Europe

Forecast of Europe’s ‘civilisational erasure’ was part of call for pro-growth reform, says Trump official

Donald Trump’s administration has doubled down on its recent criticism of Europe, saying last month’s US national security strategy was an attempt to “jolt” an ally back to economic life.

The document was widely condemned in Europe as representing a seismic shift in the 70-year transatlantic alliance with its dark references to a purported threat of “civilisational erasure” with migration and censorship creating “strife”, “cratering birthrates” and “loss of national identities”.

Its threat to interfere in European politics and oppose what it termed as “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe” was condemned as unacceptable by the president of the European Council of leaders, António Costa.

As most of the country wound down for Christmas, the Trump administration had other ideas. On Tuesday night, the State Department announced sanctions against five Europeans. The charge? Not corruption, terrorism or espionage. Instead, it was crimes against freedom of speech.

After Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced the sanctions, Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, followed up with details of the five individuals, who include the former European commissioner, Thierry Breton, and two British citizens, Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford.

She said Ahmed, head of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, and Melford, chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index, were guilty of “extraterritorial censorship of Americans”. “Our message is clear,” she said: “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”

U.S. Vice President JD Vance warned that the mass migration agenda could risk a nuclear weapons in Europe falling under the control of Islamist politicians.

Vice President Vance, who has been leading the charge from Washington against globalists in Europe on issues such as freedom of speech and open borders, said that mass migration into the UK and EU from Muslim countries could threaten the foundations of the Western alliance and the security of the United States.

When I was a child, I once, after being told off by my mother, conspicuously gathered together some treasured toys into a tea towel, and wrapped them onto the end of a broom handle, as I had seen tramps do in cartoons. Declaring that I was running away, I made it as far as the garden gate, where I lingered for some long minutes, waiting for my mother to rush out and usher me back into the warm security of home, torn between the certainty that she would — and a dread anxiety that I was, as I had declared I wanted, now truly on my own. So it is today with Europe’s political elites, endlessly declaring that this time everything has changed, and the continent must now stand on its own in a harsh and frightening world, while secretly anticipating, with mounting dread, to be ushered back into America’s stifling if protective embrace. Yet in this instance, our rulers must be careful what they wish for.

Nothing bothers the European elite as much as American conservatives praising the European foundations of their shared, but threatened, Western civilization.

Europeans especially resent having their social-welfare state system critiqued by upstart, crass Americans.

Their pique only increases as they push back against the condescending American idea that the U.S. could offer any constructive advice, much less help a more civilized Europe follow the “American model.”

Drinks parties with the Russians and scathing criticism of centrist governments could morph into Cold War-esque interference across the Continent

On the remote shoulders of a mountain 50 miles east of Rome, the Trisulti charterhouse stands as a monument to the difficulty of establishing a European version of the Make America Great Again movement.

It was in this 700-year-old Carthusian monastery on Monte Rotonaria that Steve Bannon, the America First ideologue and former chief strategist to President Trump, attempted to set up a “gladiator school” for national-conservative culture warriors from across Europe.

The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, as it was known, soon got bogged down in legal action and an eviction attempt by the Italian culture ministry.

The release of Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has provoked a furious reaction from Europe’s legacy media and centrist political leaders. One Guardian commentator went so far as to assert that Trump has ‘declared civilisational war on Europe’.