For all the talk of a “new American century,” Washington’s 2025 National Security Strategy reads less like a roadmap for global leadership and more like a manifesto for managed decline.

Europe is useless for the US

In the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), Europe is no longer portrayed as the democratic heart of the West, but as a civilization in terminal decline, unraveling under pressures so deep that Washington now doubts its ability to remain a meaningful partner. The document warns of nothing less than Europe’s “prospect of civilizational erasure,” a phrase that casts the crisis not as policy miscalculation but as existential collapse. Europe’s slide, according to the NSS, is driven by self-inflicted wounds: “cratering birthrates,” “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,” and a political culture that has lost faith in its own identity.

The NSS is explicit that Europe’s core problems are internal and ideological. It accuses “the European Union and other transnational bodies” of “undermining political liberty and sovereignty,” a charge that recasts the EU not as the guarantor of European unity but as a force accelerating fragmentation. Worse, the strategy claims Europe’s elites are responding to these pressures through “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition,” implying that the continent’s liberal democratic institutions have mutated into instruments of coercion. Europe’s economic decline serves as evidence of this civilizational weakening: its share of global GDP has collapsed from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today, a trajectory the NSS attributes to “national and transnational regulations that undermine........

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