Trump’s foreign policy vision: Make Europe white again

To say that Donald Trump’s political movement is built on contradiction is an understatement. Trump’s entire movement is a contradiction: The promise to make America “great again” has always referred simultaneously to an imaginary past that never existed and an imaginary future that can never be achieved, not even under the totalitarian dictatorship of Stephen Miller’s late-night fantasies.

Am I offering false hope if I say that the unsustainable contradictions within the Trump regime are beginning to pull it apart? Maybe, but I’m not promising that will happen tomorrow, or that it will be painless. We’ve finally reached the point when even most mainstream American liberals understand that there’s no going back to the arc-of-progress upward narrative of the Obama era, which was itself imaginary and damaging, largely because the massive hubris of those years is what brought us here.

This past week, the absurd and alarming contradictions of Trumpian foreign policy — which combine a litany of incompatible retrograde tendencies too tedious to lay out here — were spelled out with admirable clarity in an official document known as the National Security Strategy. The NSS is meant to set the tone for the totality of a presidential administration’s diplomatic and military approach to the world, and most of the time it’s a deadly dull read, full of boilerplate language about a shared set of values, a commitment to human rights and democracy and veiled “concerns” about whichever adversarial regimes are getting their turn in the barrel: North Korea has the Bomb, Iran wants to get it, Putin started a bad war, something something South China Sea.

Between the lines, the NSS offers legible clues about what a given president and his State Department are likely to focus on first and foremost, but the thing is usually read only by foreign policy professionals and the wonky journalists (ahem) who hope to forecast or interpret their actions. Well, the win-win here, I guess, is that the second Trump administration’s NSS isn’t boring at all.

To be fair, the poison-steeped Claremont Institute pseudo-intellectuals behind the Trump regime might well argue that their NSS is not contradictory in the least, since it can be boiled down to a straightforward message: Tyranny is awesome, but democracy sucks. OK, it doesn’t actually say that, but it’s hard to imagine how else to reconcile its Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties in Europe and its high-minded refusal to lecture autocratic regimes in the Middle East and Asia about “democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”

Understandably enough, it’s the unhinged and unconcealed racist panic shoveled out in the Trump NSS that has generated international headlines. Europe, the document warns, is losing its historic cultural identity and faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” Exactly what is meant here by “identity” and “civilization” is only barely left unsaid, and the Great Replacement rhetoric is not so much borrowed as copied and pasted: It is “more than plausible,” we are told, that in coming decades “certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” and may no longer “view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way” they used to.

You get the feeling this is the slightly more diplomatic second draft, after they took out references to “white genocide,” descriptions of migrant groups as trash or vermin, and Trump’s brain-damaged word-association claims that people who are seeking asylum have actually been released from “insane asylums.” Still, the point here is to rip the liberal democracies of the EU a new one for their perceived wokeness and weakness, in a splenetic narrative mode that confirmed the “worst expectations” of European observers, as a source in Brussels told GMF.

If we try to map the NSS claims onto the realm of reality, they fall apart, but that’s hardly the point: It is not in fact plausible that any European nation will have a Muslim-majority population, or a mostly nonwhite population, or anything close to that, in the foreseeable future. Second and far more important, what message is being sent when the government of a multiethnic democracy built on three centuries of immigration — roughly 99 percent of the U.S. population has ancestral ties to other continents — makes the official claim that “immigrants will corrupt the values of the societies they move to,” as The Economist puts it? At the poker table, I believe that’s known as a tell.

We can’t exactly call it surprising that this overwrought Trumpian manifesto vows to go all-in on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” by encouraging the rise of “patriotic European parties” eager to celebrate their nations’ “individual character and history.” Or that the attitude expressed toward Russia, China and the oil-based monarchies of the Middle East amounts to a shrug emoji: Really far away! Not our problem! Live and let live! Ukraine-Shmukraine!

Or rather, it’s only surprising in the sense that whenever we think the Trump administration can’t outdo itself in overt bigotry, outright lies or vainglorious self-destruction, we turn out to be wrong. One could observe that Trump’s apparent plan to give Vladimir Putin almost everything he wants, Neville Chamberlain-style, in order to end the Ukraine war isn’t working too well, and that JD Vance and Elon Musk’s efforts to meddle in European elections on behalf of the xenophobic far right have at least partly backfired. None of that means, mind you, that this alternately idiotic and delusional document — described in that Economist editorial, using an enjoyable Anglo-idiom, as “a dog’s breakfast” — is not dangerous.

In one sense, this NSS is dangerous because no American president, whether good, bad or indifferent, clear back to roughly the days of Andrew Jackson, would have published such blatant racist fiction as an official statement of U.S. foreign policy. That, of course, is also clarifying: As far as I can tell, this document has united foreign policy experts clear across the political and ideological spectrum in a reaction of WTAF followed by STFU. (There may be outliers on the Islamophobic far right and the Sinophile and/or Russophile far left, but not many.)

But the true danger here lies in the outrageous, inflated grandiosity of this document, delivered from the inside of a regime so radically high on its own supply that it believes it has seized power into the indefinite future. Previous administrations have, of course, published overly ambitious NSS documents whose goals were only gestured at, but in general terms they have presupposed a continuity of values and foreign policy goals that will be recalibrated by future presidents of various parties but not rewritten from scratch or chucked overboard altogether. I’m certainly not claiming that the goals were always good ones or the values expressed were sincere, only that this is a self-conscious effort to say “The hell with all that; the edgelords are in charge from here on out.”

There’s no plausible way to read this NSS as a three-year plan for the remainder of the Trump administration. Literally none of it could even hypothetically be accomplished within that timeframe. It’s something much bigger than that, much dumber and much worse. It’s a long-term, deep-horizon manifesto for the reactionary-revolutionary Red Caesar regime dreamed of by Miller, Vance and the bro-genius billionaires. It imagines unilateral U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere — the Monroe Doctrine, but with drones and AI — a Crusader-style reconquest of secular Europe by the white right, and a chummy division of the rest of the world into old-school spheres of influence, involving Russia, China, the Saudi monarchy and whoever else gets invited.

None of that is likely to happen, at least not the way these galaxy-brain visionaries imagine. There are lots of reasons why, but let’s cite just one: As the Trump regime is now discovering, you can’t forcibly create a prosperous economy while undoing, crushing or suppressing all the social and cultural factors that made the economy thrive (relatively speaking) in the first place. There’s the most fundamental contradiction, the fatal flaw that will eventually destroy the entire Trumpian pseudo-fascist project, but may also cause irreparable damage to this already-damaged country.

Simply put, you can’t go forward and backward at the same time. In his memorable study of the decades before World War I, “The Age of Empire,” historian Eric Hobsbawm describes that era as a contest between the ruthless forward momentum of capitalism and imperialism — dynamic, destructive forces that created and distributed enormous wealth well into the future — and the rearguard action of traditional culture, including religious orthodoxy and strictly defined hierarchies of class, race and gender, which generally opposed those forces or tried to slow them down.

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That was not, in Hobsbawm’s analysis, a straight-up clash between good and evil or enlightenment and darkness; he was a non-dogmatic Marxist, always attuned to the nuanced dialectical relationship between historical forces. That conflict between “progress” and “tradition” has never been resolved, and recurs in every generation. But the triumph of global capitalism and of liberal democracy, its political corollary, required the destruction, absorption or surrender of traditional culture.

For the would-be philosopher-kings of MAGA-world, who hope to outlast Donald Trump and build a New Jerusalem above his tomb, history is bunk. With pseudo-intelligent talking machines at their command — somehow making up for their absence of redeeming human qualities — they will anesthetize the lower orders, overmaster all contradictions and pick whatever they like from the historical menu: a 1950s-style economic boom, without the social spending that sustained it or the large-scale redistribution of wealth it produced. And, at the same time, a highly stratified Gilded Age oligarchy dominated by a superior caste of wealthy white men, but without inciting class warfare and a resurgence of socialist politics.

Amid all that couch-fascist holodeck fantasy, the dream of making Europe white again — with zero reference to the actual history of Europe, which involves centuries of unremitting and catastrophic violence between and among so-called white people — seems like an irrelevant afterthought, deleted scenes from an unmade LOTR sequel. But it has enormous resonance and almost erotic allure for the meme-nurtured, semi-adult, proudly ignorant gamer-dudes who hold far too much power in our stupid and stupefied society. It’s a projection of the world they think they want but can never have, a symbol of the impossible contradictions that someday soon, God willing, will bring down their empire.