Original Post >> Anti-Capitalist Musings

“We want Europe to remain European.”

This is a sentence from the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy. Not a leaked memo. Not an off-the-record briefing. Not a late-night Truth Social post that aides can later contextualise away. An official document, published on whitehouse.gov, stamped with the presidential seal, released in the early hours of a Friday morning when bad news goes to die.

Except this news did not die. It sat there on the government website, staring the world in the face, waiting to be read.

What does “European” mean here? It means white. There is no other way to read it. The document warns of “civilisational erasure.” It frets that NATO members will become “majority non-European” within decades. It declares that Europe will be “unrecognisable in 20 years or less” if present trends continue. It laments the “loss of national identities and self-confidence.” It worries about migration policies “transforming the continent and creating strife.”

Strip away the diplomatic language and this is the Great Replacement theory. This is Renaud Camus, the French writer who invented the term, warning that white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants. This is the ideology that animated the Christchurch shooter, who titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement” before murdering fifty-one Muslims at prayer. This is the worldview of identitarian movements across Europe that have spent a decade trying to drag race panic into the mainstream.

They have succeeded beyond their expectations. Their language is now official American foreign policy.

The Vocabulary

Pay attention to the language. It matters. “Civilisational erasure.” “Loss of national identities.” “Patriotic European parties.” “Europe to remain European.” This vocabulary has a history. It has a provenance. It did not emerge from the State Department or the National Security Council. It emerged from the far-right underground and spent years being laundered into respectability.

This is the language of Generation Identity. It is the language of Viktor Orbán. And crucially, it is the language of the American domestic right exported abroad. When Marjorie Taylor Greene calls for a “national divorce” to separate red states from blue, she uses the same logic this document applies to Europe: separation, purity, and the demonisation of the “unassimilable” other. The distinction between domestic culture war and foreign policy has collapsed. The call for European “sovereignty” is just “America First” written in a different alphabet.

Now the White House uses it to define its allies. The document celebrates “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” and calls this “cause for great optimism.” Patriotic is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means parties aligned with Trump’s vision. It means the far right. It means the forces that want to reverse European integration, close borders, and define belonging by blood.

Trump himself, in a Politico interview published this week, made his position explicit. He called European leaders “weak.” He said Europe was “decaying.” He said he would continue to endorse his preferred candidates in European elections: “I’d endorse. I’ve endorsed people, but I’ve endorsed people that a lot of Europeans don’t like. I’ve endorsed Viktor Orbán.”

He singled out Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, as a “disaster.” Khan is the son of Pakistani immigrants. He is London’s first Muslim mayor. Trump’s explanation for why Khan keeps winning elections: “He gets elected because so many people have come in. They vote for him now.”

Consider what is being said here. This is not a complaint about Khan’s policies on transport or housing or policing. This is a complaint about democracy itself. The wrong people are voting. The wrong people are winning. The wrong people are allowed to participate. Khan’s electoral success is not evidence of democratic pluralism working as intended. It is evidence of civilisational failure. The immigrants have come. They vote. They elect one of their own. And this, to Trump, is a disaster.

The logical endpoint of this worldview is not hard to identify. If immigrant-origin voters are the problem, the solution is fewer immigrant-origin voters. If their participation corrupts democracy, democracy must be protected from their participation. If Europe is being erased by demography, demography must be reversed or contained. This is where the language leads. This is where it has always led.

The Function

Race panic always serves a function. The panic may be sincere. The people promoting it may genuinely believe what they are saying. But it still serves a function. Ask who benefits.

The European Union regulates American technology companies. This is not a minor irritation for Silicon Valley. It is an existential threat to business models built on data extraction, algorithmic manipulation, and the externalisation of social costs. The EU enforces data protection through GDPR. It pursues antitrust cases against monopolistic practices. It imposes content moderation requirements. It threatens to break up platforms that have grown too powerful. It treats technology companies as entities to be governed rather than forces of nature to be accommodated.

American capital does not like this. A united Europe with regulatory capacity is a problem. A fractured Europe run by compliant nationalist parties is not. Orbán does not regulate technology companies. Meloni is friendly to American business interests. The far-right parties celebrated in Trump’s strategy document share a common hostility to the Brussels bureaucracy that writes the regulations Silicon Valley despises.

This is not speculation. Timothy Snyder, the historian of totalitarianism, observed that the strategy document reads remarkably like Russian equivalents. The same emphasis on dividing Europe. The same promotion of far-right parties. The same framing of immigration as existential threat. Russia has been running this playbook for over a decade, funding and promoting nationalist movements to weaken the European project. Now America is running it too.

The target is the same: a Europe capable of independent action. For Russia, this means a Europe incapable of supporting Ukraine or resisting Russian expansion. For American capital, this means a Europe incapable of regulating technology companies or pursuing an independent economic policy. The interests converge. The strategy converges. The language converges.

White nationalism provides the ideological superstructure. Corporate deregulation provides the material base. This is the synthesis. The nativists get their ethnic anxieties validated by the most powerful office in the world. The tech oligarchs get freedom from European interference in their business models. The nationalists get American support for their electoral projects. The corporations get access to markets without regulatory friction. Everyone wins except the people marked for exclusion and the institutions that might protect them.

The Contradiction

An American administration lecturing Europe about ethnic purity and national identity. Consider the absurdity for a moment.

America is a settler-colonial project. Settlers stole the land. They stole the labour. They exterminated the indigenous population or confined them to reservations. Enslaved Africans built the economy. The country that emerged was populated through successive waves of immigration, each wave met with exactly the apocalyptic rhetoric now deployed against Muslims and Africans in Europe.

The Irish would destroy America. They were Catholic, clannish, prone to crime and political corruption. They would never assimilate. Then they assimilated, and became white, and the Italians would destroy America. They were swarthy, criminal, anarchist. They would never assimilate. Then they assimilated, and became white, and the Jews would destroy America. Then the Chinese. Then the Mexicans. Each wave absorbed into the expanding category of whiteness. Each panic forgotten. Each apocalypse averted by redrawing the boundaries of belonging.

The people now warning Europe about civilisational erasure are often descendants of those earlier waves of unassimilable foreigners. Their grandparents were the threat. Now they define who belongs and who does not. The irony is lost on them. Or perhaps it is not lost. Perhaps they understand perfectly well that the boundaries of whiteness can expand to include previously excluded groups, as long as new groups are available for exclusion. The machine requires enemies. It does not require consistency.

But the deeper contradiction in the strategy document is about sovereignty. The document speaks the language of national sovereignty constantly. It demands that European nations take “primary responsibility” for their own defence. It criticises the European Union for stifling “political liberty.” It celebrates national identity and self-determination.

At the same time, it announces American intention to interfere in European domestic politics. It criticises European migration policy, free speech protections, and political choices. It promises to “cultivate resistance” to the European status quo. It endorses specific political factions. Trump says openly that he will back his preferred candidates in European elections.

António Costa, president of the European Council, stated the obvious: “Allies do not threaten to interfere in the democratic life or the domestic political choices of these allies. They respect them.” But respect is not on offer. What is on offer is a choice: adopt Trumpism’s racial anxieties, reject European regulatory frameworks, align with American-approved political forces, or face abandonment.

This is not sovereignty. This is vassalage dressed in the rhetoric of independence. Obey our vision or we leave you to Russia. Support our preferred parties or we withdraw protection. This is the offer. This is the only offer.

The Response

How has Europe responded? With the diplomacy of the abused partner.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, responded to the document by affirming that America is “still our biggest ally.” Romano Prodi, the former European Commission president, said the document was “nothing new” while insisting it does “not mean to break the links with the United States.” The German foreign minister acknowledged America is “our most important ally” while insisting simply that Europe “does not need advice.”

The message is clear: absorb the insult, maintain the relationship, wait for it to pass. He did not mean it. He is under stress. Things will get better if we are patient.

Things will not get better. This is not an aberration. This is not Trump having a bad day. This is policy. It is written down. It is published. It is official. The administration has told Europe exactly what it thinks and exactly what it intends to do. Believing otherwise requires ignoring what is plainly stated.

The alternative is to take the document at its word. You want Europe to take primary responsibility for its own defence? Fine. European defence integration, freed from dependence on American military infrastructure. A genuine European army, not as supplement to NATO but as replacement for American hegemony. A multipolar world in which Europe acts as an independent power rather than a subordinate ally.

This is precisely what Washington has worked to prevent for seventy years. American strategy since 1945 has been to keep Europe dependent, divided enough to require American mediation, united enough to serve American interests. The nightmare scenario for American planners has always been a Europe capable of independent action, whether that action aligns with American preferences or not.

But the Trump administration has now said the quiet part loud. They have announced their contempt for European democracy. They have declared their intention to interfere. They have published their support for forces that would tear the European project apart.

The question is whether European leaders will continue to pretend this is not happening, or whether they will finally accept the reality and act accordingly.

The Stakes

Hermann Tertsch is a member of the European Parliament for Spain’s far-right Vox party. He read the strategy document with enthusiasm. “All these things are our message, our diagnosis, so we’re happy,” he said. During previous administrations, he admitted, “we were very afraid” of the United States. Now? “It’s a new era.”

He is right. It is a new era. The world’s most powerful government has published a white nationalist foreign policy document. It has announced support for far-right parties across Europe. It has promised to cultivate resistance to European integration. It has threatened to abandon democratic allies who fail to comply with its racial and political vision.

The European project, for all its many flaws, emerged from catastrophe. Two world wars fought largely on European soil. The Holocaust. Tens of millions dead. The complete discrediting of ethnic nationalism as a governing ideology. The attempt, however imperfect and incomplete, to build something beyond blood and soil. To define belonging by citizenship and shared political commitment rather than ancestry. To make war between France and Germany not just unlikely but unthinkable.

This project has always been contested. It has always been incomplete. It has always struggled against its own darker impulses, against the pull of nationalism and xenophobia, against the forces that would define Europe by who it excludes rather than what it stands for. But it has also, for eighty years, kept the peace. It has created the longest period without major war in European history. It has, despite everything, held.

The Trump administration is now aligned with forces that would reverse this. That would return Europe to competitive nationalism. That would define belonging by ancestry and religion. That would treat diversity as threat rather than fact. That would make war thinkable again.

We do not need history books to tell us where this leads. We know. The map of Europe is drawn in blood. Every border is a scar. To dismantle the political settlement is to reopen the wound. The twentieth century was a slaughterhouse, built on the exact principles of ethnic competition and national purity now being sold as salvation.

The bodies are barely cold. The memory is still living. Yet we are told the lesson was wrong. We are told that nationalism was not the cancer, but the cure. We are told that blood and soil were not the catastrophe, but the solution.

The pretence is dead. It is not reviving. The language is published. The intentions are declared. The alliances are announced.

The question now is simple. Resist or accommodate. Defend the flawed achievements of the post-war order or surrender them to the forces that would tear them apart. There is no third option. There is no waiting it out. There is no hoping it will pass.

This is the choice. This is the only choice. And the time to make it is now.

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