After the best part of a year of zig-zagging, we now have what looks like a definitive statement of the fundamentals of American foreign policy for Donald Trump’s second term, in the shape of the National Security Strategy released a week and a half ago. (Read it here.) That doesn’t mean that the erratic behavior will cease – far from it – but it provides it with something like the theoretical structure that has been previously lacking.
There are two possible interpretations of what the NSS is saying, at least as it relates to Europe (which is what’s had the most media attention; we might look at some of the rest another time). They are superficially similar but fundamentally very different; I’ll paraphrase them as follows:
(a) In the conflict between (western) Europe and Russia (and perhaps China), Europe has enfeebled itself by its shiftlessness and by undermining its values with immigration and wokeness. It needs to spend more on defence, stop immigration and admit anti-woke parties to power, in order to strengthen itself to be a valuable ally to resist Russia.
(b) In the conflict between Europe and Russia, Europe is wrong and Russia is right. Russia’s values – assertive, nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-woke – are to be preferred. Europe needs to stop immigration and admit anti-woke parties to power, in order to take its rightful place as an ally/dependency of Russia.
Set out like this, the difference in underlying logic of the two interpretations is obvious. But in practice it’s easy to confuse them, because their policy prescriptions are basically the same (with an important difference, which we’ll come to shortly). It’s therefore not obvious which of the two the NSS’s authors are intending to endorse, and indeed it’s entirely possible that they are themselves uncertain of this: that different Trump officials are on different sides, or even that particular individuals are conflicted in their own minds about what they are trying to do.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that (b) represents the predominant view within the Trump administration, and in particular the view of Trump himself [link added], to the (limited) extent that his thought can be reduced to a coherent whole. This, needless to say, is a radical reversal of America’s strategic position.
The main argument against this interpretation is that the call for increased European defence spending that features in the NSS is at home in (a) but sits oddly in (b). Why improve your capacity to resist Russia if the point is to join Russia’s side?
But it seems to me that the arguments against (a) as an interpretation are a lot stronger. The NSS doesn’t sound at all as if it’s outlining how to best resist Russia; rather it envisages the United States forcing Europe to make peace (or “reestablish strategic stability”) with Russia. And why would it expect conflict with Russia when it endorses Russia’s values? And if it was trying to promote resistance to Russia, why would it advocate putting pro-Russian parties in power?
Even the call for increased defence spending is framed in terms of the past rather than the future; it’s a payback to the US for the (allegedly) unfair burden that it’s borne in the past. So I think it’s more likely that it, as with the occasional attempts at reassurance like “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe,” is simply cover for the strategy’s real aims.
But if I’m wrong about that, and the NSS actually does intend to back Europe against Russia, its means of going about it would be totally counter-productive. Undermining European (and for that matter American) democracy and dismantling international co-operation are not going to help the project of resistance. Nor is admitting up front that Russia is philosophically in the right, or denying that it constitutes a threat.
Incoherence in Trumpworld is nothing new; the fact that the strategy’s proposals are at variance with some of its professed goals does not prove that those goals are not genuine in their way. But the disdain for liberal democracy that shows up on almost every page of the NSS seems to me like the real thing: it’s consistent with everything we know of Trump and of many of the key people around him.
And whether its motives are misguided benevolence or active hostility, or some confused mix of the two, America is giving notice to Europe – and by extension to the rest of the democratic world, including Australia – that it seeks its destruction. I have been pointing out for four years that Russia cannot hope to win a war against NATO; equally, however, Europe cannot hope to prevail against the combined forces of Russia and the US.
Our response to that challenge will determine not just the course of the next three years but, very probably, the future of humanity itself.
PS: Jon Henley in the Guardian has one of the best commentaries on the NSS.
The World is Not Enough 