In Ukraine, as elsewhere in Europe, Donald Trump’s new national security strategy is being met with a mixture of incredulity and incomprehension. ‘What does it actually mean?’ a general who advises Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked me on Tuesday as we met in the presidential administration building in downtown Kyiv. It’s not an easy question to answer.
Is it a blueprint for surrendering to the Kremlin? Or a negligible document that, for all the hoopla surrounding it, President Trump has most likely never read?
The document was apparently drafted by Michael Anton, who was until recently head of the US State Department’s policy planning staff. He seems to have tailored it to torment America’s European allies, including Great Britain. The strategy, if it deserves that word, focuses on not merely echoing but amplifying vice president J.D. Vance’s mephitic blast at the Munich Security Conference in February, where he denounced the Europeans as a feckless lot who were allowing immigrants to overrun their societies and denying free speech rights to their citizens.
Now we are told that Europe faces the prospect of ‘civilisational erasure’. Maybe so. But the strategy paper does not explain why America should care one way or the other. If it is to be America First, then the fate of Europe should be immaterial to a Trump administration that wants to focus on its own hemisphere and wave hasta la vista to the troublesome quarrels that plague the old and new Europe alike. A longer version of the document apparently calls for a new grouping of allies – Russia, China, Japan, India and the United States – to replace the G7. The ‘Big Five’, you might even call it. No one can say that this intellectually febrile document lacks ambition in contrast to its staid predecessors.
Trump hopes to bludgeon Ukraine into accepting a peace deal that vouchsafes territory to Russia
How much of it adds up to a realistic strategy that promotes rather than undermines America’s national interests is another matter. The truth is that America has done quite well out of the ancien regime – the dollar as a reserve currency and an economy that has more often than not been the envy of the rest of the globe. America, in short, has been primus inter pares. Trump and company, though, seem perversely eager to wave goodbye to all that.
The strategy document huffs and puffs about how it marks a caesura with bad old days when America stomped around the globe trying, willy nilly, to inflict democratic mores and regimes whenever and wherever it could. Of course, the notion that America was transfixed since the end of the Cold War to promote democracy at the point of a gun is a gross exaggeration. Anyway, it’s Trump who is currently braying about the need for democracy and regime change in Venezuela, whose oil reserves he covets.
The only thing Trump is accomplishing with his potshots at Europe – the latest came in a lengthy interview with Politico that appeared on Tuesday – is to alarm the Europeans into bolstering Ukraine, which is the very opposite of what he wants. Trump hopes to bludgeon Ukraine into accepting a peace deal that vouchsafes territory to Russia that it has failed to conquer militarily. Then he and his associates, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, hope to consummate the business deals they have lined up with Putin and his gang. Maybe the Russian president will be the first honoured guest in the White House ballroom Trump is constructing.
It sure won’t be a European leader. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Wednesday that parts of the national security strategy are ‘unacceptable’. Danish military intelligence is now categorising America as a potential threat on the order of China or Russia. Writing in Foreign Policy, Michael Hirsh suggests that Putin has achieved much of what he has wanted: strife in the western alliance and an emollient White House. Meanwhile, Trump’s latest brainchild is to propose demanding five years of social media information from travellers to America from Europe and elsewhere. Talk about isolating America. If there was ever a strategy for decline and fall, this is it.
