When President Donald Trump’s second-term National Security Strategy arrived Friday, it landed like a lead balloon across the Atlantic. Yet while the unnecessarily harsh vitriol toward Europe is an American problem, the persistent shock and confusion among Europeans anytime Trump and his team say anything damning is very much a European one.

For the better part of a decade, Trump has been signaling, explicitly and implicitly, that the trans-Atlantic relationship will have to look fundamentally different going forward. Just how it will look is still up in the air. 

When comparing Trump’s second NSS to his first one, the tone toward Europe has shifted markedly. The first term strategy focused on forcing and then taking credit for increased burden sharing and burden shifting. The second has a focus on Europe’s supposed “civilizational erasure” due to mass........

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