meant to serve an important practical use. The United States policy making apparatus is enormously complex, with many different institutions, agencies and departments which have some greater or lesser role in national security, but regularly get in each other’s way. That poses enormous challenges of coordination.

The NSS helps to mitigate these challenges by laying out the administration’s broad objectives, tradeoffs and preferred approaches, so that everyone has a rough sense of how policies are supposed to fit together. However, broad objectives and approaches don’t magically coordinate the government on their own. That is why the US has a National Security Council (NSC), which is primarily responsible for connecting the priorities of the president to the different parts of the government, building understanding across institutions and agencies, and banging heads together when heads need to be banged. Then, those institutions and agencies are supposed to do all the things that need to be done given these priorities, coming back and providing further information as needed. This is a gross simplification of an enormously complex cybernetic mess, but it gives the broad picture as I understand it.

The brand new NSS purports to be vastly clearer and more effective than its predecessors (which it describes as mere “laundry lists” of “vague platitudes”). Finally, after many false starts, America’s true national security interests have been discovered, heralding a new age of decisive national security policy making!

Or, perhaps, not. Laying out grand plans is not much help if the government is incapable of delivering on them. Who is going to make sure that these priorities get implemented? The NSC has been gutted in a series of ideological purges, egged on by those who interpret expertise and experience as codewords for Deep State sympathies. It is less than half its previous size, and even less effective than that might suggest to connect priorities to process. Matters are even worse in the State Department, and the strategic decision making bits of major national security institutions aren’t doing great either. People are still fleeing and being fired. So too for the bits of government that are actually supposed to implement the detail of policy. All this is compounded by the president, who most likely hasn’t read the document, and will continue to do whatever the hell he feels like doing in the moment.

That all has big consequences, if you think through the implications. People blame the Trump administration’s foreign policy failures on bad ideas, self-dealing and inexperience. These indeed are important problems. But, as someone recently remarked to me, there is another, even more fundamental challenge. Even if all the gross stupidity and cupidity magically evaporated, the Trump administration lacks the institutional bandwidth to execute the sweeping changes that it proposes. It has hollowed out the coordinating apparatus that the US government uses to set priorities and coordinate across the whole bureaucratic apparatus. Stuff still happens, but haphazardly. When underlings turn priorities into policy, they are likely to do so in different ways that may be contradictory or even mutually undermining. Sometimes this will be the product of sincere mistakes, and sometimes of deliberate misinterpretation, as different factions vie for advantage. There isn’t any effective NSC to manage clashes or ride herd.

The problems aren’t just within the US government. The NSS also gives allies and other friendly countries some sense of what to expect from America. That isn’t its direct purpose, but it is absolutely something that its drafters need to think about when they’re writing it. They know that the document will be read by other countries that want to figure out what US national security priorities are, and what their consequences might be.

What signals does Trump’s new NSS send to allies and potential allies? There is lots that could be said e.g. about the revival of the “Monroe Doctrine” (under which the US considers the western hemisphere its exclusive sphere of influence, and the “Trump corollary” of “enlisting” and “expanding,” whatever that is supposed to mean in practice (please don’t call these ‘vague platitudes’ - it would be rude). However, others are better suited to explain these questions than I am.

What I can talk about is Europe, having just sat through a couple of days of conversations among Europeans, and having listened to many similar conversations over the last several months. It has been clear for some while that the Trump administration has a … novel … understanding of America’s relationship with Europe. But it has not always been as clear as it ought be to European officials. These officials have often vacillated in response to previously unthinkable demands, sometimes making concessions, sometimes looking to preserve a little autonomy. Brief shocks (such as J.D. Vance’s speech at Munich) have not been sufficient to galvanize long term coherence.

I can’t say for sure that the NSS will do the galvanizing, but I think that it will push Europe a fair distance further along the road to resistance. The document soft-pedals America’s rivalry with China (the central theme of the first Trump administration’s NSS) while spitting malice and venom at America’s most established supposed allies. Its clear message is that Europe - as it is currently constituted - is a threat to U.S. wellbeing.

The National Security Strategy declares that Europe is not just in economic decline, but faced with the prospect of “civilizational erasure.” The “European Union and other transnational bodies” are undermining “political liberty and sovereignty.” Europe is riddled with “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.” It is led by “unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.” Most fundamentally, Europe is being turned into a zone of “strife” by migration policies, so that it will be “unrecognizable” in two decades. Certain NATO members will become “majority non-European”and no longer reliable allies. It doesn’t take much sophistication to decipher what terms like “majority non-European” are intended to mean.

However, the NSS says, America “cannot afford to write Europe off.” Instead, it will work to foster what it calls “genuine democracy, freedom of expression and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual nations’ character and history.” America “encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” To help all this along, the NSS says that America will undertake actions which include “[c]ultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and “[b]uilding up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges.”

This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity. Accomplishing this transformation would involve undermining existing liberal governments in cahoots with Europe’s own far right, and turning Eastern Europe into an ideological wedge against its Western neighbors.

That all sounds horrifying: might it work? Theodore Roosevelt famously recommended that the U.S. should speak softly while carrying a big stick. Big talk and soft stick are likely less effective.

Again: the Trump administration’s capacity to turn rhetoric into concerted action is undermined by its self-created lack of bandwidth and capacity to coordinate policy. Nor does the Trump administration have the solid domestic support in the United States that it needs to make its threats and promises stick over time. It is electorally weak and looks, at least on current trends, to be growing weaker.

It probably isn’t a good idea to telegraph threats like a James Bond villain. Vacillating European liberal leaders are now less likely to be hesitant than in the past. The Trump administration has declared, in its defining national security document, that the EU and they themselves are a security threat to the United States. I suspect that this is more likely to build solidarity and resistance than to break it down.

We’ll likely see very soon whether this guess is right. The NSS depicts the EU as a threat to liberty, casting its restrictions on social media as censorship and oppression. The same morning that the NSS was published, the EU issued a preliminary finding that Twitter/X had breached EU law proposing to fine it 120 million euro. More findings and more fines are likely in the future.

Even before the finding was announced, JD Vance had condemned it. Elon Musk has asked that the US not only punish the EU, but the individual officials who were responsible for the decision. Will the US retaliate against the EU, and if so, how? If it does retaliate, will the EU back down, or will it stick to its guns? The NSS has likely lowered the odds of capitulation and increased the odds of resistance. So too has Trump’s decision to mostly back down from similar threats that he made against Brazil.

None of this implies that Europe is not in serious political and economic trouble. But the NSS likely undermines rather than bolsters the US ability to reshape Europe, which it would anyway find hard. Perhaps the US can help European far right parties a little. Alternatively, its efforts to help them might turn out to be counterproductive. Europe’s more serious political challenges are internal; if the US accomplishes anything it will likely be opportunistic, on the margin, and happen half by accident.

Finally, America’s rivals and adversaries will take lessons from the NSS too. The decision to target close US allies, rather than China or Russia, says a whole lot about America’s priorities right now. They are inward focused - the guff about civilizational collapse in Europe reflects the administration’s anxieties about the continued strength of liberalism within its own political system.

All this suggests that America isn’t going to pay much serious attention to the rest of the world for the next few years, except when it pays off for Trump and his cronies in very direct ways. The US government’s lack of available bandwidth may worsen as it gets mired down in some of the mistakes that it makes. When America does pay attention to the world, it will likely make bad choices, which may create sometimes create greater uncertainty and risk for America’s adversaries, but may also open up greater opportunities. Finally, America is now saying that key allies are in fact its greatest enemy. That gives those allies strong incentives to reduce their dependence on American power and technological and economic platforms, building closer connections among themselves and perhaps with others. All this is likely to the benefit of those who’d like to see America taken down a peg or three.

The Trump administration’s vision of American greatness is making the country poorer, weaker, and meaner. The new strategy document will do its own little bit to accelerate that process.

* In fairness, George Kennan was not nearly as far from the groypers on race and democracy as his aristocratic mien might suggest.