David E. Sanger

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.

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.