Defense One just published a report on what it describes as a “longer version” of the new 2025 National Security Policy (NSS), noting that “the unpublished version also proposes new vehicles for leadership on the world stage and a different way to put its thumb on the scales of Europe’s future—through its cultural values.” (2)
While the publicly released NSS calls for the end of a “perpetually expanding NATO,” the full version goes more into the details of how the Trump administration would like to – quote - “Make Europe Great Again,” even as it calls on European NATO members to wean themselves from American military support.Sounds like a Make Europe Whiter project. And of course this is the kind of what we might call a “race-based international order” that would be appealing to characters like Stephen Miller and Opus Dei fan J.D. Vance.
Working from the premise that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” because of its immigration policies and “censorship of free speech,” the NSS proposes to focus U.S. relationships with European countries on a few nations with like-minded—right-wing, presumably—current administrations and movements.
Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the U.S. should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union].”
“And we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” the document says. [my emphasis]
That list of four countries is an odd one. Austria does have a significant pro-Russian rightwing party, the “Freedom” Party (FPÖ) that for years had a formal Friendship Agreement with Putin’s United Russia Party. And its former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who is trying to make a political comeback, is part of TechBro-billionaire Peter Thiel’s stable of politicians along with J.D. Vance. But Austria’s financial and military ties to Western Europe are extensive and being part of a Russian-dominated coalition is unlikely to appeal to most voters. Austria is still officially “neutral” and proud of its role in international institutions, including hosting the UN Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna.,
Hungary under Viktor Orbán is pretty pro-Russian and is not currently functioning as a democracy. But whether Hungarians generally would be willing to accept leaving the EU for a close alliance with Russia is a whole different question. As much of a brat as Orbán has been in EU affairs, Hungary still benefits substantially from its EU membership. And since Orbán’s policies have made the country notable poorer during his current long run in power, bailing out of the EU would be self-destructive.
Italy’s current Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who Trump calls an “attractive young woman,” is not pro-Russian in her and her party’s foreign-policy orientation. Italy also stands to benefit internationally from its increased importance in defense matters, having one of the six biggest armies in Europe. Also, amazingly enough, despite having made her career since she was a teenager in literal neofascist politics, she is currently pushing a downright pragmatic and seemingly even liberal policy on immigration – we’ll see how longs she sticks to that! – and xenophobia is Russia’s and Trump’s main issue to disrupt EU politics.
And Poland? With the largest active-duty army in Europe? A “frontline” state with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus? The Trump team wants to peel them off from the EU to be part of a pro-Russia grouping? Poland has, as they say, “a history” with Russia that makes that a problematic scenario. To put it mildly.
The investigative journalist I.F. Stone had a famous saying, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Apparently some of the current White House team need to check the stash they’re using.
NATO and the US
The public NSS does not explicitly rule out an expansion of NATO. But it almost does, stating as a priority for US policy toward Europe: “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” (p. 27, my italics).
Trump and his team have been practicing some of the most bumbling diplomacy the US government has ever experienced.
But this opens an interesting possibility for negotiations over the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO countries in the past have been reluctant to permanently rule out adding new members to NATO, and Ukrainian membership in NATO is seen by the Russian government as a major red line not to be crossed.
But admitting new NATO members requires a positive vote from all current NATO members. Europe can no longer count on the US in an actual military confrontation with Russia, so European security needs to be restructured to include Britain and French nuclear deterrence against Russia and the close and active cooperation of the militaries of especially Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Italy.
Since the official foreign policy of the US is now preventing NATO from being seen as “a perpetually expanding alliance,” The Trump 2.0 regime could on its own make an explicit agreement with Russia not to allow Ukrainian NATO membership, which would remove Russia’s main red line, at least for the time being.
Of course, the Russians can see just like everyone else that Trump’s diplomatic convictions are fickle and unreliable and not actually based on any coherent strategic concept. And that his foreign policy negotiations aim primarily at securing lavish bribes for himself and his family.
But the idea of the US promising a veto on Ukrainian membership does offer an interesting possibility for a temporary agreement on a ceasefire that could offer benefits to both sides.
Getting beyond chronic euro-pessimism
European leaders and strategists are now deep into the kind of readjustments discussed by by the panel in the video above.
We’ll see lots of discussions like this over the next few years. But they are already getting beyond the long-terms clichés that, oh, the EU is a mess, the European countries can’t agree on anything important, their economies are too weak and uncompetitive. That discussion is one in which we can see analysts looking for substantive possibilities that before.
Cynicism about the EU’s ability to operate is common among EU citizens, and far-right parties who are opposed to EU membership and to the EU’s support for democracy and the rule of law try to promote such cynicism and defeatism. But there is also a lot of support for European unity, the common market, and the freedom of movement across internal borders.
And for all the complications in making major decisions for the EU, it actually does an amazing job of pulling together and implementing major policies. Including policies that make it attractive as a model and a partner to countries in the east like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova and to those in the West Balkans.
It’s worth keeping in mind the famous saying that may have come from Otto von Bismarck – or possibly from some long-forgotten state senator in Illinois during the 19th century: "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."
Law-making and policy making in any kind of democratic system always involve a lot of “muddling through.” And the EU has a remarkably good record of doing that!
The changed security situation in Europe with US unreliability under Trump and the more general changed priority for the US regarding China as its primary strategic challenge creates a strong incentive for close military cooperation between the five nations mentioned including Britain, which is not an EU member. And even though the EU Treaty includes a mutual defense clause and the EU has a small, nominal official army, the EU’s decision-making structure effective includes it from being directly in charge of collective European defense for the immediate future. But it’s not as though European nations were unable to form defensive and wartime alliance even long before the EU existed.
The need for practical realism in politics and economics
Judging the potential threat from Russia involves evaluating both Russia’s capabilities and its intentions. Russia stands in an adversary relationship with most of the EU countries – Hungary being the most important exception at the moment – and even the most antimilitarist governments would have to take account of the potential military threat from Russia.
The threat of a Russian invasion of Europe is highly unlikely. But sabotage of both the cyber- and old-fashioned sabotage of hard targets and dangerous irritations like drone incursions are happening at a relatively low level and will continue. The possibilities of Russia making attempts to seize limited territory in Estonia or Lithuania (the Suwałki Gap to Kaliningrad) are real. But despite its big advantage at the moment in the war with Ukraine, they have a big military challenge to handle there. And taking actions like seizures of territory in NATO member countries would be a huge risk for Russia, that could even result in the careening Trump 2.0 government to flipflop back to a bigger involvement in Europe.
Propaganda operations by both Europe and Russia will continue to be part of the game. But the more direct subversion of European democracies by both Russia and the US via far-right nationalist parties is more substantive and more challenging to combat. In this case, both Putin and Trump 2.0 are promoting the same xenophobic, far-right parties. That’s a challenge the Europe will have to counter with security measures and financial controls.
But that’s primarily a political challenge. And European centrist parties, including Macron’s in France and Keir Starmer’s in Europe, will have to stop playing the game of pandering to xenophobic parties and movements by protecting and defending the rule of law and pushing back directly against their nationalism and eugenic propaganda. Doing things like the following is the exact opposite of that:
When Keir Starmer and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, argue that asylum protections must be rewritten for a new “era”, they are not simply adjusting policy. They are reshaping the moral ground our societies stand on.Ironically, as noted above and as Paul Ronzheimer of the tabloid BILD recently observed in the German ZDF network program Phoenix, the rightwing Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has actually adopted a notably more pragmatic policy on immigration and asylum, including welcoming immigrants currently in Germany. As with all immigration policies, the devil is in the details. But on its face, this policy embraces at least part of the approach to burden-sharing on immigration/refugee issues that the EU and Britain badly need to put into practice. (4)
Their message is clear: hardening rules so that fewer people receive protection is the way to restore confidence in their leadership. They present this as measured and responsible, even progressive. But what they propose is not a new centre ground; it is a retreat into a politics that regards some lives as less worthy than others.
And there is a dreadful irony in seeing such a message conveyed just as the UK justice secretary, David Lammy, and Richard Hermer, the attorney general, travel to Strasbourg on International Human Rights Day – an occasion created to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the recognition, set down by the postwar generation, that dignity must not depend on borders, status or political fashion. (3)
But at this point, both the US and Russia are committed to a policy of undermining democracy, the rule of law, and internal European cooperation. And xenophobic nationalism is their chief issue to use as a tool to achieve those aims. Pandering to it rather than fighting it is a losing strategy – at least for parties who care about preserving democracy and the rule of law.
Meeting the challenges of expanding European military capabilities, bolstering their economies, and improving living standards for working people will require a departure from the dogmatic austerity economics on which European oligarchs have so far successfully demanded.
And that also means fixing the major deficiencies in the euro currency zone, e.g., the lack of common responsibility for state borrowing by eurozone members, to forestall future debt and currency crises in the eurozone.
The discussions going on now will be interesting to revisit five years from now. Because much of what is open to choices now will look a lot more like an inevitable process leading from now to then. Choices based on good sense and careful attention to facts are generally sounder than ones made on fantasy, or on blind optimism or pessimism.
I find myself reading less from the Responsible Statecraft site than I have over the last few years. Because they seem to be running more fluff like a piece by Eldar Mamedov, who makes from frankly strange arguments, like this one: “Europe’s mainstream made no serious effort to engage with the diverse MAGA world, including its anti-war paleoconservatives and libertarians. They preferred the comfort of their old Atlanticist echo chamber.” (5)
Dude, the hardcore MAGA crowd and Trump himself hates European democracies as much as they hate democracy and the rule of law in the US. And the faction he calls “anti-war paleoconservatives” are particularly committed to that view, clinging as they do to the tattered remnants of Old Right isolationist thinking from the 1950s, which at its core really was and is narrow-nationalist militarism. And Mamedov’s immediately following paragraph comes right out of the “paleoconservative” talking points:
Why? Because true strategic autonomy is terrifying to them. It would require what they have consistently failed to do: think seriously about defense, which is first and foremost about the sober assessment of threats, not just more funding for defense contractors. It is also the practice of complex, nuanced diplomacy with adversaries — something the Europeans seem to have unlearned.This kind of dismissiveness just regurgitates the superficial and lazy cynicism that too often dominates supposedly serious commentary about European security politics. And throwaway references to defense contractors can often be a way to avoid talking about the very real improvements that need to be made in both the US and Europe on regulating defense contractors. (And some of their work needs to be done by state-owned industries.) Which gets back to the plague of austerity economics, which somehow often manages to comfortably coexist with lack of proper regulation of defense contractors and war profiteers.
Notes:
(1) A Continent of Power: Does Europe Know Its True Strength? DW News YouTube channel 12/11/2025. <https://youtu.be/yFRqbWWjmH8?si=67t7kP_XxQlXVueR> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
(2) Myers, Meghann (2025): ‘Make Europe Great Again’ and more from a longer version of the National Security Strategy. Defense One 12/09/2025. <https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/12/make-europe-great-again-and-more-longer-version-national-security-strategy/410038/?oref=d1-homepage-river> (Accesssed: 2025-12-12).
(3) Valdez-Symonds, Steve (2025): Starmer is lobbying Europe to join him in watering down the ECHR. This illiberalism will harm us all. The Guardian 12/10/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/10/starmer-europe-human-rights-uk-prime-minister-echr> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
(4) phoenix persönlich: Paul Ronzheimer zu Gast bei Inga Kühn. Phoenix YouTube channel 12.12.2025. <https://youtu.be/86uKRfEYXf8?si=tDKRHbhf3yH2B_X5> (Accessed: 2025-12-12).
(5) Memedov, Eldar (2025): Euro-elites melt down over NSS, missing - or ignoring - the point. Responsible Statecraft 12/11/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/europe-nss/> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
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