A Strategy That Rewrites the Transatlantic Relationship

Dec 12, 2025

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by

Gaute Gulliksen

in Ethics, Global Ethics, Society

The newly released 2025 National Security Strategy signals a shift in how the United States government speaks about Europe. For decades, the transatlantic partnership rested on a shared commitment to democratic institutions, human dignity, and cooperative security. This document breaks from that tradition. It presents Europe as a continent losing its way, destabilized by collapsing birthrates, weakening identities, and political unrest, fueled by issues like migration and censorship.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The same government issuing these warnings is undermining political rights at home, hardening immigration policies to inhumane levels, narrowing avenues for dissent, and weakening the institutional safeguards that protect democratic life. Against that backdrop, its assessment of Europe reads less like a principled concern and more like an ideological project.

When such a government lectures Europe about liberty, it is not offering analysis. It is weaponizing its own illiberal project, not diagnosing Europe’s condition.

This does not mean the EU is beyond criticism. It is possible, and necessary, to recognize the European Union’s genuine shortcomings. Europe’s asylum and immigration regime is exclusionary. Its borders function as a fortified perimeter designed to keep people out. The institutional architecture of the Union still suffers from distance, bureaucracy, and uneven democratic legitimacy. These concerns are real, and they matter.

But the National Security Strategy is not offering that kind of critique. It does not speak from a commitment to rights or from a desire to strengthen democratic governance. Instead, it relies on themes familiar from nationalist movements: loss of sovereignty, demographic anxiety, and civilizational decline. The effect is not to illuminate Europe’s challenges but to undermine its confidence.

The deeper shift in the document is strategic. This is not a vision for a stronger, more resilient European partner. It prepares for a future in which Europe is repositioned or weakened, a future where its democracies are expected to conform to an authoritarian framework taking shape in Washington. Europe is cast not as an equal partner but as a region to be redefined (politically, ideologically, and structurally).

Is the United States government preparing for, or even encouraging, a fractured Europe?

A divided continent would be easier to influence through bilateral pressure. It would weaken the only major democratic bloc capable of constraining US regulatory, economic, and political power. And it would remove a living counterexample to the authoritarian trajectory emerging in Washington. The National Security Strategy does not need to say this explicitly; its framing does the work.

Security documents are supposed to anticipate threats and reinforce stability. This one creates a narrative in which Europe’s fragmentation becomes thinkable, perhaps even desirable. It promotes a worldview in which division, not cooperation, is the natural state of democratic societies.

Responsible foreign policy does not treat partners as ideological projects to be molded. It recognizes that genuine cooperation depends on trust, reciprocity, and an honest accounting of one’s own democratic health. If the United States government were genuinely concerned about backsliding abroad, the ethical and strategic path would begin with repairing democratic integrity at home.

The transatlantic relationship does not need fear-based narratives or ideological repositioning. It needs a commitment to democracy on both sides, lived in practice rather than claimed in rhetoric.