The new American National Security Strategy released by the Trump administration earlier this month definitively signals that a new door is opening in transatlantic relations — one characterised by a United States willing to exercise coercive pressure to weaken the European Union and advance its mercantilist and nationalist agenda across the continent.
A document issued in the first year of each new US administration, the National Security Strategy, or NSS, outlines the country’s strategic posture — militarily, economically, diplomatically — toward key geographic regions across the globe.
And the one released by the second Trump administration on 4 December was a sobering read for Europeans. It described the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe, a continent marked by a “loss of national identities and self-confidence,” while celebrating the “growing influence of patriotic European parties.”
But most concerningly for Europeans, the document concluded by calling for the US to cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That line, European officials and analysts say, suggests the Trump administration is ready to double down on its meddling in domestic European politics by backing far-right, nationalist parties opposed to the European project.
“This strategy can be framed in imperial terms,” Martin Kohlrausch, a scholar of modern Europe at Belgium’s KU Leuven university, told The Parliament. “It’s a turn away from the post-1945 idea of an irresistible empire, where Europe was pulled into the American sphere of influence through soft factors.”
Instead, he explained, the US now appears poised to bend the European continent to its will. In short, Kohlrausch argued, the US is no longer the friendly empire of the post-1945 rules-based international order, but instead playing the role of an increasingly coercive imperial hegemon with its oldest allies.
A new coercive transatlantic era
The new document is contradictory at its core — especially in its approach to Europe. Whereas in the introductory section it specifies that the US should have a “predisposition to non-interventionism” in the affairs of foreign countries, the section on Europe outlines a distinct policy of political interference.
The strategy for Europe implies the US will try to support far-right parties in European elections, subdue Brussels’ regulatory power — particularly when it comes to laws targeting American tech firms — and weaken pan-European institutions. The document also signals a more conciliatory policy towards Russia, even as it continues to pursue its nearly-four-year-long war of aggression in Ukraine.
Calls for direct American intervention in Europe represent a distinct historical departure in the transatlantic relationship. However lopsided — with the US long dominating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — Europeans have lived comfortably under the American security umbrella for decades. They have also voluntarily played by the rules of a US-led international order.
Now, that dependency is undermining Europe’s strategic autonomy.
While there have been strains in the alliance over the years — notably, some European opposition to the 2003 Iraq war and the Bush administration's execution of its so-called war on terror — the transatlantic alliance has been the bedrock of the post-war US-led Western order.
But over the past year, the Trump administration has taken a sledge hammer to the alliance through tariffs, territorial threats, an ambiguous policy towards NATO, and its wavering commitment to defending Ukraine — and the wider European continent — in the face of mounting Russian aggression.
The new NSS shows that the relationship has been transformed, according to Leonard Schuette, an International Security Program Fellow at Harvard University’s Kenney School.
“The second Trump administration is pursuing a fundamentally different [world] order vision compared to essentially all previous US presidents since 1945,” said Schuette.
He added that one of the most helpful ways to understand how American strategy has so quickly changed is to compare this NSS to the one released by the first Trump administration in 2017. That document noted that Europe and the US “are bound together by our shared commitment to the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.”
The new NSS “reeks of partisanship through every pore,” said Schuette. “It threatens coercion, for sure, and is a piece in a mosaic of a much bigger picture in signalling the end of the post-1945 order.”
Meanwhile, a longer, classified version of the NSS obtained by Defense One this week reportedly stated that the US should aim to “Make Europe Great Again” by peeling certain member states away from the EU. “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 reads.
Part and parcel of that plan is for the US to strengthen bilateral relations with European countries that are more politically aligned with the Trump administration, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Robert Fico’s Slovakia, Georgia Meloni's Italy and potentially Poland.
A tentative European response
European leaders were quick to denounce the new National Security Strategy.
“Allies do not threaten to interfere in the democratic life or the domestic political choices of these allies,” European Council President António Costa said last week. “What we cannot accept is this threat of interference in Europe’s political life,” he added.
Sophie Wilmès, a member of the European Parliament who serves as vice-chair for relations with the US and is a former Belgian prime minister, told The Parliament that the “political agenda behind this document is quite clear: it is the dismantling of the European Union, nothing more, nothing less.”
But for all that rhetoric — aside from fining Big Tech under the bloc’s landmark digital regulations— European leaders have appeared largely powerless in their response to increasing American threats.
That’s because of fundamental asymmetries in the transatlantic relationship that keep the Europeans dependent on the Americans, especially in the realm of defence, according to Otto Svendsen, an associate fellow in the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
“Europe’s ability to push back and push the stakes in terms of what an abrupt transatlantic rupture could look like are limited,” said Svendsen. “Europe still needs to sharpen its tools,” he added, referring to the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument that Brussels could use to fight back against American economic pressure on the continent through a range of tools such as tariffs and export controls.
If there’s a silver lining for the EU, it’s that the new security strategy makes the Trump administration’s coercive aims in Europe unambiguous and impossible to ignore, analysts say.
“From a European perspective, I think this will be the last in a long line of awakenings in regards to where this administration is going and its priorities as it regards Europe,” said Svendsen.
But how Europe chooses to respond is still a question mark. Beyond the Anti-Coercion Instrument, Brussels could tighten its regulation and oversight of American technology firms operating in Europe to strike back at Washington, while taking greater control of its security by developing a European defence union distinct from NATO, according to analysts.
However, in the now infamous words of the US president, Europe still doesn’t hold the cards. As KU Leuven’s Kohlrausch noted: “This document makes it explicit that the US has all the means that Europe does not, so if you want to be with us, you better listen to us.”
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