How do you craft a foreign policy manifesto for a U.S. president who governs by instinct? The initial draft fell to Michael Anton, a MAGA firebrand described by officials as the lead author of the U.S.’s radical new National Security Strategy (NSS). The document alarmed U.S. allies by warning that immigration to Europe could lead to “civilizational erasure,” reviving the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere, and downplaying the U.S.’s role in great-power competition with China and Russia.
Anton, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, first gained widespread attention in 2016. Writing under a pseudonym, he compared that year’s election to a hijacked airliner, arguing conservatives must radically shake up U.S. politics and reject pro-immigration stances, which he called the “mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die.” He wrote, “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die… a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”
Given this background, it’s no surprise the recent NSS—typically a ponderous document weighed down by bureaucratic language—landed like a bombshell. Though it survived a difficult bureaucratic process from the State Department to Trump’s senior advisors and was released with little fanfare last week, some of its recommendations were radical enough for European leaders to declare that U.S. Euroscepticism had become “official doctrine.”
“I think what’s clear is that MAGA is trying to be a revolutionary movement,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s trying to completely upend postwar U.S. foreign policy and really change the direction of the country.”
The strategy breaks with decades of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, which viewed European institutions like NATO and the European Union as allies in great-power competition with authoritarian countries such as Russia and China. Instead, the new document identifies the greatest threat as immigration and suggests the U.S. should seek illiberal allies in Europe.
“This is sort of like a divorce,” Bergmann said of the European reaction. “They don’t want the marriage to end. They’re looking for signs that the United States is still interested in them… and this was sort of confirmation that it’s over.”
Skeptics note that the NSS rarely dictates actual policy, isn’t tied to any budget, and question whether Donald Trump even read the 33-page document. Traditionally, the NSS results from a convoluted interagency process that leads to a “cut-and-paste job,” according to Daniel Hamilton, a former State Department official and professor at Johns Hopkins University.
“My guess is he’s never read this thing and never will,” said John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who has since become a prominent critic. “He didn’t read the national security strategy in the first term, and nobody ever paid any attention to it.”
However, in a subsequent interview with Politico, Trump echoed the strategy’s criticisms of mass migration, indicating that even if he doesn’t engage with policy documents, its alarm over multiculturalism aligns closely with his own thinking. “If it keeps going the way it’s going… many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer,” Trump said. “Their immigration policy is a disaster. What they’re doing with immigration is a disaster.”
National security strategies, which U.S. administrations have made public since the mid-1980s, have often served a…The document serves as a battleground for competing visions of U.S. foreign policy, with rival officials inserting language to advance their key interests.
Under Trump, the White House has drastically cut staff at major national security agencies, including the National Security Council, as part of an effort to streamline government and purge what it sees as a disloyal bureaucratic “deep state.” This has traditionally been the main body coordinating U.S. national security policy.
Observers note that the resulting document is less polished and will be harder to implement. However, it reads like a manifesto for several of Trump’s closest foreign policy advisers, such as J.D. Vance—who criticized European liberalism in a February speech at the Munich Security Conference—and influential Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who views immigration as this administration’s top national security priority. The sections on Latin America closely mirror the views of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, after a rocky start, has secured his place among the president’s inner circle.
Trump himself is said to have little interest in policy details. According to Hamilton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, his advisers produced a “written articulation of the gut instinct that the president lives by.”
“That’s about the best you can call it,” he said. “He won’t write it himself or even read it, probably, but his people are trying to give an articulated worldview behind, kind of, where his instincts go.”
Although the document does not lay out specific policy recommendations, there are signs its spirit is already being put into action across parts of the U.S. bureaucracy.
U.S. embassies in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been instructed to collect data on crimes committed by immigrants. Senior officials have called mass migration an “existential threat to Western civilization and the safety of both the West and the world.” The State Department’s 2024 human rights report—edited before release by Anton and other senior aides to Rubio—highlighted “significant human rights issues” in Germany, including censorship and antisemitism, while softening language on Israel’s war in Gaza and on reports of torture and extrajudicial killings in El Salvador.
Senior U.S. diplomats are also warning Europe as they reframe the European Union as a key rival.
“Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not,” wrote Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who leads the administration’s immigration agenda, shortly after the document’s release. “But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”
Anton left the government in September, months before the document was published. Diplomats said he had grown frustrated at the State Department, where other powerful allies of Secretary of State Marco Rubio were making key decisions.
“He was facing headwinds [at the State Department] and could hardly speak for the administration,” said one former department official.
In conservative circles, some warn that even if the Trump administration does not fully implement the vision outlined in the document, potential successors like Vance now have a draft for a future MAGA foreign policy.
“Read as a blueprint for the rest of the Trump presidency, the NSS can be oversold,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored.”That doesn’t mean it can be safely ignored. The NSS represents the worldview of those who aim to shape American policy long after President Trump completes a potential second term. Their ideas matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the topic You and me against the world Who shaped Trumps antiEurope foreign policy in a natural conversational tone
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does antiEurope foreign policy mean in this context
It refers to the Trump administrations approach that often treated traditional European allies with skepticism criticized multilateral institutions like NATO and the EU and favored bilateral America First deals over traditional transatlantic cooperation
2 Who were the main people behind this policy
The policy was driven by a combination of President Trumps own instincts and a key group of advisors most notably Steve Bannon John Bolton and Mike Pompeo They were often called Jacksonian or nationalist conservatives
3 Why did Trump call NATO obsolete
He argued that many European member nations were not spending enough on their own defense making the alliance unfairly costly for the US He used this criticism as leverage to demand more financial burdensharing
4 Whats a simple example of this antiEurope stance in action
A clear example was the repeated threat to withdraw US troops from Germany unless the country increased its defense spending and the imposition of tariffs on European steel and aluminum treating the EU more like an economic competitor than a partner
Intermediate Advanced Questions
5 Wasnt this just America First Whats the difference between that and being antiEurope
America First was the overarching doctrine The antiEurope element was its specific application the belief that the postWWII alliance system had become a bad deal for the US that the EU was a bureaucratic competitor and that shaking up these relationships would force Europe to concede to US demands
6 Did any Republicans or advisors push back against this approach
Yes internally more traditional internationalist Republicans like HR McMaster and James Mattis often clashed with this worldview They argued for sustaining and reforming alliances not undermining them
7 How did think tanks and media figures shape this policy
Institutions like the
