Were Europeans worried about the risk of US disengagement and a return to American isolationism? They can rest assured. The new National Security Strategy (NSS) published on December 5 made it as clear as possible that Europe is “strategically and culturally vital to the United States.” The price of this renewed interest is that Europe has become one of the main export markets for American culture wars, with the corollary of growing interference.

Conceived by the most ideologically driven wing of Trumpism, embodied by Vice President JD Vance, the NSS set out to restore Europe’s greatness by painting a bleak picture of its so-called “civilizational” decline. According to the strategy, this decline is demographic, political, cultural and geopolitical, and stems from Europe’s denial of its own identity and the submission of the European Union to supranational entities.

The NSS report draws on both the conspiracy theory of the “great replacement” and on the idea that “wokeism” advocates are imposing censorship. These terms echo those long used by Russia. Moscow has portrayed itself as the true Europe: the heir to Byzantium, uncorrupted by the liberalism of the “Anglo-Saxons,” as well as the guardian of its Christian roots and the memory of old Europe. The Kremlin considers itself the last bastion – the katechon, literally “the one who restrains” in biblical language – standing before the coming of the Antichrist. The bulwark against liberal chaos, bearing the promise of salvation that would see Europe rise from its ashes.

Beyond discursive analogies, it would be a mistake to reduce the NSS to a mere transposition of Russian rhetoric onto Trumpian ambitions. The NSS’s argument for defending Western civilization has its own national genealogy, owing nothing to Russia and drawing from distinctly American traditions. Among these are the Judeo-Christian anticommunism of the Cold War, the post-1960s backlash against secularization and multiculturalism, the “clash of civilizations” narrative centered on Islamism after September 11 and the racialized conception of a threatened West.

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