Has Trump Just Declared War on Europe?
Byline Times' Head of Investigations Nafeez Ahmed talks to Adrian Goldberg and the Byline Podcast about what really lies behind the new Kremlin-aligned US National Security Strategy
The new US National Security Strategy, laid out in 33 pages last week, makes overt what many people have sensed covertly since the election of Donald Trump for a second term in 2024.
It says the White House should “cultivate resistance in Europe” a continent which it describes as facing “civilisational erasure” because of high migration and falling birth rates, echoing the far right playbook, the great replacement theory and welcomes what it describes as the growing influence of “patriotic” European parties.
It claims the EU undermines political liberty and sovereignty, yet there is not a hint of criticism of Russia. Instead, the strategy document blames European officials for blocking attempts to bring peace in Ukraine, which Russia illegally invaded in 2014 and 2022.
Byline Times Head of Investigations Nafeez Ahmed has been charting the drift rightwards of the Trump movement and identifying the key figures behind it in both his book, Alt Reich, and his work for the Byline Times.
“This is a major wake up call for Europeans,” he says. “Whether you are on the left or the right, you need to look at this document and recognise it for what it is – an unprecedented declaration of interference in European politics.”
Whatever your views on the EU, he says, “This is a national security document which actually poses a national security threat to Europe, because it’s saying to us, that this terrible invasion inside Europe that’s been led by Vladimir Putin, is essentially something we should normalise.”
Something deep has shifted in the transatlantic architecture, he points out. America is “openly saying that actually forget about NATO, let’s get rid of NATO. NATO is the problem. Europe is the problem. The implications of this are astonishing because it means that following an aggressive invasion inside Europe by a foreign invader, our closest ally is now telling us that we’re just going to normalise relations with that. Let them have some land. Let them have what they want.”
Ahmed highlights the fact that Russia has been playing a long game. Anyone studying Russian machinations over the last decade “knows that the war on Ukraine was always seen as part of a longer effort by the Kremlin to undermine and dismantle what it considers to be a threat to Russian ambitions” which are, he says to reassert its dominance over parts of Europe “that it feels were its own, reassertion of the Russian empire.”
Ukraine, he says, has long been seen as a stepping stone into other parts of Europe. “There have already been hundreds of thousands of lives lost. This is serious. This is giving a green light to a military aggression on the doorstep of the European Union which is essentially saying, ‘you’ve already committed war crimes. You’ve already broken the law. Why not just have your cake and eat it?’”
America will now be fostering parties in Europe, cultivating resistance to the direction of the European Union, which, as Ahmed points out, Europeans have voted in favour of, time and time again. “America is now saying to us that they’re going to support Kremlin-funded extreme nationalist parties, for which most of us have not voted.”
While the EU is not without its flaws and problems, he says, “Those are European problems. Those are not problems for America to come in and tell us what to do… it’s beginning to expose that this is not about democracy.
“This is something far worse, something that obviously I’ve spoken about in my book, Alt-Reich. The subtitle of my book is The Network War to Destroy Democracy from Within. And I’ve been warning for a while, that this is not normal politics.”
The book charts the deliberate strategy of a far-right network that aims to take control of the United States democratic system, and is allied with the enemies of democracy, the epicentre of which is Russia.
“America has now essentially gone dark and Europe is next. That war is now extending across the Atlantic. And we need to take this extremely seriously.”
Vice President JD Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February, shocked European leaders by saying that the biggest threats facing the continent of Europe politically were not China, or Russia, but the issues of mass migration and laws that restricted free speech.
The military invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign European state, was seen as less important than mass migration and free speech. Which prefigures what is enshrined now in this national security document.Yet this is not part of a mainstream political discussion in the UK involving the any of the main parties.
“Europeans are going to need to start waking up and facing the music,” says Ahmed. He points to the response of the Canadian Government to President Trump’s stated aims to make Canada .
“Canadians have not looked at this and just said, ‘this is a joke’. They looked at this and they said, ‘America is no longer the America that we know. This is a fundamental shift’. And they have been preparing.
“Of course, they’ve been engaging in diplomacy. But…they were looking at scenarios of what would happen if the United States decided to cross the border.
The United States is not only not coming to save us, they are throwing us to the wolves who are already on the borders, who’ve already crossed over. They’re killing people in Ukraine and the ambitions do not stop in Ukraine.”
Russia is already deep within our systems, he says: “Given what we’ve seen with the prosecution of Nathan Gill here in the UK, other names connected to Nathan Gill now cropping up, we know that there are active influence operations by Russia going on in our democracies in order to essentially dismantle democracy, undermine and push Putin’s ambitions. So it’s now time to wake up.”
One of the key features of this new world has been information warfare, with American tech companies like X and Facebook being critical in the spread of disinformation. The European Union recently fined Elon Musk’s X $140 million for failing to comply with its requirements.
Musk has hit back on that, saying that the European Union must be dismantled. And although Trump himself hasn’t yet said that, there is a clear intersection between the interests of big tech in the United States and Government, which means that this battle over information, misinformation and disinformation is is only going to become more intense over the coming years.
“We know that these platforms have been weaponised,” says Ahmed. “We know that these platforms are being used to manipulate information and to spread specific political views, and that that has had influence. It’s impossible to completely determine the extent of that influence precisely because of the sheer opacity of these platforms and how they work. But what we know is that it’s happening… That is empirically incontrovertible.”
There is a war going on, Ahmed says, the theatre of war, the nature of war has changed, but it has physical impacts, as seen in the summer of riots led by Tommy Robinson and others.
“Everybody knows that those riots were boosted by X. Tommy Robinson, the convicted racist fraudster, was boosted by Elon Musk,” he says, but there is more going on among the techno-fraternity, as Ahmed documents in his book, Alt Reich. The Silicon Valley elites have converged around a bizarre shared consensus that the biggest problem they are facing is democracy itself.
“They think that national sovereign democracies are the biggest obstacle to the kind of techno-utopian authoritarian regimes that they believe should replace everything else…
“They think the solution is replace national sovereign democracies with essentially techno-fascist regimes controlled by giant shareholder structures which don’t operate on the basis of normal national borders and boundaries, and which allow mass surveillance, total control.”
It is this belief in the creation of a tech-based utopia, conducive to the elimination and marginalisation of so-called inferior populations, Ahmed believes, and that has resulted in the US National Security document, enshrining the idea of the great replacement and the threat of civilisational erasure in Europe.
While migration is not the cause of industrial productivity problems and is actually a net positive, of course it should be discussed and debated, Ahmed affirms. But ending all migration, controlling populations and installing techno-fascism is not the answer.
The intersection between politics and tech platforms is a dangerous one. The need for transparency and regulation for protection of users is vital. But the European Union calling for X to comply with the law has led to Secretary of State Marco Rubio claiming that the fine on X is a fine on American tech companies.
This has become a political conflict rather than one about press information, media, transparency.
There is a strange schism in the thought process here, where the National Security Strategy wants Europe to contribute more to its own defence, which, it can be argued, is a fair point. At the same time, it says the member nations of the EU should return to being individual sovereign states.
But if European states are going to develop their own military, develop their own defence capabilities, then Europe must be in control of what it does with that military. The United States cannot demand that countries not be part of a union, a union which, it should not be forgotten, emerged from the smouldering ruins of World War II.
Nafeez Ahmed thinks the crucial point is that there are two issues. While it is legitimate to say Europe should do more in its own defence, blaming mass migration for Europe’s ills, while Russia is working to undermine democracies via propaganda being weaponised across these platforms, so that Europeans can be turned against each other, is a hostile act, he says.
“This is divide and rule. This is colonisation. That’s why I say this is a declaration of war…
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t deal with issues of migration. Climate change is going to make the issues of migration even worse in coming decades. So let’s have a conversation about the driving forces of migration. How, as a global civilisation, do we address these issues?
“Instead, what we have is a manic, fanatical, climate-denying regime in the United States actively dismantling democracy, dismantling its own free market system, and crushing the most exponentially improving industrial technologies in clean energy in order to do special favours for a dying coal industry, and then putting out ridiculous memes about it.
“This document demonstrates something far deeper even, that the United States as a Government is no longer conscious of reality. It is now actively in denial of reality and doesn’t understand its own situation of decline…and is allying with another foreign regime, Russia, which is also in decline.
“As frightening as it is, I think in Europe, we need to hold the line and see this for what it is, but also recognise that these desperate moves are not coming from a position of strength.”
Listen to the whole interview on the Byline Podcast
Nafeez Ahmed’s book Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within is published by Byline Books.
