The US attack on Europe misses the point entirely

The other day I was asked whether I was happy that the US President was finally saying things that I have been noting for years. The reference to Trump was, on interrogation, based on the US government analysis of Europe that appeared in the so-called – National Security Strategy of the United States of America – November 2025 (hereafter NSS) – which was released to the public on December 4, 2025. When I finally got around to reading the document, it was clear that the person who put that proposition to me didn’t understood Trump’s position and certainly didn’t understand my position. While the Trump Administration is critical of the European Union, as I am, the respective bases for those criticisms couldn’t be farther apart.

It is a hard document to read given all the excessive bombast, which is redolent of the way the US Administration deals with the rest of us on a daily basis.

The braggadocious manner in which Trump and his cronies behave is almost beyond belief and would be comical if their resultant actions were not so lethal.

I am not an expert on US international relations and the way in which this statement from Trump diverges from the previous two statements (Trump 1 and Biden) although there are some notable shifts – not the least being the soft-pedal on Russia and China in the current approach.

While not denying the power in international relations that the US obviously possesses, it has been clear for some time now that the world is shifting away from the US being at the centre.

My understanding of the Israeli behaviour in Gaza, for example, shocking in its extreme, is that it really defied what the US would have preferred and the latter looked like it kept playing catch-up to make it look as though they were in charge.

And the Ukraine debacle – ‘I will solve it in a day’ – has shown that Russia is far from tempered by US interventions and is just doing what it wants at great cost to the people of Ukraine.

But it is the rise of China as an economic power that has really demonstrated how weak the US is becoming.

In another strategy document release recently (December 1, 2025) – ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker: 2025 updates and 10 new technologies – from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a Canberra-based institution that specialises in the challenges posed by geopolitical and economic developments in the “Indo-Pacific” region.

Their ‘Critical Technology Tracker compares “74 technologies, giving policymakers, industry and partners the clearest, most current picture of the tech race for strategic advantage.”

ASPI say that:

The tracker measures not a country’s overall strength in critical technologies but its research performance in them.

The latest version concludes that:

1. “The updated picture is stark. China’s exceptional gains in high-impact research are continuing, and the gap between it and the rest of the world is still widening. In eight of the 10 newly added technologies, China has a clear lead in its global share of high-impact research output.”

2. “The historical data for these new technologies tells a familiar story: an early and often overwhelming US lead in research output in the opening decade of this millennium, eroded and then outmatched by persistent long-term Chinese investment in fundamental research.”

3. “China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies tracked, with the United States leading in the remaining eight ,,.”

In my recent discussions with Japanese colleagues, they have focused on the need for tariffs to offset China’s advantages, which they concluded was more due to currency manipulation (keeping the yuan cheap) than anything else.

I made the point that even if you clap tariffs on Chinese goods, they are so far ahead of the rest of us now that they can still under cut other nations in competitive export markets.

The solution is not to follow Trump like measures but rather to learn from what China is doing – investing heavily in its people, its research infrastructure, and industrial design.

The West has become so obsessed with fiscal austerity that it has starved the research community of funding and undermined its education systems.

China has done exactly the opposite.

The longer the West starves its educational systems of funds and privatises every functional state apparatus that it can, the further behind we will all become relative to China.

And that spells trouble in the future.

This article (published December 8, 2025) – China’s global technology and engineering ascendancy continues – written by the ABC Finance person (Alan Kohler) documents some aspects of that rise and the reasons for the relative decline of the West.

And it is the West’s almost total embrace of neoliberal ideology and praxis that is at the basis of my long-standing criticism of Europe.

It is a different argument altogether to the rather extraordinary attack on Europe by the US in its NSS, which after all outlines the current foreign policy of the US government.

The NSS tied in the usual Right-wing obsessions with immigration and purity of culture with the assertion that it was taking Europe into a state of “civilisational erasure” – whatever that exactly means.

Trump is obviously miffed that the Europeans, to their credit, will not let Putin redraw national boundaries to suit himself, while pretending to seek peace on the Continent.

The ‘white-being-supplanted-non-white’ narrative that is a driving force for the far-Right lunatics is now central US foreign policy.

The document contends:

Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less … within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.

That is about demographic makeup.

French author Renaud Camus introduced the term – ‘grand remplacement’ – in 2011, which is about the so-called – Great Replacement conspiracy theory – the view that the French (and Europeans) were being overrun by non-whites (ostensibly Muslims) because of migration and differential birth-rates.

If there is one thing that provides a common thread for all the Right-wing political voices it is that issue.

And sure enough, the NSS rehearses exactly the same conspiracy theory.

As did the National Socialists in Germany and beyond in the 1930s except the ‘evil’ ethnic group responsible the ‘civilisational erasure’ has evolved over time or beein added to.

That is how crazy the world has become under this current US Administration.

And yes, I know in writing this that I would never be permitted to visit the US again – a desire that faded many years ago before this latest madness emerged.

The other obsession rehearsed in the NSS is the dislike of “liberal ideology”, which in context is about progressive views on equity, care and respect, etc.

Taken together – the evil migrants and the woke liberals – are conspiring to undermine Western democracy and US cultural dominance.

That is the message.

And the solution according to the US is to support the:

… growing influence of patriotic European parties …

Which they claim will promote “genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history.”

So, give succour to the far-Right parties that want to restore ethnic purity (at least how they define it) and purge society of people who care about gender issues, and the like.

The transactional nature of the current US Administration is also on display.

The NSS talks big about democratic freedom and the like but constructs the Taiwanese issue, for example, not as one of preserving Taiwan’s right to self-determination, but, rather, as a vehicle for US prosperity via its access to the semiconductor sector.

Democratic principles are only defined in terms of freedom of access for US domination.

Very tawdry indeed.

My position on Europe

My position is clear – the European Union has become the most advanced form of neoliberalism in the World.

It has embedded that ideology within its very legal structures (the Treaties), which are nigh on impossible to change unless the interests of France or Germany are advanced.

Migration is not the issue.

The far-Right point, for example, to the – Banlieues – or ‘Projects’ in France as being Muslim-infested centres of anti-French sentiment.

However, my focus is on these urban centres as poverty traps – created by governments who have become obsessed by neoliberal fiscal rules at the expense of providing work and pathways for the children of the migrants that came from Northern African and beyond.

And remember a significant push factor promoting that migration was the colonial behaviour of metropolitan France in the first place.

My view is that if the state reassumes its responsibility to provide work for all and jettisons its fiscal austerity obsessions then these housing estates would cease to be centres of unrest and illegal behaviour.

I don’t hold the view that certain ethnic groups are pre-disposed to lawlessness.

Crime rates are highly correlated with economic circumstance and we know that austerity impacts disproportionately badly on those considered marginal in the society – which includes the migrant populations typically.

And in Europe generally, that austerity mindset is overseen by the technocrats in Brussels, which has only been possible because most of the nations (20 out of 27) ceded their currency sovereignty and signed up to treaties that made it almost impossible for them to run their own macroeconomic policy that would allow them to determine their economic trajectory.

And in doing so, the elites also refused to create a federal fiscal capacity that could make permanent asymmetric fiscal transfers across the ‘European space’ when needed.

So these nations are caught between a ‘rock and a hard place’ and as a result social instability is rising because peoples’ needs are being manifestly neglected while the elites swan around wining and dining at expensive summits etc.

The far-Right is not the answer to that problem.

And that economic malaise has nothing much to do with migrants.

The European treaties are the work of the corporate elites within Europe and are designed to advance their interests rather than provide prosperity for all.

Trump’s transactional vision is about reinforcing those elites rather than dismantling the currency union.

His claim that it is progressive views – which he calls ‘woke’ – that are undermining democracies and freedoms, whereas the ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe is all to do with the hijacking of economic policy by Brussels and the power the treaties have given the technocrats in Brussels.

Trump sees ‘sovereignty’ in ethnic terms, I see it in economic policy terms.

Conclusion

Thus my criticism of Europe has very little overlap with the vision that Trump and his cronies project.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2025 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.