A sly plan to make life much, much harder for the Eurotards in Brussels
By Eugyppius
A Plague Chronicle
December 13, 2025
On 5 December, the Trump administration released a concise 29-page document outlining their National Security Strategy as required by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Mostly these documents are a snooze, but the Trump NSS is remarkably readable and at points also pretty provocative. This week it succeeded in drawing waves of aneuristic doomerism from the impotent Eurocracy, which in itself is enough to motivate a close read.
I'm not going to compile all the vague repetitive screechy verbiage of our political and journalistic overlords, but Chancellor Friedrich Merz is always a good barometer for the Continental mood. In a speech on Tuesday, Merz said that the Trump administration with this document has effectively abolished the entire "normative West":
What we once called the normative West no longer exists in this form. At best, it is still a geographical designation, but no longer a normative bond that holds us together. With the publication of the new security strategy of the United States of America last week, it has become clear that J.D. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February this year was not a one-off, but the beginning of a strategic reorientation of the United States of America. This affects foreign policy, security policy, economic policy and also European policy, insofar as it exists.
Merz just throws in random phrases to increase his syllable count, but I like his concluding allowance that "European policy" may not even be a thing. Separately, Merz called "some aspects" of the NSS "unacceptable... from a European perspective" and professed to see "no need for the Americans to now want to save democracy in Europe" because " if it were possible to save" democracy "we could manage that on our own."
In my discussions with the Americans, I say: "America first is fine," but "America alone" cannot be in your interest... You also need partners in the world, and one of those partners can be Europe. And if you can't get along with Europe, then at least make Germany your partner.
A direct partnership with Germany, bypassing Merz's "Europe," is as we will see exactly the kind of thing the United States is aiming for. And it should make establishment politicians like Merz very, very nervous - perhaps even more nervous than they are.
Many European commentators have expressed puzzlement about establishment despair over the NSS. This is, after all, a document with an entire section on "Promoting European Greatness," which affirms that "Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States" in part because "America is... sentimentally attached to the European continent." Isn't that what we Euros like to hear ? This was my view too at first, but then I reread the NSS, and I reread it again, and I read other things, and now I understand it more fully. Trump's NSS is overtly hostile to the European Union, and it sketches - sometimes openly and sometimes between the lines - an aggressive strategy to undermine the Eurocrats in Brussels and expand Trumpist influence on the Continent, in part by using their own repressive strategies against them.
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Trump's National Security Strategy is unsigned, but it bears the clear influence of Elbridge Colby, presently serving the Trump administration as Under Secretary of Defence for Policy. Colby, who identifies with the "realist" school of international relations, believes that China is the primary rival of the United States and that meeting the challenges of this rivalry will require the Americans to reduce their engagement in Europe. In general, geopolitical realists are sceptical of cherished liberal myths like "democratic peace theory" and approach international relations from the standpoint of simple strategic interests. These are also the core attitudes of the Trump administration, thanks to Colby and others like J.D. Vance who share his perspective.
Trump's departure from the rhetoric of universal humanitarianism is much more than a personal idiosyncrasy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a foolish era of unchallenged liberal hegemony. This was a period in which the American political establishment and the broader West decided that they had overcome all challenges to their geopolitical reach. All that remained for future statesmen was to extend and perfect the liberal democratic project forever and ever. Since 2015, however, China and to a lesser extent Russia have emerged as credible rivals to American influence. Thus the unbounded liberal vision is bounded once again, and the old utopian aspirations that emerged in the generation after 1990 begin to seem tarnished, naive and ridiculous. Perhaps it is no longer so important after all to destroy our industry to perfect the balance of atmospheric gases and to spread feminism and modern art appreciation through all the valleys of Afghanistan. Conflicting strategic interests matter a lot more. In this area especially, Trump as an outsider merely accelerates a political evolution that was already in the cards.
Of course, the various ideological excrescences that grew up like foul mushrooms under the unbounded liberal vision will not disappear overnight, and we cannot be certain what will replace them. An entrenched "foreign policy blob" in American bureaucracy, academia, the press and influential think-tanks is still arrayed against Trump's realist vision. The European political leadership remains faithful to this prior establishment, but if Trumpism lasts long enough, it will eventually remake the entire system. For the moment, there is tension in Europe, and Merz is left to mourn the "normative West."
Trump's NSS is an unapologetic plea for the defence of "core national interests." It decries past "foreign policy elites" who convinced themselves after the Cold War "that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country." The NSS insists instead that "the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests." It rejects the hapless democracy evangelism of past decades, emphasising that Americans want merely "good relations... with the nations of the world" and are no longer interested in "imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories." True to realist principles, it is also an explicitly nationalist strategy:
The world's fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty... We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.
The NSS calls for an end to mass migration:
In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass migration must end. Border security is the primary element of national security
Finally, the NSS promises to "oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies."
We need not search far for the "intrusive transnational organisations" that "hinder individual sovereignty." The European Union is very much in the crosshairs here, and justifiably, because the EU is the worst thing in Europe right now. Trump himself has called the EU " nastier than China" and complained (ahistorically!) that it " was formed in order to screw the United States." While these specific statements relate to trade practices, the general Euroscepticism of both Trump and his administration is much broader. After the EU hit Musk's X with a €120 million fine, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau responded with this wide-ranging attack on Brussels:
My recent trip to Brussels for the NATO Ministerial meeting left me with one overriding impression: the US has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the EU. These are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that Transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of our mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security-including censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba, etc etc. This inconsistency cannot continue. Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU's unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.
These sentiments are necessary prologue to section IV(3)(C) of the NSS, on "Promoting European Greatness." These pages open with a brief discussion of Europe's "insufficient military spending" and its chronic "economic stagnation," but they almost immediately brush these problems aside:
The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.
The NSS emphasises that "It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine," among other things "to stabilize European economies." Yet:
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. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.
In other words: The European Union has become a dysfunctional sclerotic bureaucratic monstrosity that has imposed a range of unpopular policies on its member states, some which even threaten to destroy the Continent. These policies are possible because out-of-touch, oblivious, hapless and unstable governments in core EU countries like France and Germany have suppressed the political opposition. As a result of these ongoing failures, the Americans fear "that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European" and that it is therefore "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."
The NSS thus calls for "unapologetic celebrations of European nations' individual character and history" and says that "the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism." In probably its most explosive (and, for people like Merz, ominous) clause, the NSS says the U.S. should "prioritize... cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations." An earlier, unreleased draft of the NSS was more explicit here, emphasising the importance of supporting " parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life...while remaining pro-American."
Basically, this means that the Trump administration wants to help bring sympathetic right-populist parties like Rassemblement national in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Reform in the United Kingdom into government. Such a development would moderate the European position on the war in Ukraine and also massively assist Trumpist opposition to the EU. The earlier draft was apparently even more explicit on anti-EU measures envisioned by the Trump administration, urging the U.S. to "work more with" countries like Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland "with the goal of pulling them away from the" EU. This has naturally occasioned a new wave of whinery, which whinery European leaders will back up with absolutely nothing, because they are losers.
Now, the US is not literally planning to pull Hungary, Austria, Italy or Poland out of the common market. I suspect the actual goal is rather more devious. The Americans hope to build a Trumpist bloc within EU member states by forging bilateral alliances with sympathetic governments. This is the nationalist strategy articulated at the beginning of this document; the Trump administration, remember, prefers to deal directly with specific states rather than bloated transnational institutions. These states would then carry water for Trumpism within the EU, opposing measures the Americans don't like and generally making Ursula von der Leyen's life vastly more difficult. Allies like Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland would be great, but the real coup would be winning a founding EU nation like Germany over to the Trumpist bloc.
The latter possibility is why Trump and his Republican Party are so carefully courting Alternative für Deutschland right now. This is a clever approach because the firewall strategies European countries have deployed against the populist right are beginning to push many of these movements into the arms of the Americans. Right now, the AfD have all but abandoned their prior Americoscpeticism in favour of something approaching Americophilia. At home they are isolated and under threat, and the Trump administration has become an important lifeline for them. Should Trumpism persist beyond 2028, the AfD might even enter government with backroom assistance from the Americans, representing a new kind of Euro-Trumpismin a founding EU nation. If similar events happen in enough EU member states, Brussels would be hollowed out from the inside. The full version of this strategy might also substantially reduce the importance of NATO.
This article was originally published on Eugyppius.