The US National Security Strategy (NSS), published on 5 December, gives institutional form to President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. It is meant to bring the different elements of his international policies into a coherent strategic framework, to steer the various branches of the national security apparatus in implementing his priorities, to rally public support, to reassure friends and allies, and to deter adversaries. Trump describes it as ‘a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history’ and is made ‘safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before’.

The document repudiates the previously dominant worldview of successive administrations that ‘lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty’. Instead, ‘The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over’.

But Trump is no isolationist. The NSS emphasises the need to prioritise competing regions and goals in a world of limited resources, instead of presenting a laundry list of feel-good objectives. On geographic logic, the retreat from a globe-spanning strategy that is no longer sustainable to focus on the defence of the homeland, and its own hemisphere, makes good sense. The US ‘will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine’.

This has intentional echoes of the Roosevelt Corollary from over a century ago. It is imperialist in conception and interventionist in practice. US strikes that have sunk drug-running boats, the heavy naval presence and seizures of oil tankers off Venezuela, and the demand that President Nicolás Maduro leave the country are contemporary examples of gunboat diplomacy. The justification for the deadly strikes on alleged drug-runners proved almost immediately hollow with Trump’s pardon of convicted drug smuggler Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a US federal prison.

Instead of strategic coherence, there are tensions between the logics of geography, security and trade. The primary threats to US security are Russia and China. The NSS resurrects a world of global and regionalised geopolitical balances of power within an overarching US primacy. The inescapable corollary is that Eastern Europe (including Ukraine) and East Asia fall into Russia’s and China’s spheres of interest, respectively. Re-establishing ‘strategic stability with Russia’ in practice requires sacrificing parts of Ukraine.

Europe’s ‘civilisational erasure’ theme – that Western civilisation is under attack from a toxic combination of hostile migrants, cultural degeneracy and effete liberals – is a reprise of Trump’s campaign rhetoric from last year. It is particularly painful for Australians as the terrorist massacre of Jews on Bondi Beach came barely a week after the NSS was published.

The NSS openly disdains European decline and chastises its leaders as enablers of the loss of European character. The unusually sharp language has sent shockwaves rippling through Europe’s cultural elites and political establishments. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul responded that Germany does not need ‘outside advice’. How it organises its free society is not a matter for alliance security policy.

Unfortunately, he speaks from a position of weakness. To have a seat at the table, Europeans will need to bring something beyond a sense of entitlement. Most NATO allies are de facto US protectorates, not equal partners. The EU’s share of global GDP has declined from 29 per cent in 1992 to 17 per cent. European rearmament in pursuit of military self-sufficiency and reduced reliance on the US will require energy-intensive industrial production that is incompatible with accelerated net zero timetables. Strategic autonomy is unachievable with dependence on US precision munitions, satellites, intelligence and logistics.

Several leaders and analysts, including in Australia, are indeed in denial about the civilisational equation that confronts them: can a host country survive with its civilisation intact when mass immigration implants a parallel culture with its own claim to moral and political authority, loyalties and religiously based laws? According to demographic projections by Professor Matt Goodwin based on official data, the share of white British in the UK population will halve from 70 per cent today to 34 per cent in 2100. They will be in a minority by 2063, and the foreign-born and their descendants will be the majority by 2079. White Britons will be minorities in the three biggest cities (London, Birmingham, Manchester) by 2050 and by 2075, all three could well be Muslim-majority cities.

Mass inflows of people from diverse cultures with radically differing beliefs, values, and rights are not the best recipe for creating an integrated, harmonious, and cohesive new community. Immigrants from conflict-riven regions often bring inherited hatreds, creating major problems for adopted countries whose values they don’t respect. The Bondi Beach slaughter of the innocents drove home the spectre of the West committing cultural suicide. This was not because the terror attack was directed at Jews, but rather, because of the ruling party’s strict taboo against uttering the words ‘Islamic radicalism’ or publicly debating the volume of immigration from culturally hostile populations intent on imposing their moral frameworks on the host society.

That said, the criticism of Europe lacks balance and nuance. The Atlantic allies have always been divided on some core civilisational values. The fervent public displays of patriotism by Americans have often troubled European visitors, and the continent has been less hung up on national sovereignty, possibly because of the violent wars it has triggered in the past. The organising principle of several European political systems rests on a different normative settling point in the fundamental relationship between citizens, markets, society and the state. Polls show solid public support for the EU that is scorned by the NSS as an example of ‘transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty’.

The NSS posits China as the US’s strategic rival, an economic and military power to be countered economically and technologically. One-third of global shipping passes through the South China Sea. The NSS commits the US to ‘keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open, preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes, and maintaining secure and reliable supply chains and access to critical materials’. Consistent with the retreat from the US burden as the global hegemon, allies, including Japan and Australia, will be required to play a larger role to buttress the US ‘military overmatch’.

Offending historic allies in Europe and imposing punitive tariffs on friends and partners in the Global South risks rebuffing their overtures to strengthen bonds with America and driving them into the welcoming arms of China and Russia. This has already happened with India, best symbolised by the summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin, held in New Delhi at the same time as the NSS was published in Washington.