Global & US Headlines
Trump Unveils 2025 National Security Strategy That Demotes Europe and Courts Russia
On 8 Dec 2025 the White House released a 30-page National Security Strategy that recasts Europe as a fragile partner facing “civilizational erasure,” omits Russia from the threat list, and urges the U.S. to back nationalist forces inside EU states.
Focusing Facts
- The strategy mentions Russia 0 times as a threat, devotes just 2½ of its 30 pages to Europe, and was posted online by the National Security Council on 08-Dec-2025.
- It calls on Washington to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” and praises the “growing influence of patriotic European parties,” a first for any official U.S. strategy document.
- The paper labels NATO’s eastward growth a “perpetually expanding alliance” that must stop, shifting the U.S. role to mediator rather than defender.
Context
This moment echoes the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—when Washington told Europe to stay out of the Americas—only now the corollary flips the script, telling Europe to manage itself while the U.S. steps back. Like Charles de Gaulle’s 1966 exit from NATO’s command or Nixon’s 1972 China opening, the NSS signals a structural pivot: America reallocating bandwidth from the Atlantic to other competitions, chiefly China. Whether the rhetoric about Europe’s “civilizational erasure” is analysis or ideological posturing, it accelerates two slow-burn trends: EU moves toward strategic autonomy and Washington’s retreat from alliance primacy. On a 100-year horizon the document matters less for its culture-war barbs than for normalising spheres-of-influence logic among nuclear powers—an idea that historically (e.g., Yalta 1945) breeds unstable bargains. If Europe responds by re-arming and diversifying security ties, this could mark the start of a genuinely multipolar order; if not, the strategy may be remembered as rhetorical overkill in a century-long realignment already underway.
Perspectives
Left-leaning Western media outlets
e.g., The Guardian, The Week, Firstpost — They warn that Trump’s National Security Strategy is an ideologically-driven assault on Europe that could shatter the trans-Atlantic alliance and empower the far-right. With a stake in defending the post-1945 liberal order, these publications emphasise worst-case scenarios and gloss over Europe’s own defence shortfalls or voter discontent that the document taps into.
Nationalist/right-wing media and voices
e.g., American Renaissance, Eurasia Review, The American Conservative — They hail the Strategy as overdue ‘tough love’ that urges Europe to reclaim nation-state sovereignty, curb migration and end costly entanglements like the Ukraine war. Rooted in populist and ethnonational interests, these outlets celebrate the document’s civilisational framing while minimising risks of enabling Russian aggression or fracturing NATO.
Chinese state-owned media
People’s Daily, China.org.cn — Beijing-run outlets frame the Strategy and tech disputes as proof of a deepening U.S.–EU rift, arguing that Europe will now accelerate ‘strategic autonomy’ away from Washington. By magnifying trans-Atlantic discord, these sources advance China’s geopolitical narrative that U.S. leadership is in decline and that multipolar alternatives—where Europe hedges toward China—are inevitable.