Opinion
Guest
Essay
Trump Is
Not Attacking Europe. He’s Attacking Something Else.
Dec. 11,
2025
Christopher
Caldwell
By
Christopher Caldwell
Mr.
Caldwell is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam and the West.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/opinion/national-security-strategy-us-europe.html
In Paris
on Sunday, Le Monde led its coverage with an article on what it called the
consummation of a divorce. Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran the headline “Trump
Declares War on Europe.”
The
president’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week, sent a message
to the continent that shocked the world. Drowning under mass migration,
mismanaged and bullied by the European Union’s leaders, increasingly incapable
of producing children, Europe’s ancient nations, the document argues, face not
just economic decline but also the prospect of imminent “civilizational
erasure.” In the near future, it adds, “it is far from obvious whether certain
European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain
reliable allies.”
President
Trump’s detractors on both sides of the Atlantic blamed him for rupturing the
NATO alliance and for straying into matters far removed from national defense —
such as migration, culture and demography — that are the province of racists
and xenophobes.
That is
the wrong way to understand the document. Read carefully, in fact, the passages
about Europe sound more like a defense of the continent. They include a
description of Europe as “strategically and culturally vital” to the United
States. Few of those outraged by the document have bothered to distinguish
between Europe — a geographical area that is also shorthand for the culture
that arose over the centuries from a mix of Greek rationalism and Middle
Eastern monotheism — and the European Union, a 33-year-old experiment that aims
to replace the continent’s nation-states with a novel form of transnational
governance based in Brussels.
In
certain quarters the European Union has become synonymous with a postdemocratic
permanent ruling class of regulators and bureaucrats. It has proved more
successful at delegitimizing national governments in, say, Paris and Rome than
at shifting their responsibilities for defense, budgeting and border policing
to Brussels. That is because European voters have not conferred on it the
legitimacy to do so. What powers Brussels has been able to claim, it has
snatched piecemeal from voters when they were distracted by the euro crisis,
Covid, the Ukraine war and other emergencies.
That is
how the Trump administration sees things. Its document identifies the European
Union as a danger to the United States — albeit for its incompetence rather
than its antipathy. Brussels saps the economic power and the morale of our
European allies while purporting to unite and strengthen them. Even more
seriously, it has melded 27 countries into a largely borderless zone in which
mass migration has proved almost impossible to stem.
The
document forthrightly links this demographic shift to changes in national
character. “It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest,
certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the document holds.
“As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the
world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who
signed the NATO charter.”
Since
this is the claim that threw critics into the greatest rage, it is worth
looking at the modesty of it. The administration is not arguing that people of
this or that national origin are better than others. It argues that we have
arrived at the end of the politics of the blank slate: The nations of Europe
are actual places, with distinct cultural and civilizational qualities, on the
basis of which they make peace and go to war. They’re not just arbitrarily
bounded zones that can be expected to remain always the same, no matter who
lives there.
Look at
France, where a growing population of Arabs and Muslims is increasingly vocal
and increasingly politically effective. La France Insoumise led a coalition
that won the country’s national elections in 2024, although its plurality of
seats did not permit it to take power. Led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party
espouses a kind of Mamdani-ism gone national. It advocates for the country’s
Muslim and non-European immigrants around a platform that includes
redistribution of income and wealth and ferocious criticism of Israel.
There’s
nothing illegitimate about that. But if France remains a democracy, it will
increasingly be a country that fights Zionism. And it is reasonable to expect
that that will make it a less compatible and less reliable ally for the United
States. To acknowledge this is not to claim all Muslims are closed to
persuasion or that they are worse than the Christians who once dominated the
culture of France. It is merely to open one’s eyes and see that the common
ground on which an alliance can be built is shrinking.
It is
possible to share Mr. Trump’s diagnosis and recoil from his prescription. The
president proposes rebuilding the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by
“cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European
nations.” This means backing “patriotic” forces that oppose further E.U.
integration, including, presumably, the national populist party Alternative for
Germany, which some in Germany’s older parties are proposing to ban as
extremist.
In the
wake of the strategy document’s release, Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat
of New York, deplored the way the strategy “discards decades of values-based
U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”
It
doesn’t, though. It just elaborates a different set of values and principles.
While Mr. Trump is taking sides, he is not more anti-E.U. than his predecessors
were pro-E.U. In 2016, President Barack Obama campaigned against Brexit,
threatening to send Britain to “the back of the queue” on trade deals if it
chose to secede from the European Union.
If you
look back at earlier National Security Strategies, you find that attitudes
toward migration, culture and demography guided America’s approach to alliance
building every bit as much as they do in Mr. Trump’s. These attitudes, again,
were just different. Mr. Obama proclaimed in 2010 that “our diversity is part
of our strength” in a global economy to which he considered the United States
“inextricably linked.”
The
global economy still has its defenders, but it has social downsides that were
not evident — or at least not much discussed — 15 years ago. A national
security strategy for today is bound to look different. Mr. Trump chides his
predecessors for having made “hugely misguided and destructive bets on
globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class
and industrial base on which American economic and military pre-eminence
depend.” Mr. Obama wanted to protect universal norms. Mr. Trump wants to ensure
the survival of the United States and like-minded nations and their way of
life.
There may
appear to be an inconsistency here. The new National Security Strategy calls
for a “flexible realism,” the opposite of the misplaced idealism that has led
the United States into too many failed foreign interventions. But if you are
now going to make allowances for, say, Saudi tribalism in order to keep up good
relations, then why not do the same for European preferences for transnational
governance and passport-free transit? How is it anything but hypocritical to
overlook Saudi values while picking through those of Europeans with a
fine-toothed comb?
There are
two answers to this question. The first is that the values of European
civilization, as traditionally understood, are a large part of what the United
States signed up to defend in 1949 with the founding of NATO. That traditional
understanding provided not only a purpose but also a source of cohesion that
made the alliance viable. By contrast, no matter how important you think our
alliance with Saudi Arabia is, the values of its polygamy-indulging,
Sharia-enforcing Wahhabi monarchy had absolutely nothing to do with why the
United States entered that alliance.
Then
there is the other, simpler answer to why the Trump administration now makes it
a priority to lead Europe back to a more traditional understanding of itself:
because the United States is so intimately involved in its decline. Europe has
undergone many periods of decadence before but somehow endured. It stopped the
Moors at Poitiers and the Turks at Vienna, withstood a series of plagues,
survived Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin. But none of those episodes vitiated
its culture and enfeebled its sinews and threatened its historic continuity
quite so thoroughly as three and a half decades of American-style liberal
international order, under the banner of “C’mon, people now, smile on your
brother.”
The main
source of Europeans’ anger at seeing their vanishing civilization mourned by
the United States may be this: that it was at America’s urging that they
undertook this work of self-destruction in the first place.
Books of
The Times
A Turning
Tide in Europe as Islam Gains Ground
By Dwight
Garner
July 29,
2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/books/30garner.html
Christopher
Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and
the West” is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe
that Mr. Caldwell’s rhetoric is “hot” is not to say that it is aggrieved or
unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig
by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit.
But they
are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the
West’s leading political journalists. Primary among them are these: Through
decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a
strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe,
perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European
culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture,
these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s
cities, street by street.”
Mr.
Caldwell is a vivid writer, and like an action-movie hero he walks calmly away
from his own detonations while fire swirls behind him. “Imagine that the West,
at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from
Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported,” he
writes. “Something similar is taking place now.”
Muslim
cultures “have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its
underlings,” he deposes. “Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over
the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear.
That is probably not a wise wager.”
These
kinds of ideas have been articulated before, of course, by writers including
the Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis — who has said that, by the end of
this century, “Europe
will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb” — the Somali-born Dutch feminist Ayaan
Hirsi Ali (“Infidel”), Lee Harris (“The Suicide of Reason”), Bruce Bawer (“While Europe Slept”) and the combustible journalist
Oriana Fallaci. But Mr. Caldwell’s book is the most rigorous and plainspoken examination of
Muslim immigration in Europe to date, a sobering book that walks right up to,
if never quite crossing, the line between being alarming and being alarmist.
There are
many strains to Mr. Caldwell’s argument, too many to fully tease out here.
Suffice it to say, up front, that Mr. Caldwell is not anti-immigration. He
traces the historical movements of various peoples across continents and
nationalities and notes both successes and failures. But there has been
nothing, he suggests, quite like the recent influx of Muslims into Europe — he refers to it as “a rupture in its history.”
“In the
middle of the 20th century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe,”
Mr. Caldwell writes. “At the turn of the 21st, there were between 15 and 17
million Muslims in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4 million in
Germany, and 2 million in Britain.”
These
immigrants are further swamping Europe demographically, he adds, because of
their high fertility rates. He points to small facts as well as large ones. In
Brussels in 2006, the seven most common given boys’ names “were Mohamed, Adam,
Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine, and Hamza.”
The
problem, in Mr. Caldwell’s view, is less about sheer numbers than cultural
divergence. What’s happening in Europe is not the creation of an American-style
melting pot, he writes, because Muslims are not melting in. They are instead
forming what he calls “a parallel society.” Newcomers to England now listen to
Al Jazeera, not the BBC. They are hesitant to serve in their adopted country’s
militaries. (As of 2007, Mr. Caldwell notes, there were only 330 Muslims in
Britain’s armed forces.) Worse, these immigrants are bringing anti-Semitism
back to Europe.
Mr.
Caldwell carefully observes the riots that spread in ethnic neighborhoods
across France in 2005, during which thousands of cars were burned. “Who were
these rioters?” he asks. “Were they admirers of France’s majority culture,
frustrated at not being able to join it on equal terms? Or did they simply
aspire to burn to the ground a society they despised, whether for its
exclusivity, its hypocrisy, or its weakness?”
The most
chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell’s book may be that the debate over Muslim
immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because
anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic. Europe’s citizens
— as well as its leaders, its artists
and, crucially, its satirists — are scared to speak because of a demonstrated willingness by
Islam’s fanatics to commit violence against
their perceived opponents. There exists, Mr. Caldwell writes, a kind of “standing fatwa” against Islam’s critics.
Mr.
Caldwell, who is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine,
finds things to praise about Islamic society, but he is unsparing about its
deficiencies. “The Islamic world is an economic and intellectual basket case,
the part of the potentially civilized world most left behind by progress,” he
writes. He adds, devastatingly: “Spain translates more foreign books in a year
than all the Arab-speaking countries have translated since the reign of Caliph
Mamoun in the ninth century.”
“Reflections
on the Revolution in Europe” is more descriptive than proscriptive. Better
intermediaries between East and West are sorely needed, Mr. Caldwell implies
during his thumping takedown of the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, whom
he accuses of placating Western audiences while encouraging jihad through coded
language. Among Mr. Caldwell’s few heroes is the French president, Nicolas
Sarkozy, who refers to himself as a “demanding friend” of Muslims in France and
who, as France’s interior minister, reduced the number of first-time residency
permits the country offered. Mr. Sarkozy, the author writes, is moving beyond
“uncritical multiculturalism.”
Mr.
Caldwell’s book is well researched, fervently argued and morally serious. It
may serve as a dense, footnoted wake-up call to many of Europe’s liberal
democracies. It is also a worst-case overview of Muslim immigration into
Europe, and it is possible that Mr. Caldwell overstates his case.
Just this
past Sunday, The Guardian newspaper in London published the results of a new
Gallup poll taken in the European Union, one whose findings seemed to show that
a mass radicalization of the continent’s Muslims is not taking place, as was
feared from 2004 to 2006, in the wake of terrorist attacks in London and
Madrid. The Guardian also quoted Mr. Sarkozy’s security adviser, Alain Bauer,
who took a sanguine view of Muslim immigration: “We estimate about 10 percent
of our Islamic population are in a dynamic of rejection of the West and Europe,
10 percent are more European than the Europeans, and about 80 percent are in
the middle, just trying to get by.” Mr. Bauer added, “The concern is less
home-grown or imported terrorists, but states such as Iran.”
That, Mr.
Caldwell would say, may well be wishful thinking — or yet another example of a public
figure afraid to say what he really thinks. For Mr. Caldwell, the fundamental
issue is also, more centrally, about irrevocable societal transformation.
It is
hard to argue with his ultimate observation about Europe today: “When an
insecure, malleable, relativistic culture” (Europe’s) “meets a culture that is
anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines” (Islam’s), “it is
generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
REFLECTIONS
ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE
Immigration,
Islam, and the West
By
Christopher Caldwell
422
pages. Doubleday. $30.
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