The urgent lesson that Keir Starmer must learn from Donald Trump’s new security strategy
The US National Security Strategy suggests the Trump administration plans to support far and hard-right parties in European countries, while leaving it to its own defences
A month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, his vice-president, JD Vance, gave a now infamous speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he said: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor... what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values...”
During the same trip, Vance met with the leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party – just a few weeks before the country held a general election – in a show of support for the kind of “fundamental values” he was talking about. Both the meeting and the speech shocked many European politicians.
Departing from his prepared speech at the same Munich conference, German defence minister Boris Pistorius said: “... if I have understood him [Vance] correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes. Ladies and gentlemen, that is unacceptable. That is not acceptable...”
But perhaps Vance had been speaking out of turn. He is, after all, only the vice-president, a role that usually has little real power. Perhaps the US government didn’t really think that Putin’s missiles and drones, currently raining down on Ukraine, and his undeclared hybrid war on much of the rest of Europe posed fewer dangers than some vague “threat from within”.
‘Permanent American domination of the entire world’
Unfortunately, the new US National Security Strategy, published by the White House, confirms in no uncertain terms that Vance was providing a hugely valuable – and terrifying – insight into Donald Trump’s thinking.
There are some truly bizarre lines in a document which reads more like a political pamphlet than any kind of serious policy. As journalist Paul Mason pointed out in a recent article for the New World website, the strategy’s claim that “after the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country” could have been written by Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.
Indeed, I’ve been re-reading historian Margaret MacMillan’s excellent book about the 1972 meeting between US President Richard Nixon and China’s Mao Zedong, and it reminds me of the language used by the more hot-headed Chinese officials towards their American guests. It is astonishing that this is the view of the people currently running the USA.
There are other, deeply concerning passages. The US is going to “reassert and enforce the [1823] Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere”, ie the Americas. Trump is criticising his predecessors for allegedly trying to control the world, while making his own explicit and brazen claim for control of a huge swathe of territory far beyond American borders.
“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity – a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” the strategy continues in words that will only heighten concern about Trump’s failure to rule out using military force to seize Greenland from Denmark.
READ MORE: Why Ukrainians, hardened by war, will take the fight to Russia if Donald Trump betrays them
‘Civilisational erasure’
However, the most worrying aspects of the strategy are its failure to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or see his regime as a serious threat, and its condemnation of democratic European society.
It claims Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilisational erasure”; the European Union and other transnational bodies “undermine political liberty and sovereignty”; and migration policies “are transforming the continent and creating strife”. Other alleged blights include the “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”.
The document concludes, grandiosely, that “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
However – and remember this is the US National Security Strategy – it offers its own cause for optimism: “the growing influence of patriotic European parties”, which presumably includes Germany’s far-right AfD and, in all likelihood, Reform UK. “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” it adds.
Trump ‘in bed with Russia’
Of course, there are plenty of serious people who have known for some time that Trump’s US is a highly unreliable ally.
Speaking to Times Radio in June, General Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said Trump “has already demonstrated that he is in bed with Russia, that he is a pro-Putin sympathiser”.
“He cares not a damn for Ukraine, and he will look after his interests and forget about the alliance,” Shirreff said. Leaders of European Nato states, he added, were “terrified that Trump is going to walk away”.
However, there is one line in the security strategy that Keir Starmer and all other European leaders need to take to heart: that Europe should “stand on its own feet” and take “primary responsibility for its own defence”.
Were it not for the language about encouraging the far-right and “correcting” Europe, it could almost be seen as a friendly way of saying goodbye and good luck.
UK and Europe must rearm
What it also means is that the UK should stop buying US military equipment which relies on regular software updates because we cannot be certain that, in our hour of need, the “pro-Putin sympathiser” in the White House will allow this to happen.
In embattled Pokrovsk, Ukrainian soldiers briefly broke cover to raise their national flag to show Putin’s claim that the strategically important city had fallen was false, and that their fight to defend their country and “fundamental values” like freedom and democracy continues.
Trump and Vance may abandon them, but Europe must not. And it must learn the most vital lesson from the new US National Security Strategy: rearm, rearm, rearm.
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