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The US national security strategy published in December singles out the failings of its European allies. Its text is brutal.
It claims that Europe’s “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 birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” It also says that the US “will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies”.
In sum: “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”
The main way in which the US intends to do so is to help “patriotic European parties”. No leader of such a party is more admired by Maga than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. So, how has he done in promoting freedom of expression and liberal democracy, more broadly?
According to the respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) database, the answer is very poorly: the country’s index of “liberal democracy overall” fell from 0.77 (out of 1) in 2009 to 0.32 in 2024. Maga’s beloved Hungary is a corrupt and authoritarian state. But it is nothing like as bad as Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, is among Donald Trump’s heroes. That is hardly surprising. A man who tried to overthrow an election cannot be convincingly concerned about democracy.
Then consider freedom of speech more narrowly. Again, according to V-Dem, many European countries, including the UK, France and Germany, protect freedom of speech and what it calls “alternative sources of information” better than the US. That was in 2024. Does anybody imagine this will have improved in 2025, not least given the administration’s assaults on universities and the media?
This is not to say that all is well in Europe. There exists a host of potent concerns, including the state of free speech even in the UK, though Nigel Farage’s comparisons with North Korea are grotesque. Yet anxieties about those “patriotic” parties are also reasonable. Europe, after all, has a history. This tells us with brutal clarity that “patriotic” parties, and indeed nationalism more broadly, can all too easily be roads to ruin. The two world wars taught us that. Thus, by failing to throttle Adolf Hitler’s “right” to free speech, Germany ended up losing 5.5mn soldiers and between 1.1mn and 3mn civilians in the second world war. Worldwide, the losses were 75mn in the two world wars.
Hitler was also one of those “patriots” terrified by what the NSS calls “civilisational erasure”. In May 2025, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) was designated “rightwing extremist” by the country’s federal office for the protection of the constitution. No doubt, it is not a Nazi party. But it does have neo-Nazis within it. Should Germans who know their history just smile and say, “Why not? Freedom of speech is after all sacred.” It takes cocksure Americans to spout such idiocy. Alas, similar backgrounds and ideas can be seen in other rising European rightwing parties.
Equally foolish is the assault on the EU. Here, too, there are many confusions. Nation states are not natural political features of Europe. They were created, many of them quite recently (just as the US itself was created). What is more, they were also created largely through bloodshed. Thereupon those imagined identities led to more disasters.
The EU was created in order to manage and, ideally, eliminate any chance of a repetition. The idea was that co-operation and open markets would be better than war. This, the NSS tells us, is folly.
Yet there is another powerful reason for preserving the EU. As the Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak, one of the EU’s founding fathers, said long ago: “There are only two types of country in Europe: small countries . . . and countries which are small, but don’t yet know that they are.” In a world dominated by superpowers and a continent threatened by a nuclear-armed Russia, it is a case of unify or become a victim. There is no doubt which Trump wants. But why should the Europeans do so, too?
This brings us to the fear of imminent “civilizational erasure”. It is rooted in an identity politics more extreme than that of the left. The identities in question are national, racial and chauvinist. It is linked to the fear of a “Great Replacement”, which many in Maga embrace. To be “erased” then is to become less “white”, less “Christian” and less numerous. Vice-president JD Vance, though the husband of an Indian woman, seems to share this vision in an intellectualised version. It is also, alas, where the future of the Republican Party might lie.
If so, what the NSS says is a projection upon Europe of what animates the administration itself — a burning hatred of the way the US has been changing, demographically and culturally.
I do agree that states must exercise control over their borders: their values may be universal, but citizenship cannot be open to everybody in the world. Yet liberal democracies can be beacons. What has emerged painfully (and often hypocritically) over many centuries is indeed a great civilisation. It is based on ideals of individual freedom, equal rights of citizens, rule of law, the pursuit of knowledge and fairly elected government. None of this is rooted in race or religion. But every citizen of a liberal democracy must accept those values.
In brief, this administration wishes to erase the republic itself, in its 250th year. That is why Europe is its enemy. It is also why Europe must defend itself.