US President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has finally dropped. It’s a strange document. At only 33 pages long, the NSS is not exactly rich in detail – yet it tries to cram in a broad range of topics. It lacks a proper conclusion and comes across as lopsided. But it shouts at least one thing very loudly: it was written by and for people with the politics of a stroppy alt-right teenager.

Among Trump’s obsessions are ‘civilizational’ purity in Europe, threats to ‘the homeland’ and the legacies of ‘forever wars’ and past US promotion of liberal ideology globally. The NSS boasts of Trump’s ‘peace’ record, yet wants to expand the Munroe Doctrine of US dominance in the Americas.

The NSS swears it has rooted out ‘woke’ and ‘radical gender’ lunacy on the route back to an American ‘golden age’ and to unshackle raw military power. China, Iran, and Russia are largely de-prioritised as expected. Trade and economics are central to this ‘art-of-the-deal’ president’s plans. ‘Narco-terrorism’, borders and migration are conflated heavily – and African minerals are on the menu.

Gaza is a “thorny” side issue, of negligible interest in comparison to, say, the imagined cultural death of a Europe ‘flooded’ with alien foreigners. And the NSS has a lot to say on Europe…

Trump’s bigotry on show

In a section called ‘promoting European greatness’, the document laments the decline of the Old World:

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

So what is the ‘real’ problem, you may ask? Well, the answer reads like a bitter uncle’s 1am Facebook post. The economic decline, Trump’s cabal believe, “is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. And, in their infinite wisdom, they state:

The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.

They claim current European migration policies:

are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Civilisational greatness?

Luckily for us, America [read: the nativist white elites of Trump World] are “sentimentally attached to the European continent –  and, of course, to Britain and Ireland”.

Echoing the fascist Replacement Great Theory, the document warns even some NATO states will soon “become majority non-European”. But the US “wants to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness”.

Clearly referring to the rise of far-right, xenophobic electoral parties in Europe, the NSS says:

America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.

In what Ukraine Flag Twitter will read as a sop to Russia, the report recommends:

Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.

The NSS is trying to hit a lot of notes – maybe too many. But on Europe, the Trump administration’s vision is relatively clear. It will support far-right parties in a war against what it perceives as alien invaders. It will do so according to a conspiratorial narrative about an imagined ‘clash of civilizations’. This self-serving story – petty, mean-spirited and empirically untrue – is now explicit US global security strategy.

All of which begs the question, why the fuck is Starmer still trying to cosy up to these bigots?

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

This post was originally published on Canary.