President Trump’s new National Security Strategy is a manifesto for undermining democracy and carving up Europe – it’s time the government acted to protect our interests from our most unreliable ally, writes Herald columnist Mark McGeoghegan.

While it’s most closely associated with Samuel Huntington’s 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, the concept of a clash of civilisations has a long pedigree. Albert Camus used it in 1948 to make a very similar argument to Huntington’s, suggesting – wrongly, as it turned out – that the “Russo-American problem” would soon be superseded by a clash of civilisations between colonised and colonising nations.

That concept now sits at the heart of President Trump’s new National Security Strategy, at least as it pertains to Europe, which the document alleges is on the verge of “civilisational erasure” because of immigration. The Trump Administration “want(s) Europe to remain European”, as it were. But the real clash here isn’t one of civilisations, it’s within Western civilisation, between the authoritarian ethnonationalism of MAGA and European liberal democracy.

All in all, the document is absurd from a European perspective. It pairs pivoting away from Europe with a commitment to reshape Europe in a Trumpian image. It proposes a world of sovereign states while simultaneously looking to interfere in domestic European politics. It is deeply hypocritical, rooted in the tension inherent in trying to couch this dramatic shift in US foreign policy in the language of traditional democratic and liberal values.

Far from a recipe for a peaceful, thriving world, President........

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