Europe’s Post 2025 NSS Mandate

Much of the reaction to the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) has treated it as a rupture with Europe. In reality, it is something closer to an invitation—a call for Europe to recover the civilizational character that once made the transatlantic alliance robust and meaningful rather than transactional and sentimental. The question the document poses is not whether America still values Europe, but whether Europe still recognizes itself.

This very question sits at the heart of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy and the recently released NSS—a piece that is both pragmatic and restorationist. It is not sentimental in tone or diagnosis. Rather, it reflects a growing concern that America’s naturally positive disposition toward Europe is eroding—not because of momentary political disagreements, but because European governments are increasingly attacking the civilizational character and values that built us in the first place, and that we owe our inheritance too. The “Promoting European Greatness” section of the NSS argues that national security rests not just on weapons and trade but “in the civilizational integrity of faith, cultural continuity, strong families, and national identity.” It notes Europe’s defense and economic challenges but says plainly that these are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”

It even states what things are erasing the civilization: collapsing birthrates, political censorship, the abandonment of freedom of speech, uncontrolled migration and weakening sovereignty, the suppression of political opposition, and the steady empowerment of unaccountable bureaucracies that are undermining national identity.

All of this echoes Vice President JD Vance’s pointed question at his Munich Security Conference (MSC) speech earlier this year: “How do you begin talking about defense budgeting when you don’t even know what you are defending? What are you defending yourselves for? What is the positive vision that animates us?”

He then said, correctly and definitively, that “There’s no security if you’re afraid of the conscience of your own people.” The posture here is that cultural certitude and confidence is the precondition of security—a real embrace of the line that “politics is downstream from culture.” If a civilization loses the will to defend its own values, or even to articulate them, no amount of defense spending can save it.

The NSS also importantly rejects the assumption that dissolving sovereignty produces peace. It does not condemn global institutions in of themselves, but it names directly that the elites running them have used their power to attack the spiritual, cultural, and democratic foundations of the West. That can no longer be tolerated.

The Trump Administration’s standard for alliances is simple: either we are partners in defending Western civilization, or we are not. When we consider who our partners are, the questions we’re asking are not merely “are they fairly upholding their end of the NATO defense budget,” but, “does this nation share our understanding of freedom? Our view of human dignity? Our willingness to defend the inheritance we received?”

For many Western European governments today, the honest answer is “no.”

Since President Trump re-entered the world stage this January, and in follow-on moments like Vice President Vance’s MSC address, American leadership has forced long-avoided conversations about the failures of our allies to uphold the very values they are supposedly defending. This is necessary. But it is not because America wants to withdraw. To the contrary: it is not in America’s interest to face China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea alone. We need strong, sovereign, confident partners capable of bearing regional burdens. But “partners” must actually share the civilization they claim to defend.

When it comes to the U.K., and its current status on the precipice, this relationship remains pivotal. President Trump has a deeper, more instinctive belief in the Special Relationship than many leaders of recent decades because he understands that our bond is not sentimental. It is rooted in shared faith, law, language, political tradition, and moral foundations, and there are consequences when these things are attacked.

These consequences show up perniciously for the ordinary American, in the cost of security, the stability of markets, and whether our sons and daughters are asked to defend those who no longer know what they stand for. With a culturally and politically weak allied Europe, the burden to defend our way of life does not disappear—it shifts onto American taxpayers, American military families, and American strategic credibility.

Civilizations evolve, but the permanent things must endure. The mandate for Europe is to defend those things, and to cooperate with the U.S. on security, trade, defense and other key matters. Leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni show that a nation can defend its culture, enforce immigration laws, increase defense spending, and still be a reliable friend to the United States. Europe should not fixate on Trump’s rhetoric—nor its own. It should focus on results and actions. This administration values outcomes over process.

As Vice President Vance said at the Munich Leaders Meeting this May, “good friends must be able to have hard conversations.” U.S. leadership is initiating those conversations now—because we still believe the West can be renewed, together, with our European friends. We would not bother if there were no hope. And yet the tragedy is that many in Europe are interpreting this appeal as hostility, when it is better understood as a test of whether the civilizational bond still exists at all.

America is not asking Europe to become something new, but to remember what it already is—and why that makes us indispensable to one another.