Europe is on a trajectory towards nothing less than “civilisational erasure”, the Trump administration claims in its extraordinary new National Security Strategy, a document that blames European integration and “activities of the European Union that undermine political liberty and sovereignty” for some of the continent’s deepest problems.

Everybody should have seen it coming after Washington’s humiliating 28-point plan for Ukraine. JD Vance’s shocking Munich speech in February, in which he suggested that Europe’s democracies were not worth defending was an early red flag. But the new words still land as a shock. The security document is the clearest signal yet of how brutally and transactionally Washington wants to engage with the continent. It marks another phase in Trump’s attempt to reshape Europe in his ideological image while at the same time abandoning it militarily. US policy, the paper says, should enable Europe to “take primary responsibility for its own defence”.

Withdrawing US troops from Europe has been a particularly adamant demand of the Maga right. Figures such as Steve Bannon openly argue for “hemispheric defence” – defending the Americas, not Europe. On his War Room podcast, Bannon said plainly that: “We’re a Pacific nation … the pivot, the strategic heartland of America, is actually the Pacific.”

One of the clearest articulations of US strategic retrenchment has come from a key figure in Trump-era defence thinking: Elbridge Colby, the principal........

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