Published a few days ago, the United States’ new National Security Strategy (NSS) sums up the worldview of the U.S. administration.
The Monroe Doctrine is back as a major symbol. The foundational doctrine of U.S. imperialism—especially from the the 20th century—has been adjusted to present circumstances. This newly unabashed U.S. imperialism no longer targets “only” South America. The NSS pulls no punches: Washington officially views Europe as a vassal to be re-educated.
That the United States sees Europe as a vassal is not new. Nor is the complicity of the majority of European leaders to this vassalization. There is a consensus, regardless of the political branding of the U.S. administration, to prevent any impulse toward European strategic independence. Contrary to the proclaimed ambitions of European “strategic autonomy,” recent years have deepened this vassalization. We remember the NATO summit last June and the pathetic statement by its Secretary General Mark Rutte: “Daddy sometimes has to raise his voice”, referring to Trump’s reprimands. Under Trump’s injunctions, NATO’s European members then agreed to devote 5 percent of their GDP to armaments spending. This is nothing less than a tribute, since those expenditures will massively swell the order books of the U.S. arms industry. This runs counter to any form of independence, since the most sophisticated U.S.-made weapons can be remotely disabled if their use displeases the U.S. authorities. Even without going that far, it is enough for the United States to block deliveries of spare parts.
In late July, in the wake of that session of collective humiliation, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, concluded a leonine, one-sided trade agreement with Donald Trump. In order to limit tariffs on most European products exported to the United States to 15 percent, in reality 20 percent given the weakness of the dollar relative to the euro, she conceded on everything else: a pledge of €600 billion in European investment in the United States, at a moment that requires, on the contrary, a massive revival of productive investment in France and in Europe; a pledge of €750 billion in purchases of U.S. energy products, which only increases the continent’s dependence in this area; a pledge of tens of billions in purchases of American semiconductors, a new dependence in a strategic domain; and a commitment to reduce environmental, health, and safety regulations that could slow the entry of American products into the European market, particularly in the strategic digital sector, even as Europe is already a U.S. digital colony.
These latest displays of humiliation and voluntary dependence by European leaders vis-à-vis the so-called “American ally” were not enough to convince Trump to change course. For good reason, he is not improvising, contrary to what those who take him for an idiot would have us believe. However detestable his worldview may be, he has one, and it is relatively coherent: that of a far-right president of an imperial power that has been economically overtaken by other powers, first and foremost China, and who adapts its strategy accordingly. The vassals must serve the United States’ national security strategy, and that strategy alone. The United States no longer has the means, and it no longer even has the ambition, once displayed between the end of the Cold War and the 2000s, of ensuring a unipolar global “order” based on monetary domination, backed by military power and economic leverage, wrapped in an international law manipulated according to circumstances. There is little to regret in that, given the damage done by neoliberal globalization imposed through the famous “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s, and given the disasters of the “global war on terror” launched by Bush. As early as the second Iraq war in 2003, it had become clear to the whole world that the empire was trampling the principles it claimed to defend. The other actors’ more-or-less reluctant acceptance of its claim to be the world’s “benevolent policeman” was eroding. Then the financial and economic crisis triggered in the United States in 2008 accelerated China’s rise, and China has since become the leading productive economy.
As a result, one way or another, the United States intends to throw overboard the UN-centered “multilateral system” that it itself largely helped to create after the Second World War. Joe Biden, as a Democrat concerned with preserving appearances, wrapped the abandonment of references to international law in the new notion of a “rules-based order”. It is a pernicious notion, whose implication is that these rules are decided by the United States according to circumstances. We saw what those rules were worth when he supported the genocidal war in Gaza. Trump does not trouble himself with such precautions when he sweeps aside the “rules-based” order and points to the UN as an adversary of U.S. security. The same holds when he suggests forming, as a competitor to the UN, a group of “five advanced powers” including the United States, China, Japan, India, and Russia. There is a long distance from proposal to implementation. Even so, this should prompt reflection among European countries that have preferred the G7 and the G20 to the UN, which is the only truly universal institution, and therefore the most legitimate, whatever its limits.
As for Europe, while continuing his predecessors’ view of it as a satellite, Trump also consigns niceties to oblivion. Gone are the honeyed formulas that preserved the appearance of sovereignty and that, up through Joe Biden’s presidency, filled the passages devoted to transatlantic relations. Nothing about this is surprising. The ideological-war speeches by U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Munich and Paris last February had set the tone. Donald Trump wants a Europe aligned with his far-right project, even more vassalized, and placed at the service of his trade war, already lost, with China. The stated objective is to facilitate the accession to power of far-right parties in Europe. We have already had a glimpse of this when, last January, the social network X, owned by Elon Musk, put its recommendation algorithms, meaning the programming that promotes or, conversely, renders content invisible on social networks, at the service of the German far right during the electoral campaign. This objective is now being made official, reinforced by rhetoric against immigration, presented as threatening “Western values,” in a context of a so-called “clash of civilizations”.
The first reactions of European leaders to the NSS follow the same pattern as the sessions of collective humiliation described above. Shortly after the publication of the United States’ National Security Strategy, and in spite of the obvious, the “head of European diplomacy,” Kaja Kallas, declared: “The United States remains our greatest ally (...) we have not always agreed on different subjects, but I think the general principle remains the same. We are the greatest allies and we must remain united.” One would have liked to say that she does not speak in the name of French diplomacy. Yet in Paris, there is silence on Trump’s direction, even though he is a close friend of Macron. Macron’s flights of rhetoric about European “strategic autonomy,” at a time when he has become one of the closest friends of the U.S. tech barons and is turning France into a U.S. digital colony, have long been disconnected from his concrete decisions. There is nothing to be expected geopolitically from today’s European leaders, who are incapable of even the slightest upswelling of dignity.
The NSS confirms one thing: renewing a policy of independence is not an option; it is an absolute necessity. It is urgent to advance a different international policy in the service of our independence across all strategic domains: defense, digital, energy, food, public health, and so forth. France has the means to do so. French foreign policy was never as influential as it was when France was outside NATO’s integrated military command between 1967 and 2009. Far from isolating it, that distancing from Atlanticism opened many doors beyond the Western world. France should be non-aligned and should promote, first within the framework of the UN, a policy of cooperation grounded in international law. This is not the moment to shut ourselves in, under the yoke of an abusive empire, inside a Western world undergoing an identity narrowing that imagines itself as the guardian of “democratic values” largely emptied of their substance. The task now is to respond collectively to challenges that bear on the common human interest, to refuse the march toward war that is contained in the all-against-all competition of a globalized capitalism in crisis, and to prepare for adaptation to global warming.
