PARIS: The national security strategy of US President Donald Trump, which criticised Europe as facing “civilisational erasure”, is a wake-up call for Europe over the hardening of Washington’s position, a French minister said Tuesday.
The new strategy of the Trump administration, published on Friday, is “an extremely brutal clarification of the ideological stance of the United States,” Alice Rufo, the number two minister at the French defence ministry, told parliament.
It represented an “acceleration” of the ongoing move by the United States to make a priority of “their national interests over the search for compromise in their alliances”, she said.
“This is where we are and it’s going to continue. We live in a world of carnivores. Europe is not an island, and it will earn respect if it learns how to command respect,” she added.
The strategy put a top priority on eliminating mass migration and said the administration would be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Trump slams ‘decaying’ Europe
In a new broadside at a time when Washington is putting forward proposals to end the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump in an interview with Politico published Tuesday, called Europe “decaying” and blasted key allies as “weak”.
“We must accelerate the rearmament of France and Europe,” Rufo said, adding that this could take place within the bloc or through coalitions of member states.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Tuesday that parts of the new US national security strategy were “unacceptable to us from a European perspective”.
Trump doubled down on his extraordinary recent criticisms of a region that Washington has long counted as a key ally.
“Most European nations, they’re, they’re decaying. They’re decaying,” Trump told Politico in the interview, conducted Monday.
The US President said that Europe’s policies were a “disaster.”
“They’re coming in from all parts of the world,” Trump said. “But they want to be politically correct, and they don’t want to send them back to where they came from.”
US alliance with European nations
Asked if European countries would not remain US allies if they failed to embrace his administration’s policies on the issue, Trump replied that “it depends.”
“I think they’re weak, but they also want to be so politically correct,” Trump said.
He listed countries including Britain, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden that he said were being “destroyed” by migration.
Trump also brushed off the fact that the Kremlin had hailed the new US national security strategy as being in line with its own views.
“I think he (Putin) would like to see a weak Europe, and to be honest with you, he’s getting that. That has nothing to do with me,” he said.
