Trump’s Tough Love for Europe

Last week in Warsaw, a Polish journalist told me, “We conservatives all loved JD Vance’s Munich speech. He spoke for us.” 

“When Europeans find out I’m friends with the vice president,” I replied, “they often ask, ‘Does he hate Europe?’ I tell them, of course not, that he loves Europe, but he loves Europe enough to tell European leaders the truth.”

President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) exemplifies that kind of tough love for Europe. When Vance gave his Munich speech earlier this year, the German in charge of the security conference, a grown man, actually wept in public. Many tears of grief and anger are no doubt being shed in Brussels, and among European elites, in the wake of the NSS. Tough love has a way of doing that to people who have grown soft and dependent.

The Trump NSS articulates a massive shift in US policy, one that has been emerging in the second Trump administration but that finds clarity in this document. The NSS, whose author is not named (but U.S. Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton’s fingerprints are all over it), casts aside the globalist neoliberalism that has defined U.S. foreign policy for the past several decades. No more ‘free trade’ that wrecks the American middle class and industrial base. No more writing endless cheques for European defense. And no more “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”

Is that Mr. Soros in the corner, crying into his caviar? Good. Cry more.

The Trump NSS comes out unapologetically for “the sovereign rights of nations,” and encourages other nations to embrace sovereignty for themselves too, “against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations.” Somebody hand von der Leyen a box of tissues. 

The NSS identifies mass migration as a chief threat to sovereignty. 

“In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security,” it reads. “The era of mass migration must end.”

The document also comes out powerfully in defense of free speech and freedom of religion, both in the United States and among America’s allies. It could not be clearer: “We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.”

And then the NSS comes specifically to Europe. As bad as Europe’s anemic economic performance is, its inability to control its borders is even worse. The NSS says that the continent faces an existential crisis, one of potential “civilizational erasure.” This paragraph sums up the message of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and all the sovereigntist leaders who have long been demonized by Brussels:

The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that 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. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. 

The Trump NSS warns that Europe’s decline is so severe that the question of whether its nations can be “reliable allies” of the United States is on the table. But contrary to what globalists in Europe and the U.S. are saying, the Trump administration does not “hate Europe.” It hates what Europe has become under decades of failed leadership. 

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” says the NSS. 

Well, yes, and so do many Europeans. They are the ones that European media and Eurocrats in Brussels and in the continent’s capitals denounce as ‘far right.’ 

The Trump NSS is a dream document for European sovereigntists, who have for so long been maligned and marginalized in their own countries. These lines could have been drafted by Fidesz, VOX, the AfD, Fratelli d’Italia, the Rassemblement National, and other parties of the patriotic Right:

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. 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. 

The European ruling class is not taking it well. France’s former ambassador to the U.S., Gérard Araud, tweeted, “The stunning section devoted to Europe reads like a far-right pamphlet.” Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt likewise responded, “In saying that Europe faces ‘civilizational erasure,’ the Trump new security strategy places itself to the right of the extreme right in Europe.”

Bildt refers to this passage of the NSS, which touches the electrified third rail of European politics: the Great Replacement:

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter. 

To be fair, the “majority non-European” claim seems demographically unlikely, despite low EU fertility rates, though much depends on future mass migration northward out of Africa. The American right-wing writer Steve Sailer, who created this image over a decade ago from available data, calls this “the most important graph in the world”:

Sub-Saharan African fertility has since begun to decline, like nearly everywhere else in the world, but that is only relatively good news for Europe. It will take Africa decades to reach the dying-out phase now engulfing Europe. Meanwhile, many of those sub-Saharan Africans will be restless and on the move northward.

If it is unlikely (but not impossible) that any European NATO ally will become majority non-white in this century, there can be no doubt that the non-white migrant population of most Western European countries will continue to grow. This growth, along with the obvious failure to integrate, will cause growing chaos, possibly even civil wars. 

Take France, for example. The French government does not gather data based on ethnicity, but reliable estimates exist. In a 2017 report, U.S.-based Pew Research Center, considered the gold standard for research, projected that France’s Muslim population (at the time 9%) would grow to nearly 13% by 2050 under a ‘zero migration’ scenario, which is completely unrealistic. Under a high-migration scenario, that number could reach 18% by mid-century.

But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Migrant population growth is concentrated in the cities. Thus, by 2075, the Paris region could be 50-60% non-white. This is not a formula for political stability, to put it mildly. 

In Britain, which does collect racial demographic statistics, the consensus estimate is that the country will be between 30 and 40% non-white by 2050. Demographer Matthew Goodwin estimates that by 2075, the UK will have crossed the line into majority non-white status. 

The Islamic portion of that cohort will be smaller, but nevertheless, projections estimate between 13 and 17% of Britons will be Islamic by 2050. 

But look at UK cities. Today, nearly one in three residents of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, are Muslim. In London, the capital, 16% are Muslim. Granted, predicting religious trends is shaky business, but on current trends, by 2075, the UK’s three biggest cities—London, Birmingham, and Manchester—could be majority Islamic. 

Today, white Britons are already a minority in London, though whites overall hold a slim majority (54%). Whites are already an absolute minority in Birmingham (49%), with 43% of that share identified as white British. Similarly, whites are a majority in Manchester today (57%), though white Britons are only 49% of Mancunians.

By 2050, though, whites will be absolute minorities in all three cities. And, if Goodwin’s analysis earlier this year is correct, white Britons—those whose ancestral roots are in that country—will make up only one in three residents on the island by 2100.

These tectonic population shifts are happening during Europe’s longest-ever period of internal peace. In fact, UK journalist Sean Thomas recently noted that within 50 years, London has gone from being 85% white British to being 37% white British, and falling. 

“There was not so much a replacement as an invited influx, deliberately willed by the government of the day,” Thomas writes in the Telegraph. “London, then, really is unique in peacetime. No one voted for the change we’ve seen, no one consciously willed it, yet it has happened.”

Many, perhaps most, Europeans see this, but to complain publicly about mass migration and its consequences is to risk trouble with the law. In France, Éric Zemmour and Renaud Camus have been hauled into court on hate speech charges for expressing displeasure with the decline of French culture under mass migration. In Britain, X has shown countless clips of ordinary people being harassed by police, even arrested, for objecting to migration. 

No wonder Brussels wants to clamp down on free speech via hate speech laws and mechanisms like the Digital Services Act. The ruling classes of Western European countries do not wish their own people to notice what their leaders, of both the traditional Right and traditional Left, have done to them. 

Plus, governments appear to have concluded that one important way to avoid civil conflict between Islamic and migrant populations on one side, and native-born people on the other, is to criminalize whites noticing and complaining. That, and to demonize as ‘far-right’ those who can see clearly what is happening, and don’t like it.

It won’t work. The ruling classes in European capitals, and in Brussels, have created a potentially revolutionary situation in Europe. King’s College London war studies professor David Betz has been warning loudly all year about the rising prospect of civil war in the UK and Europe—this, based on what academics know about how civil wars begin—but official Europe doesn’t want to listen. 

Multiculturalism and identity politics have produced an incredibly volatile situation in Europe, one that appears to be accelerating towards some sort of violent reckoning, unless Europe’s leaders can somehow steer the ship away from the demographic iceberg. It will never happen as long as the governing elites, and their allies in the media, deliberately blind themselves to reality, and punish Europeans who refuse to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

At last, however, clear-sighted Europeans have an ally in Washington. Earlier this year, a monk at a French abbey told me that the friars there pray for the success of JD Vance, the Catholic vice president, and the deliverer of tough love to the Munich mandarins. “We believe that our future depends on him,” said the monk. The welcome new Trump National Security Strategy illustrates the point.