David E. Sanger

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.

But I think we have to allow for the possibility, Natalie, that what's really going on here is they want like-minded MAGA-oriented governments in these nations.

And they think the current European establishment is standing in the way of that goal.

Well, they're vague about what they do about it.

There is this line saying that among their priorities is cultivating resistance to Europe's

within European nations.

But we don't really know what that means.

Does it mean that the president is going to endorse right-wing patriotic candidates as if he was endorsing Republican or MAGA-oriented governors or senators running for election in the United States?

Would he be interfering in their elections?

He doesn't say, except in the trade arena where, of course, he's quite specific about his goals.

It's hard to tell because parts of it are contradictory.

But you emerge from reading the document thinking that the United States is carving out an exception for itself to step in and intervene in Europe to get to the kind of society that President Trump and his allies think they want and think that many Europeans want.

And yet, buried in this assertion of a right to interfere with Europe's internal politics, even directly engaging with European voters, there's this sort of strange undertone of retreat, a real sense that overall the U.S.

is turning away from Europe.

And so then the question becomes, if the U.S.

is retreating from our traditional European allies, where are we turning?

Well, for the past decade, the Europeans have been worried that the U.S.