Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the new National Security Strategy, and what it means for Europe.
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The Emperor’s New Groove
This month, the Trump administration published its new National Security Strategy (NSS).
Foreign policy scholars react:
“Reject Global Primacy.” Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center writes:
The centrality of cultural and “civilizational” issues in the document is tied in interesting ways to the criticism of post–Cold War foreign policy and the elites that pursued it. As Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment noted … this is the first NSS to explicitly reject global primacy, described in the document as America’s “global burdens.”
“Unchecked Unilateralism.” Jonathan Kirshner of Boston College lambasts the document:
It is, above all else, preening — a boatload of boasting buttressed by vague platitudes — although the emphasis on unchecked American unilateralism is a sustained theme.
“The Contradictions Are Legion,” says Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute:
The document extolls “sovereignty and respect” but ferociously denigrates European sovereign decisions and advocates interfering in their political processes. There are also hilarious lapses of self-awareness, such as the blithe statement that “departments and agencies of the United States Government have been granted fearsome powers. Those powers must never be abused.”
“The World Has Become More Polycentric.” George Beebe of Responsible Statecraft has a more positive take:
Trump’s approach is much more than a simple effort to reconnect American objectives in the world to its capabilities and interests, however … Equally important, it recognizes that the distribution of power in the world has become more polycentric, and that technologies are changing the components of national power in ways that have big implications for geopolitics.
“A Future NSS.” The Democrats should keep some Trumpist ideas, argues Aslı Aydıntaşbaş of the Brookings Institute:
A future NSS — perhaps even under a Democratic administration — would likely retain some Trump-era themes: burden-shifting, criticism of global institutions, a narrower definition of U.S. interests, and the centrality of economic interests.
The Fate of Europe
The NSS describes Europe as decadent, rife with censorship, excessive migration, and falling birthrates. It blames all of this largely on the European Union.
Is the NSS good or bad for Europe?
Bad for Europe. Europe can no longer expect security guarantees, writes friend of Wisdom of Crowds and longtime European affairs commentator, Rachel Rizzo:
The era of relying on U.S. security guarantees is effectively over. Europeans should have already known this before the publication of the NSS, but if there are any lingering doubts, this should take care of them.
Bad for Europe. Tara Varma of the Brookings Institute thinks that the US is trying to subvert the European Union:
… a clear plan for subversion in Europe is laid out in the NSS. The word “Europe” is mentioned 48 times in the NSS, demonstrating an evident interest in the continent’s future. But that interest does not extend to the foundations of the transatlantic alliance — namely, fostering liberal democracies and open societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Good for Europe. Europe is not the EU, writes Christopher Caldwell (author of Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West):
Read carefully … the passages about Europe sound more like a defense of the continent. They include a description of Europe as “strategically and culturally vital” to the United States. Few of those outraged by the document have bothered to distinguish between Europe — a geographical area that is also shorthand for the culture that arose over the centuries from a mix of Greek rationalism and Middle Eastern monotheism — and the European Union, a 33-year-old experiment that aims to replace the continent’s nation-states with a novel form of transnational governance based in Brussels.
Good for Europe. By forcing Europe to do more for its security, the US is helping to restore European sovereignty. So writes Juan P. Villasmil:
The NSS … acknowledges Europe’s historic and cultural importance and the enduring value of the alliance, while making the obvious point that sovereign nations have sovereign responsibilities. … The United States expects Europe to contribute not because we care less about Europe, but because we believe Europe can do more.
Bad for the USA. By undermining Europe (as well as other allies), the US is shooting itself in the foot. So writes French entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand:
[It’s] unclear how you build an economic coalition against China while simultaneously waging trade wars against your coalition partners, demanding they shoulder more of their own defense, and treating every allied relationship as a deal to be renegotiated in America’s favor.
I weep for this antiquity and herald the Millennium for I saw the Atlantic sun rayed down from a vast cloud
— Allen Ginsberg, “Europe Europe”
From the Continent
What they’re saying in Europe.
Paris. Le Monde columnist Alain Frachon thinks that the transatlantic alliance is over:
Europe risks being in denial on two counts. The first would be failing to take seriously the Donald Trump-led United States’s message: The transatlantic alliance no longer interests them. The second would be to take a contemptuous view of the Trumpian portrait of a European Union in decline. Such a depiction, alas, contains a grain of truth.
London. The NSS gives Europe no choice but to submit to the American Empire, writes UnHerd columnist Aris Roussinos:
Now, faced with aggression from the East, [European leaders] must subject themselves to humiliation from the West. … The price of American protection, the NSS makes clear, is ideological conformity: it is not Europe being discarded by its imperial master, but its current leadership [i.e., the EU]. For us Europeans, whom they have dragged to this civilisational nadir, their removal will at least be some small consolation.
Milan. The NSS raises legitimate questions, writes Danilo Taino of Corriere della Sera:
The NSS, however, also raises issues that we Europeans must ask ourselves, regardless of whether they are imposed on us by a “foreign power.” Immigration comes first, understood as the inability and lack of willingness of many EU countries to deal with it. Then there is the criticism of excessive regulation in Europe: it “stifles” the initiative of businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups, and sacrifices economic growth.
Madrid. The US wants a fragmented Europe, argues a paper published by Elcano Royal Institute, a Spanish think tank:
A fragmented Europe, without a powerful internal market or ambition to be a global player, could not compete with the US in terms of rules nor avoid total subordination in international politics. [The NSS’] illiberal bet thus turns out to be, simultaneously, ideological and rational.
“A Central Point in Our Foreign Policy”
In Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense under President Harry Truman, recounts how, after World War II, the US saw European integration as being in the American national interest:
The trouble seemed to me to run far deeper and to lie at the very root of popular acceptance of European unity. I pointed out … the amazing distance the United States had gone, often in cooperation with European initiatives as brilliant as they were novel, in the Marshall Plan, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, the North Atlantic Treaty with its concomitants of the unified command, the stationing of American troops abroad, the restoration of German sovereignty and participation in defense through the European Defense Community. Now momentum in Europe was being lost and retrogression had set in to the point of threatening disaster. A continuance of American interest and effort in Europe on the scale of the past six years depended upon the continuance in Europe of policies designed to create a community united politically and strong economically and militarily. Such a community we could and would support as a central point in our foreign policy.
From the Crowd
To what extent does truth matter for politics? Responding to last week’s podcast, Gemma Mason writes:
I love truth and I’d love to believe that it’s terribly important, but I can’t help but note that it cannot be the case that only political projects based on truth can succeed in the long term. This is because there have been many very-long-term political projects with underlying meta-narratives that are not fully compatible with each other. The Islamic Golden Age and the Ming Dynasty cannot both have been based upon strict metaphysical truth.
Can we “rescue” truth from this objection? Maybe. After all, it’s possible that a narrative merely needs to be true enough. The concept of a pendulum clock could be understood in terms of Galileo’s initial speculative measurements via his own pulse, even if it really was general relativity — or something else! — giving rise to that regularity all along. The underlying metaphysics didn’t need to be perfect in order for the principle to be perceptible. …
See you next week!
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