The national security strategy of US President Donald Trump, which brutally 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.”
In a new broadside at a time when Washington is putting forward proposals to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, 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 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”.
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