In a move undoing years of bipartisan American foreign policy achievements, the Trump administration handed the Russians an unprecedented political and military victory by aligning American foreign policy with Russian strategic goals. Since the end of World War Two, the Soviets and then Russians have tried to pull America and Europe apart. While the American/European alliance was not always smooth, the partnership kept the peace and preserved freedom. The newly released “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” abruptly reverses decades of American foreign policy.
New American security document parrots Russian talking points
The New York Times analysis of the National Security Strategy is startling:
In addition to calling for a new political trajectory in Europe, the document is also likely to raise fresh concerns about Mr. Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the United States’ approach to ending the war in Ukraine … And it appears to echo Mr. Putin’s language by insisting that the United States should be “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
In its analysis of the National Security Strategy, the US Council on Foreign Relations make a critically important point that while the document stresses the importance of ending the Russian/Ukraine war, it “but directs stronger language at longtime U.S. allies in Europe than Russia, which had been called out in the first Trump administration as a chief geopolitical rival.”
On 7 December 2025, Russian came out in support to the US National Security document saying that it was in line with their world view. The Irish Times reports that “The adjustments [in American foreign policy] that we see correspond in many ways to our vision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television reporter Pavel Zarubin when asked about the new US strategy.
Has American foreign policy become anti-European?
In addition to taking the Russian line on foreign policy, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is critical of European domestic policies:
But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. 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.
Both the tone and substance of the National Security Strategy is not just a tilt away from America’s traditional commitment to Europe, it is in fact a calculated insult. Though America’s is still bound by its NATO treaty commitments, the strategy the Trump administration unveiled is bound to create doubt among European leaders.
Trump’s message to Europe: “You are on your own”
In the first Trump administration, the message to Europe was that you have to contribute more to your own defence. In Trump 2.0, the message is that you are on your own. What Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were unable to achieve, Donald Trump has handed to Vladmir Putin on a silver platter.
Does Europe realise that it cannot count on America as a security partner? It is difficult to say that all European leaders have come to the same conclusion. Nonethless, I think European leaders realise that Trump is more allied with Russian than with Europe. As the French newspaper Le Monde reported this week:
”President Donald Trump has had Europe in his crosshairs since beginning a second White House term earlier this year. But in his new National Security Strategy – published in the dead of night early Friday – the US president launched an all-out attack, lambasting Europe as an over-regulated, censorious continent lacking in ‘self-confidence’ and facing ‘civilizational erasure’ due to immigration.”
Perhaps the most telling sign of European leaders realising that they can no longer depend on the United States, is the fact that on 5 December 2025 German lawmakers approved a plan that aims to increase the number of German soldiers to 260,000 by 2035, a nearly 50% increase.
Trump’s new national security strategy has already made the world a more dangerous place and I fear even worse it to come.
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