Trump Administration Says Europe Faces ‘Civilizational Erasure’

 

Trump Administration Says Europe Faces ‘Civilizational Erasure’

 

America’s goal should be “to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the administration said in its new National Security Strategy.

 

Michael D. ShearJeanna SmialekLara Jakes

By Michael D. ShearJeanna Smialek and Lara Jakes

Michael D. Shear reported from London, Jeanna Smialek from Berlin and Lara Jakes from Rome.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/world/europe/trump-europe.html

Dec. 5, 2025

Updated 12:54 p.m. ET

 

The Trump administration said on Friday that Europe was facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” and pledged that the United States would support like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent to prevent a future in which “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”

 

The grim assessment of Europe’s future was released overnight as part of an annual update to the United States’ national security strategy around the world.

 

Without naming them directly, the document says the United States should be “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting political parties that fight against migration and promote nationalism. That describes several right-wing populist parties like Reform U.K. in Britain and the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which has been classified as an extremist party by German intelligence services.

 

“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” Mr. Trump wrote in a foreword to the document, which he called a “road map to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”

 

In a section called “Promoting European Greatness,” the document offers a searing critique of America’s closest allies.

 

It warns that Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries. And it says that the policy of the United States should be to help Europe “correct its current trajectory” over the course of the next several decades.

 

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the 33-page document says.

 

Mr. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the political leadership in Europe, and he has repeatedly pressured those leaders to bend to his will on funding for NATO, trade and tariffs. Vice President JD Vance issued a broad critique of Europe’s mainstream political parties in a speech in Munich in February and urged them to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent.

 

But the document released overnight is the clearest statement yet of how the president wants his America First foreign policy to be a clarion call for other nationalist politicians to overhaul their political systems. And it echoes some of the language of the Great Replacement Theory, a nationalist conspiracy theory embraced by some of his top aides that warns of a deliberate effort to replace white people with nonwhite immigrants.

 

The document accuses the European Union and other “transnational bodies” of undermining liberty and sovereignty, censoring free speech and trampling on basic principles of democracy to suppress political opposition.

 

“The growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism,” the document says. “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”

 

Within hours of its release, the document was already provoking sharp retorts from across Europe.

 

Johann Wadephul, the foreign minister for Germany, responded on Friday by saying that Germany did not “believe that we need to get advice here from any country or party.”

 

He told journalists in Berlin that the United States was Germany’s most important ally in NATO but that “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.”

 

“It’s a frontal attack on the European Union,” said Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Parliament who chairs the delegation for relations with the United States. He called the document “totally unacceptable,” full of “extreme, shocking phrases,” and said some of its statements amounted to direct calls for election interference.

 

The United States’ latest criticism of Europe came on a day when trans-Atlantic tensions were already running hot. The European Union announced on Friday that it would fine X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, $140 million for breaching the bloc’s transparency rules, including through what it called the “deceptive design” of its blue check mark for verified accounts.

 

As rumors about the fine circulated on Thursday, Mr. Vance criticized the European Union for the expected move, writing on X that the bloc should be “supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”

 

The administration’s approach to Europe, as described in the strategy document, was in stark contrast to the way it said it would treat some countries in other parts of the world.

 

A section of the document titled “The Middle East: Shift Burdens, Build Peace” argues that while the United States should “continue to encourage” the countries in the region to combat radicalism, it should not overly meddle in their internal concerns.

 

It calls for “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government,” adding, “We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without.”

 

The document adds that what is crucial to a successful Middle East policy is “accepting the region, its leaders and its nations as they are” and makes no mention of human rights issues like the treatment of women or the killing of a Washington Post columnist, which the C.I.A. believes was approved by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

 

In addition to calling for a new political trajectory in Europe, the document is also likely to raise fresh concerns about Mr. Trump’s relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the United States’ approach to ending the war in Ukraine.

 

The document criticizes “European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”

 

And it appears to echo Mr. Putin’s language by insisting that the United States should be “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

 

Ian Lesser, who heads the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund, a research group, said that the document would reinforce Europe’s existing concerns about the state of the trans-Atlantic relationship and the U.S. position toward Russia, and that it might further embolden the far right in Europe.

 

“The piece treats Europe as a sort of other, one that is a model of what not to do,” he said, adding that it underscored that the United States was not isolationist, but rather “unilateralist.”

 

“It really reinforces existing concerns and puts a sharper edge on them,” he said.

 

Carlo Calenda, a center-left, pro-European senator in Italy, said on Friday that the document showed that Mr. Trump was an “enemy of Europe,” and “an enemy of democracy.” He said that efforts by European politicians to try to flatter Mr. Trump had not worked to promote their own interests.

 

“He’s a bully, and you cannot face a bully by being warm and kind,” he added. “It’s not the way in which you can manage him.”

 

By contrast, one of Mr. Trump’s top supporters in Europe, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, criticized the European Union’s support for Ukraine while praising the American and Russian presidents’ negotiations to end the war.

 

Mr. Orban did not directly address the new U.S. strategy during an interview on the state-funded Kossuth Radio, but broadly echoed its tone.

 

“Those who have power, act; those who don’t only speak,” Mr. Orban said. “This is why strong players like Russia and the United States negotiate and make deals, while weak Europe is left out of shaping its own future and chooses to talk instead.”

 

Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.

 

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.

 

Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.