(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Key Takeaways:
Trump’s national security doctrine tells Europe to reform or face collapse.
Strategy rejects globalism and demands European nations shoulder their own defense.
Massive migration threatens European identity and NATO reliability.
If Europe’s elite politicians are offended, that probably means Trump is telling the truth again. For decades, Europe has coasted off American defense budgets while lecturing us about morality, borders, and “global responsibility”—as if Washington exists to babysit a collapsing continent. Trump’s strategy finally says what every serious analyst already knows: Europe is becoming a hollowed-out museum of uncontrolled migration, dying birthrates, and suicidal political correctness.
The sobering warning is simple—if Europe keeps importing the world instead of defending its own culture, it won’t be Europe anymore. And if NATO partners become majority non-European nations with different civilizational priorities, why would they fight to defend the West? Trump is forcing Europe to confront a choice it pretended didn’t exist.
Globalists can shriek all they like. The era of endless American life-support for Europe is over. They can change—or rot.
From Western Journal:
A sweeping statement from the White House outlining President Donald Trump’s “America First” national security strategy says Europe can either change or rot.
“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” the 29-page document states, in bracingly direct language. “We count among our many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.”
The strongly worded document reframes the U.S. role in the world and rejects the globalist model.
“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the document states.
It contends Europe’s problems are deeper than “insufficient military spending and economic stagnation,” attributing its declining share of global GDP to “national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.”
“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 birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence,” the document states.
And some sentences are damning.
“Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less,” it states. “As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
It was not well received by European officials.
“It’s a frontal attack on the European Union,” Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Parliament, said, according to The New York Times.
The report is “totally unacceptable,” full of “extreme, shocking phrases,” he said, alleging some sections call for election interference.
Johann Wadephul, Germany’s foreign minister, said he does not “believe that we need to get advice here from any country or party,” the newspaper reported.
He said the U.S. is a NATO ally, but “questions like freedom of expression, freedom of opinion and how we organize our liberal society here in the Federal Republic of Germany are not part of that.”
The new National Security Strategy of the United States:
“As Alexander Hamilton argued in our republic’s earliest days, the United States must never be dependent on any outside power for core components—from raw materials to parts to finished products— necessary to the nation’s… pic.twitter.com/XWsBL6hxjL
— Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg (@UnderSecE) December 5, 2025
Ian Lesser, who heads the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based nonprofit “committed to the idea that the United States and Europe are stronger together,” said the document “treats Europe as a sort of other, one that is a model of what not to do,” he said, according to The New York Times.
But Trump’s document is unapologetic.
“American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history,” it states.
And it contains a stark warning for Europeans and the consequences of immigration.
“Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter,” it states.
Goals for Europe include “Enabling Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense, without being dominated by any adversarial power” and “Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
