Donald Trump is pursuing regime change – in Europe

When are we going to get the message? I joked a few months back that, when it comes to Donald Trump, Europe needs to learn from Sex and the City’s Miranda Hobbes and realise that “He’s just not that into you”. After this past week, it’s clear that understates the problem. Trump’s America is not merely indifferent to Europe – it’s positively hostile to it. That has enormous implications for the continent and for Britain, which too many of our leaders still refuse to face.

The depth of US hostility was revealed most explicitly in the new US national security strategy, or NSS, a 29-page document that serves as a formal statement of the foreign policy of the second Trump administration. There is much there to lament, starting with the sceptical quote marks that appear around the sole reference to “climate change”, but the most striking passages are those that take aim at Europe.

China and Russia, which you’d think the US would see as genuine strategic threats worthy of serious attention, are addressed flatly and with relative brevity. It’s Europe that gets Team Trump’s blood up, against Europe that it unleashes its rhetorical firepower. It warns that economic stagnation, “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates” and above all, migration, raise “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure”.

You don’t need advanced decryption software to work out what that means. The NSS worries that soon some European countries “will become majority non-European”, which can only be a euphemism for non-white. Any doubt on that score was dispelled by the rambling speech the president delivered in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, in which he mused on how the US only takes people “from shithole countries” such as Somalia, asking plaintively: “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden … from Denmark?”

Perhaps this would not much matter if it merely confirmed that Trump and his circle view Europe through the same culture war lens that they apply to the US, blaming migration, DEI and “woke” for enfeebling societies that were stronger when they were solidly white and Christian (their understanding of “European”). But this is not merely a Fox News rant. It’s a plan.