Ian Bremmer’s email regarding Trump’s new National Security Strategy echoes David Brooks’ article about the need for morality in America’s national life. Ian Bremmer writes:
What’s most striking to me about this document isn’t any specific policies, but what it reveals about values. Increasingly, the United States and Europe don’t share them. This reflects a change in America far more than a change in Europe. Trump sees a G-Zero world ruled by the law of the jungle, where might makes right and everything can be bought. For all its flaws, institutional quirks, and bureaucratic sclerosis, the European Union stands for something else: rule of law, liberal democracy, human rights, multilateralism. You can roll your eyes at that list all you want, but it’s the foundation of the entire European project. Heck, it’s why America built the transatlantic alliance in the first place. (The alternative, two world wars, didn’t work out too well for anyone.) And it’s now in direct tension with what Washington is selling.
One of the document’s primary arguments is that Europe, mainly through its immigration policies, is facing “civilizational erasure.” That sounds offensive on its face, but it’s worth noting that many European leaders – in France, Germany, Italy – have been raising similar concerns for years. In fact, EU migration policy has tightened considerably since the days of Angela Merkel’s open-door approach. The key difference is that Europeans want to address these and other challenges by making Europe stronger, not by tearing it apart. Even increasingly popular Euroskeptic populist parties across the continent have stopped pretending they’d be better off outside the union – Brexit cured them of that. Marine Le Pen’s party used to flirt with “Frexit” – turns out it’s a political loser. Instead, they argue that bolstered sovereignty for each member state is the best way to strengthen Europe as a whole. A strong European Union is one of the few policies most European voters actually agree on.
The Trump administration sees it differently. The NSS talks openly about “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That’s not a diplomatic boilerplate, it’s the United States committing to undermine its erstwhile closest allies from within. It also institutionalizes what Trump, Vance, Elon Musk, and others have already been doing: boosting far-right, anti-EU forces from Germany to the United Kingdom.
European leaders should see this for what it is. If Washington is no longer aligned with Europe on values Europeans consider essential, then American electoral interference starts to look a lot like Russian meddling. Most European leaders now believe the United States can no longer be counted on as an ally. That’s an existential crisis for the transatlantic alliance. Or, as we put it in our top risk back in January, the G-Zero wins. What the Europeans are prepared to do about it is another matter entirely.