The Trump administration said on Friday that Europe was facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” and pledged that the United States would support like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent to prevent a future in which “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
The grim assessment of Europe’s future was released overnight as part of an annual update to the United States’ national security strategy around the world.
Without naming them directly, the document says the United States should be “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting political parties that fight against migration and promote nationalism. That describes several right-wing populist parties like Reform U.K. in Britain and the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which has been classified as an extremist party by German intelligence services.
“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” Mr. Trump wrote in a foreword to the document, which he called a “road map to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”
In a section called “Promoting European Greatness,” the document offers a searing critique of America’s closest allies.
It warns that Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it says that the policy of the United States should be to help Europe “correct its current trajectory” over the course of the next several decades.
“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the 33-page document says.
Mr. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the political leadership in Europe, and he has repeatedly pressured those leaders to bend to his will on funding for NATO, trade and tariffs. Vice President JD Vance issued a broad critique of Europe’s mainstream political parties in a speech in Munich in February and urged them to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent.
But the document released overnight is the clearest statement yet of how the president wants his America First foreign policy to be a clarion call for other nationalist politicians to overhaul their political systems. And it echoes some of the language of the Great Replacement Theory, a nationalist conspiracy theory embraced by some of his top aides that warns of a deliberate effort to replace white people with nonwhite immigrants.
