In a bygone age, prominent conservatives in the United States clung to any number of well-worn complaints about the country’s Western European allies.
According to these Cold War U.S. ideologues, Europeans taxed too much and spent the money on overly generous social security programs that supposedly rendered them soft while inhibiting innovation and growth. Frequent were the warnings that Europe was abandoning the ethos of open and competitive markets that had made it a bastion of capitalism and was edging steadily, if somewhat stealthily, toward a socialist dead end.
In a bygone age, prominent conservatives in the United States clung to any number of well-worn complaints about the country’s Western European allies.
According to these Cold War U.S. ideologues, Europeans taxed too much and spent the money on overly generous social security programs that supposedly rendered them soft while inhibiting innovation and growth. Frequent were the warnings that Europe was abandoning the ethos of open and competitive markets that had made it a bastion of capitalism and was edging steadily, if somewhat stealthily, toward a socialist dead end.
Another ritualized complaint, dating at least as far back as President Richard Nixon’s administration, was that Europe was chronically underspending on its own defense, free riding on the reliably lavish U.S. outlays to its Defense Department, which were designed above all to protect Europe—and thereby the West itself—from its greatest existential threat, the Soviet Union.
Some of these old gripes about Europe, such as those concerning the continent’s supposedly parsimonious spending on defense, remain in the new National Security Strategy released last week by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. But as many commentators have noted, the document amounts to the most sweeping overhaul of Republicans’ worldview in decades. In terms of its major assumptions about Europe, almost everything has been scrambled to a degree that no major Republican Party figure in recent history—not Nixon, not President Ronald Reagan, and probably not even the failed 1964 ultraconservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater—would recognize.
Gone almost entirely is the assumption that Russia constitutes a major shared security concern for the United States and Europe. This comes across mostly through omission and what can be read between the lines, but also from Trump’s numerous actions this year to reorient U.S. foreign policy in ways more favorable to Moscow. And the best gauge of this comes from Russia itself, which may find it hard to believe its good fortune amid Washington’s turnabout. Russian media promptly pronounced Washington’s National Security Strategy to be largely in accord with its own views of the world.
This would be one thing if the ongoing war in Ukraine were not the result of Russia’s invasion in 2022. But the lack of preoccupation with Russian expansionism in the administration’s security circles suggests something truly radical that Trump and his advisors haven’t had the courage or candor yet to pronounce clearly.
Make no mistake: The White House’s new strategy document is a blueprint to engineer the demise of the West—or at least, what the world has understood by that term since World War II, starting with a closely knit set of shared interests between Europe and the United States.
The Trump scenario for this involves dark fantasies about the creeping takeover of nominally white societies by peoples of color—the Black, brown, and yellow hordes that haunted a bygone era’s genre of fevered white panic writing. This was best exemplified by figures such as the popular 1920s author Lothrop Stoddard. In his influential book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Stoddard wrote that “colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.” (A thinly veiled reference to Stoddard even made its way into one of the most widely esteemed U.S. novels of the century, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.)
For its part, Trump’s National Security Strategy has warned that because of immigration, Europe is at risk of not being European for much longer, by which it clearly means being defined by whiteness. One can intuit that the reason this warrants inclusion in such a prominent document is that for Trump, having the United States and Europe “remain” white together is a bedrock condition of staying close allies at all. Another way of saying this is that remaining committed to whiteness is a condition, in Trump’s eyes, of continuing to be worthy of that long ubiquitous and unquestioned sobriquet, “the West.”
As disturbing as the U.S. government’s obsession with whiteness is, it would be wrong to imagine that the Trump administration’s policy is even remotely coherent. Trump’s warning that Europe risks losing its identity, principally due to the in-migration of nonwhite peoples, contains a logical flaw so glaring that it suggests that what is at stake isn’t entirely about race but, at bottom, something else that is arguably even more threatening.
This fault becomes obvious when one compares U.S. immigration rates to those of some of Europe’s largest and richest countries. Doing so reveals that Europe does not stand out in this regard at all.
Around 19 percent of Germany’s population are immigrants—a slightly higher figure than the United States’ 15 percent—which arguably resulted from a sober assessment of its demographic decline during the chancellorship of Angela Merkel. During her tenure, Germany accepted hundreds of thousands of people from a failing state in the Middle East, Syria. The integration of such large numbers of newcomers inevitably demands cultural adjustment that bring stresses for both the host population and the migrants. But although many German voters have at least temporarily turned against large-scale immigration, history may come to judge Merkel’s policy generously, if the influx of Syrians and others stems Germany’s very real crisis of population decline, aging, and the associated problem of too few workers.
Two other major European powers, France and Britain, each have foreign-born populations roughly comparable to those in the United States—around 14 percent and 16 percent of the total population, respectively. The fact that none of the three examples cited is a statistical outlier squarely disproves Trump’s notion that Europe is speeding toward its own racial erasure—and to be clear, neither is the United States.
U.S. complaints about European defense spending are equally ill-founded. As an editorial in the Washington Post recently pointed out, the United States is itself barely projected to surpass the benchmark of devoting 3 percent of its GDP to military spending in the 2025 fiscal year, even as it demands that European countries devote 5 percent of their output to defense.
That Europe should somehow follow the lead of the United States is also belied by the reality that European standards of living are higher by some measures than in Trump’s United States, and that many European countries nowadays are widely regarded as more vibrantly democratic than their newly ambivalent longtime ally across the Atlantic.
To understand what is going on more fully, one must recall how Trump used xenophobia and racial and ethnic scaremongering as a central tactic in his initial rise to power in 2016. Getting large numbers of voters riled up over identity issues not only proved to be a reliable way of rallying support but also an effective distraction from the elements of his agenda that were a radical departure from any recent precedent.
This points to what seems to be Trump’s true aim toward Europe: supporting a bigger and broader radical conservative agenda, of which race-based nationalism may be the point of the spear but also merely a single component.
Trump, in fact, revealed this himself—one wishes to say clumsily—by authorizing his National Security Statement to lay out Washington’s interest in promoting far-right parties in Europe. Trump’s appeal to racial xenophobia drew a mixture of puzzlement and chagrin from European commentators but little surprise. That’s because these have already long been core elements of his domestic politics.
Trump has flirted with interference in Europe’s domestic politics previously, but never before so brazenly, with a clear and official statement of outright alignment with that continent’s radical right, many of whose parties embody politics that engage in antisemitism and draw inspiration from fascism. Such audacious meddling has drawn sharp protests from many quarters in Europe.
If Trump manages to enact an agenda based on a political reorientation as radical as this—and above all, if he is succeeded by someone such as his vice president, J.D. Vance, who has loudly promoted very similar extreme views—this development, more than an emphasis on whiteness alone, is what will formally bring about the death of the old West.
During the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin appealed for the support of European powers such as France by saying, “We are fighting for their [Europeans’] liberty in defending our own.”
The democratic record of the West is, of course, replete with blemishes. But this idea of a shared set of values centered on liberty has always been the core of what has sustained the alliance of the United States and much of Europe. With Trump embracing authoritarianism ever more brazenly, it is the United States’ detachment from this value that may finally undo any common sense of what the world calls the West.
If Franklin were around today, he might have turned his formula around to say that in defending our liberty, Europeans are hoping to inspire Americans to defend their own.
