Take two mental images. In the first, in black and white, there are post-World War II leaders designing the Atlantic architecture: the idea that the United States and Europe share the same political security horizon, albeit with imbalances and conflicts. In the second, in colour, there is a PDF file on the screen: the new US National Security Strategy. For seventy years, those two symbolic photographs have been in the same album. Today they seem to come from two different planets.

The new National Security Strategy is not a technical report written for generals and analysts. It is a declaration of rupture. Europe is no longer described as an ally with whom to share risks and responsibilities, but as a political space to be reshaped. An object of ‘correction’, not a subject of cooperation.

The key passage is on pages 25-27, where the administration sets a goal that, translated into the language of classical diplomacy, would have been unthinkable: the US must ‘cultivate resistance to the current trajectory of European nations’. In practice, Washington declares that it wants to work for a change in the internal political balance of the EU countries. It does not merely register that forces critical of Brussels exist in Europe; it presents them as privileged interlocutors and as a means to bring the continent back into a new American orbit.

The democratically elected governments of the Old Continent are dismissed as minority elites that ‘trample democratic principles underfoot‘; the ‘European patriotic parties‘ are celebrated as a sign of ‘great optimism’. It is the outline of a doctrine of regime change at the home of the historical ally. For the first time since 1945, the White House codifies in an official document the idea that the desirable stability for Europe comes not from the strengthening of its institutions, but from their political delegitimisation.

What is most revealing is the tone. This text does not resemble dry and cold National Security Strategies listing threats, priorities, instruments. Rather, it resembles the ideological platform of a political movement that speaks at once to an internal and external audience: to the MAGA base in America, to the galaxy of radical right-wingers in Europe, to the autocrats to be bamboozled around the world. In this sense, it truly marks the end of an era: the transatlantic relationship born in 1945, made up of basic trust and mutual recognition, is replaced by an asymmetrical relationship in which Europe becomes the theatre, no longer a partner.

Within what Thomas Friedman would call the ‘machine’ of the world – the media, digital and financial flows that reshape politics – the leverage is clear: to use the strength of the American system to push Europe in a political direction more favourable to the White House. The problem is that that direction coincides with the systematic attrition of the institutions that, with all their flaws, guarantee pluralism and the rule of law on the continent.

Europe as a problem: identity, demography, regimes to change

The heart of the European section is built on three intertwined narrative threads: immigration, demography, institutional architecture. It is a narrative that anyone who follows the Trumpian right recognises immediately.

Immigration is presented as the main matrix of ‘transformation and conflict’. European governments are accused of repressing opposition and manipulating electoral tools. The picture sketched in the document is not far from the caricature that certain channels close to the Kremlin propose to their viewers every night: a decadent Europe, led by elites hostile to the people, unable to control its borders and its identity. ‘The French president is gay, his wife is a man and beats him‘: a joke circulating as much in Trumpian circles as on Russian propaganda channels.

Then there is demography. The strategy argues that some European NATO countries will, within a few decades, become ‘non-European majority’, and suggests that this fact could reduce their reliability as allies. There is no security doctrine here, there is an ethnic-identitarian theory of the alliance: partner status would depend not so much on institutions, military capabilities or industrial contribution, but on the ‘ethnic’ composition of the population. It is a red line that American strategy had not yet crossed and is now being crossed without hesitation.

This identity narrative is intertwined with the delegitimisation of the European Union as such. Supranational institutions are described as a ‘suffocating’ apparatus that extinguishes freedom and talent, alienates countries from their supposed ‘true civilisation’ and makes them dependent on distant bureaucracies. Europe does not appear as part of the solution to global problems, but as the main source of instability.

Here the most resounding reversal from the Atlantic tradition takes place. Russia steps out of the role of central threat to European security. The concept of deterrence – the brick on which the strategic balance has been built for eighty years – slips into the background. In its place comes the reassuring formula of ‘strategic stability’ with Moscow, as if the war of aggression against Ukraine was an accident to be filed away at the cost of any compromise.

While Putin remains engaged in a war of annihilation against a sovereign state, the paper shifts focus. The anomaly to be dealt with becomes European governments that support Kyiv, defend NATO enlargement, invest in climate policies and regulate digital markets. In other words: the new American doctrine identifies the combination of the European Union plus liberal democracies as the variable to be corrected.

If you scroll down to the end of the section on Europe, the picture becomes clearer. The stated objectives are to build a stable and peaceful relationship with Russia; to favour a Europe made up of less integrated nations more jealous of their sovereignty; to curb further NATO enlargements; to expand the access of American products to European markets; to forge privileged relations with eastern and southern Europe through armaments, economic exchanges and cultural penetration; and to explicitly support internal opposition against the current European ruling classes.

Put in sequence, these pieces compose a coherent design: a politically fragmented Europe, commercially more open to American interests, militarily more exposed, led by ultranationalist parties that share the same identity grammar and the same indulgence towards Russian authoritarianism with Trumpism.

In this context, the ‘prettified puppets’ (as Draghi called them) who align themselves with Trump and Putin – often every other day – assume a clear role in the machine. They are amplifiers of a message written elsewhere. They preach façade sovereignty, waving flags and slogans, while opening the door to a political hetero-direction that would reduce the real sovereignty of Europeans over their own destiny. They are a symptom and instrument of our strategic weakness: cultural fragility, demographic fear, military dependence.

End of the Atlantic illusion: today the real sovereignty is Europeanism

At this point the temptation is to give in to a simplistic reflex: ‘The United States has become an enemy of Europe‘. That would be a misreading. The document expresses the line of an administration and the political bloc that supports it; America remains a much more complex country. Congress, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, the scientific and industrial worlds do not move in a single chorus. There are American political cultures that see the Union as an essential pillar of stability and not a problem to be dismantled.

And it is precisely here that the situation becomes, at the same time, most risky and most interesting. Because the uncomfortable truth is another: Europe has lived for decades within an Atlantic illusion. It has convinced itself that the American umbrella was a constant of nature, something given once and for all. It has endlessly discussed budgetary rules and procedures, cucumber curves and electric motors, delegating the architecture of its own security elsewhere.

The new strategy sends a message that must be taken literally: that season is over. The Trump administration, as codified in this text, no longer looks at the Union as an ally to be strengthened. It sees it as a region to be transformed. The Russian conflict in Ukraine becomes a dossier to be ‘closed’ with any stabilisation; the priority is to free up resources and attention for other global games (as well as to let the various Witkoffs and Kushners do business in and around Moscow). The risk is obvious: an imposed compromise on Kyiv, built over the heads of Ukrainians and Europeans, destined to freeze Putin’s territorial conquests and move the line of insecurity even further west.

From here on, European security will depend on how quickly we can change our mentality. The Union must stop presenting itself as a concerned observer in a negotiation where others define the parameters. It must build its own strategic space, using all available levers: diplomacy, trade, military capabilities, intelligence, technology. Defending Ukraine also means strengthening the defence industrial base, coordinating the production and purchase of munitions, securing energy and digital infrastructures, developing a common policy towards the Mediterranean and Africa that is not just a reaction to crises, but a proposal for development.

Against this backdrop, the cardboard sovereignism filling Europe’s digital squares appears for what it is: a rhetoric of dependency. It screams of nationhood, but relies on the American umbrella for defence and authoritarian supplies for energy. The alternative is not to take refuge in an impotent nostalgia for the Atlantic that was, nor to imagine improbable national autarchies. The alternative is a European sovereignty that is finally taken seriously.

Translated: today the true sovereignty needed is Europeanism. It means that those who cherish Italian, French, German, Polish sovereignty must strive to build a common European capacity. Capacity to decide, to defend, to negotiate. It means reworking the Union’s structures to make it more political, less paralysed by vetoes, quicker in crises. It also means redefining the relationship with Washington: from a protector-protector relationship to a relationship between adult allies who know they have interests that are partly shared and partly not.

The American strategy puts us in front of an unpleasant mirror. We see a Europe perceived as fragile, divided, permeable to returning nationalisms. We can be indignant at the caricatures of Brussels, or we can use that mirror as a tool. The world around us is already made up of continental blocs and authoritarian powers that do not wait. To remain the terrain of contention is to become the object of others’ strategies.

Making Europe an autonomous pole – democratic, open, but capable of deterrence and initiative – is the political and existential challenge of the coming years. It is the concrete way to respond to an American strategy that sees us as a problem. Not with a sterile indictment, but with a decision of maturity: if we want to remain masters of our history, that stronger and more united Europe we have been talking about for decades is no longer a chapter in white papers. It is a strategic urgency. And yes, in these strange times, Europeanism is the new word for sovereignty.

Read also: Europe faced with a choice between sovereignty and surrender to Russian imperialism, by David Favara