You and me against the world: who was behind Trump’s anti-Europe foreign policy?

How do you create a foreign policy manifesto for a US president who leads from the gut?

The initial draft fell to Michael Anton, a Maga firebrand whom officials have called the lead author behind the US’s radical new national security strategy (NSS). The document shocked US allies, warning that immigration to Europe would cause “civilizational erasure”, reviving the Monroe doctrine in the western hemisphere, and downgrading the US’s responsibility for great power competition with China and Russia.

Anton, the former director of policy planning at the state department, had previously gained widespread attention in 2016 when he compared the impending elections to a hijacked airliner in which conservatives must radically shake up US politics and reject the pro-immigration stances that were the “mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die”.

“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” he wrote under a pseudonym. “To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

It is no surprise, then, that the recent NSS, usually a ponderous document weighed down by carefully measured bureaucratic-speak, landed like a bombshell. While it survived a tortured bureaucratic process from the state department to Trump’s senior advissrs and was released to little fanfare last week, some of the recommendations were radical enough to cause European leaders to say that the US’s Euroscepticism had now become “official doctrine”.

“I think what’s clear is that Maga is trying to be a revolutionary movement,” said Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s trying to completely upend postwar US foreign policy and and really change the direction of the country.”

The thinking pushed against decades of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxythat saw European institutions, including Nato and the European Union, as allies in a great power competition with authoritarian countries like Russia and China. The new document sees the greatest threat coming from immigration – and suggests that the US should court illiberal allies in Europe.

“This is sort of like a divorce,” Bergmann said of the European reaction. “They don’t want the marriage to end. They’re looking for signs that the United States is still interested in them … and this was sort of confirmation that it’s over.”

Skeptics have said that the NSS rarely dictates policy, that it is not attached to any budgets, and questioned whether Donald Trump had even read the 33-page essay.

Traditionally, the NSS is the result of a convoluted interagency process that leads to a “cut-and-paste job”, according to Daniel Hamilton, a former state department official and professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“My guess is he’s never read this thing and never will,” said John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump during his first term who has since become a prominent critic of the president. “He didn’t read the national security strategy in the first term, and nobody ever paid any attention to it.”

But in a subsequent interview with Politico, Trump echoed the strategy’s criticisms of mass migration, indicating that even if he does not have time for a policy document, its horror at multiculturalism is closely aligned with his thinking.

“If it keeps going the way it’s going … many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer,” Trump said. “Their immigration policy is a disaster. What they’re doing with immigration is a disaster.”

National security strategies, which have been made public by US administrations since the mid-1980s, have often served as a sparring ring for different visions for US foreign policy, with rival officials injecting language to reflect their key interests.

Under Trump, the White House has significantly slashed staff at key national security apparatuses as part of its effort to streamline government and cull a disloyal bureaucratic “deep state” – including at the national security council, the main forum that would traditionally coordinate US national security policy.

The result is a document that is less polished, but also one that will be more difficult to implement, said observers.

However, the NSS does read as a manifesto for a number of Trump’s closest advisers across the foreign policy space, including JD Vance, who denounced European liberalism in a speech at the Munich security conference in February, and the powerful deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has said that immigration should be a top national security priority for this administration. The sections on Latin America closely reflect the thinking of Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, who, after a shaky start, has established his place among the president’s closest advisers.

Trump himself is said to have little interest in policy. As a result, advisers to Trump produced a “written articulation of the gut instinct that the president lives by”, said Hamilton, who is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe.

“That’s about the best you can call it,” he said. “He won’t write it himself or even read it, probably, but his people are trying to give an articulated worldview behind, kind of, where his instincts go.”

While the document does not stipulate specific policy recommendations, there are signs that its spirit is already being implemented in parts of the vast US bureaucracy.

US embassies in Europe, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have been ordered to gather data on crimes committed by immigrants, and senior officials have said that mass migration is an “existential threat to western civilization and the safety of both the west and the world”. The 2024 human rights report from the state department, said to be edited before release by Anton and other senior aides to Rubio, reported “significant human rights issues” in Germany including censorship and antisemitism, while softening language on Israel’s war in Gaza and reports of torture and extrajudicial killings in El Salvador.

Senior US diplomats also are issuing warnings to Europe as they recast the European Union as a key rival.

“Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not,” wrote Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state who has taken the lead on promoting the administration’s immigration goals, shortly after the document’s release. “But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”

Anton left government in September months before the document was released. Diplomats said that he had grown frustrated at the state department where other powerful allies to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, were tasked with making key decisions.

“He was facing headwinds [at the state department] and could hardly speak for the administration,” said one former state department official.

In conservative circles, some people have warned that while the Trump administration may not implement the vision described in the NSS, Trump’s potential successors, including Vance, have a draft for a future Maga foreign policy.

“Read as a blueprint for the rest of the Trump presidency, the NSS can be oversold,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “But that doesn’t mean it can be safely ignored. The NSS represents the worldview of those who hope to shape American policy long after MrTrump completes his second term. Their ideas matter.”