David E. Sanger

And that the Europe that the president came to think of, the one from which his parents emerged, his mother was a Scottish immigrant, his father was the first generation descendant

of German immigrants to the United States in the late 1880s, that that Europe was almost gone.

And many read that line as a complaint that there is a diminishment of the white European allies that the president imagines when he thinks of Europe.

And I think what this document is doing is saying Europe's threatening its own future existence and identity.

I think it has to do with their image of countries with common values, not only with the United States,

but with President Trump and the MAGA movement.

And there was a lot of this in the J.D.

Vance speech to the Munich Security Conference last February that was such a shock, where he said, your big adversary is not Russia.

Your big adversary is the waves of migration.

that are changing your societies.

I think the Europeans who viewed that diversity as a strength, a revitalization of Europe, were truly shocked to hear that.

And this whole section of the national security strategy reads like it is a expansion of the Vance speech in Munich in February.

That's absolutely right.

And you sense this whenever you're in Europe and you just read it in the headlines, see it in protests on the streets, see it in the clashes between these new migrants who are coming in and traditional Europeans.

So the core of the Trump argument in this document is basically a warning to the Europeans that you are ignoring your own voters.

that you're suppressing free speech, right, by suppressing the right wing, by trying to keep them down, by refusing to allow them to take power, right?

And that's true in their minds in Germany, in their minds it's true in France, and in their minds it's even true in Great Britain.

Well, to the Trump administration...

I think there are sort of two reasons.

The stated reason is that a Europe that is divided like this, that is suppressing the will of its own voters, that's keeping the right wing from coming up, is basically an unstable Europe that can't, as the document says, operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations taking primary responsibility for their own defense without being dominated by an adversarial power.