Trump’s new national security strategy takes aim at Europe
The document chastises Europe over ‘unrealistic expectations’ for how to end the war in Ukraine and stresses the need to ‘harden and strengthen’ military capabilities in the Western Pacific to deter potential Chinese aggression.
Donald Trump has issued a new national security strategy that sharply criticises the “unrealistic expectations” of European leaders for settling the war in Ukraine and calls for an end to NATO expansion.
The long-awaited document sets out the core principles of Mr Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, underscoring its priorities of addressing dangers in the Western Hemisphere, including the use of “lethal force” to stop drug cartels, and competing economically with China.
The document underscores the growing rifts between the US and Europe. It fuses the criticism by top Trump administration officials of Europe’s domestic policies with Washington’s peace push in Ukraine, which many European leaders fear will come at Kyiv’s expense.
Mr Trump’s new strategy document, which was issued Friday AEDT, says the US “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.”
In recent days, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other European leaders have urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to yield to Russia’s demand without obtaining firm security commitments from the US.
European and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly pushed back since the summer on some of the Trump administration’s ideas for ending the war, which in an initial 28-point plan included core Russian demands, such as barring the deployment of a European peacekeeping forces, capping the size of the Ukrainian military and handing over territory in eastern Ukraine that the Russian military hasn’t occupied.
They are now pressing the US to say what its role will be in safeguarding Ukraine from a future Russian attack, arguing that is critical to what they can offer to Kyiv in terms of security guarantees. That will also be key to persuading Kyiv to make compromises, they say.
Mr Trump’s strategy also takes aim at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s policy of keeping its doors open for the potential admission of new members. A Trump administration priority, it states, is “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” The strategy says Europe needs to “take primary responsibility for its own defence.”
That contrasts sharply with the foreign policy of a previous Republican president, George W. Bush, who sought to put Ukraine on a firm path to inclusion in the alliance at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.
The criticism of Europe in Mr Trump’s new strategy document also contrasts with the 2017 national-security strategy that Mr Trump issued during his first term in an administration that included principals like adviser H.R. McMaster, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and Central Intelligence Agency Director and later Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
That 2017 strategy emphasised the need of the US and Europe to work together to “counter Russian subversion and aggression” and dubbed Moscow a “revisionist” power that along with Beijing was determined to “shape a world antithetical to US values and interests.”
It is also starkly different from the strategy issued by the Biden administration in 2022, which portrayed the world situation as a competition between US-led democracies and autocracies and stressed the need to push back against Moscow’s “imperialist foreign policy.”
In contrast, Mr Trump’s new document stresses the need to “re-establish strategic stability” with Russia and casts Washington as a potential moderating force between Moscow and a Europe that is anxious about the Kremlin’s objectives.
The description of Europe in Mr Trump’s new strategy document echoes Vice President JD Vance’s February speech in Europe in which he charged that its leaders were curtailing free speech and urged European governments not to try to block hard right parties from power. The Trump strategy document says Europe faces “civilisational erasure” because of its failure to check illegal migration.
“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,” Trump’s strategy document states. “This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.”
Some former US officials were sharply critical.
“This administration wants results from allies without providing consistent leadership. Moscow will exploit any gap between American words and European capabilities,” said Jacqueline Ramos, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs during the Biden administration. “If credibility erodes in Europe, it erodes everywhere and adversaries will take note.”
Mr Trump’s new strategy will be followed by the Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy. It is expected to be unveiled soon by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and will outline more details about US military goals and programs.
Even so, Mr Trump’s new strategy document underscores some of the top goals of the forthcoming Pentagon strategy. The document calls adjusting the US global military posture so the US can put more focus on the Western Hemisphere.
“The United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere,” states the strategy document. “Targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades,” will also be pursued, it says.
It also stresses the need to “harden and strengthen” military capabilities in the Western Pacific to deter potential Chinese aggression.
The strategy says that the US will seek to deny aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain, a string of territory from the Japanese archipelago through Taiwan and the Philippines to the South China Sea.
“America’s diplomatic efforts should focus on pressing our First Island Chain allies and partners to allow the US military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defence, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression,” it stated.
“This will interlink maritime security issues along the First Island Chain while reinforcing US and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavourable to us as to make defending that island impossible.”
In contrast with the Pacific, the document says the Middle East has receded as a central focus for US foreign policy as the US steps up its energy production. “The days in which the Middle East dominated foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over,” it states.
The optimistic sentiment comes as Washington and its partners are still struggling to organise and deploy an international stabilisation force to establish order in Gaza and amid uncertainty over the status of Iran’s nuclear program after the US’s June air strike on its nuclear complex.
Wall Street Journal
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