The new American National Security Strategy – the imperial republic’s strategic guideline, and doctrinal principles for citizens and adversaries – can only be cautiously described as ‘realism with Huntingtonian characteristics’. Entrenching the concept of ‘burden shifting’ instead of the standardised ‘burden sharing’ – an idea that I previously explored when outlining what I call the ‘Dormant NATO‘ doctrine – the strategy paper lays out the responsibility of security squarely on the shoulders of America’s rich allies, especially in the European continent. Indeed, the National Security Strategy (NSS) confidently declares:

The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over. We count among our many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.

The document proceeds to repudiate the last quarter century’s foreign policy:

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

However, some of the harshest whiplashes were served for the mother continent. ‘We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies’, the strategy declares. It then continues to explain that Europe as a continent faces several profound challenges, including the overreach of the European Union and other transnational bodies that erode political liberty and national sovereignty, and mass migration transforming the continent’s demographics and generating significant social strife, which in turn results in a growing censorship of free speech, and a broad erosion of national identities and ‘civilizational self-confidence’. The document claims that if these trends persist, the continent risks becoming unrecognisable within two decades or less, as well as potentially hostile to the United States, due to the predominance of different cultural principles. The hope expressed is for Europe therefore to preserve its distinctly European character, restore its civilisational confidence, and move away from excessive regulatory burdens.

To ask the obvious question: what is to be done? The document proceeds to outline a few concrete policies. One, building up ‘healthy’ nations of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe through ‘commercial ties and weapons sales, and political collaboration and education exchanges’. Two, opening up European markets to US goods and services, and ensuring fair treatment for Americans working in Europe. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, ‘ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.’

In a bout of phenomenal clarity, Jean-Claude Juncker once said in 2007: ‘We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.’ The central contradiction of the European Union is that it is an imperial entity without sovereignty. A ‘vicarious empire’, thriving under the American nuclear umbrella, claiming sovereignty in trade, and culture, without having the strength of arms to enforce them.

A classical empire typically needs four interlocking features: total narrative control, a governing elite, an army to defend against external predation, and an imperial guard to crack down on dissent within. To put it in layman’s language, if the EU needs to be an empire, it would require banning all foreign-operated social media and tech companies. It would need to train a cadre of Homo Europa who would take over the major institutions, which should be strictly meritocratic and race neutral, similar to the Roman Empire at its height or the Cold War-era Soviets and Americans (after Civil Rights). But most importantly, it requires force. Externally, it would have to build and integrate a joint army under the command of Europeans and only Europeans, as well as an internal ‘Guard’, which can be easily transported and dispatched to different places to maintain security and control.

In short, for the EU to be truly sovereign and imperial, it requires, as all successful empires before it, a monopoly over interpreting history and a monopoly over violence. The only glitch is this: if and once European countries do it, there is no way they could maintain any form of democracy.

The idea of a European empire as a counterbalance to the Americans and Russians isn’t new. The most provocative and forceful recent advocacy was from a man once considered peculiar, but upon deeper reflection and with the benefit of hindsight, is now considered ahead of his time, a European Joseph Chamberlain of sorts. Guy Verhofstadt, reacting to Brexit, said, ‘The world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires. China is not a nation; it’s a civilisation. India, you know it better than I do, is not a nation. The US is also an empire, more than a nation. Maybe tomorrow they will speak more Spanish than English. And then, finally, the Russian Federation. The world of tomorrow is a world of empires.’

In fact, first slowly, then suddenly all at once, this idea of an overt era of imperialism has returned in both academic circles and public intellect. The Wall Street Journal claimed that the post-Second World War international order is collapsing as great powers revert to imperialistic behaviours where the strong dominate the weak. The Economist argued that Donald Trump’s second presidency marks a revival of overt American imperialism, with him becoming the first US president in over a century to explicitly advocate for acquiring new territory, extending ambitions even to Mars. The Financial Times agrees, arguing that the three overtly imperial entities today are China, Russia and the United States.

It’s not just the US, China and Russia, however. Armenia was routed in a territorial conquest by Turkish arms supported Azerbaijan. Parts of Syria seem as if they are being carved up by Turkey and Israel, where Turkey is seeking to emphasise that its brand of imperialism is characterised by a race-neutral, Sunni cosmopolitanism. ‘Erdogan now hopes to demonstrate a multiethnic – albeit illiberal – model of governance that accommodates communal diversity under strong Sunni leadership’, a Foreign Affairs essay on the new Turkish imperialism argues. This was ‘the key to the success and longevity of the Ottoman Empire – and a shortcoming of the secular Turkish republic.’ Multiethnic, albeit illiberal, could be one way of describing a new, race-neutral imperial meritocracy.

Meanwhile, if some reports are to be believed, Washington, DC initially considered forming part of a ‘Concert’ of five Great Powers – a Core 5 – consisting of Russia, China, Japan, India, and the United States: all powers with a population exceeding 100 million people. Incidentally there was no mention of the European Union as a unified entity. But more than the rhetoric, the recent actions of the United States justifies The Economist‘s claim of a shift from covert to overt imperialism. At the time of writing, the US is currently pushing a naval blockade in Latin America. One might agree or disagree with its aims, or justify it with a hemispheric focus, but a naval siege or a blockade is an ‘act of war’ and has been considered so since pretty much the dawn of recorded history. An annexation of Greenland by force, or a conflict with oil-rich Venezuela, coming immediately after the wars in Ukraine, Syria and Armenia, would be a war explicitly over resources and territory: ergo, an imperialist war.

A shifting of conventional burdens, as the NSS advocates for, while keeping the nuclear umbrella and naval protection of Europe, needs a coherent timeline and a plan. There are, however, two wrinkles. First, the EU common trade and regulation policy, and an increasing rivalry between the EU’s military-industrial complex and the US’ technology and weapons sales. The US has always actively opposed the notion of a fully autonomous European system of defence. The impending confrontation over the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) may represent one of the most consequential geopolitical contests in the coming year, with profound implications for European sovereignty and autonomy. Should the United States prevail in compelling the subordination or dilution of the DSA, perceived by Washington as an instrument of extraterritorial censorship targeting American platforms and viewpoints, Europe’s aspirations for independent superpower status would be permanently undermined, effectively consolidating a hegemonic, hyper-power position for the United States.

Conversely, a decisive victory for the EU in upholding and enforcing the DSA could erode the sovereignty of individual member states, fostering a more centralised imperial structure within the Union itself; irrespective of the outcome, the traditional model of small-nation liberal democracy, prevalent in Western Europe for much of the postwar era, appears unlikely to endure in this emergent era of renewed great-power competition.

The European Union also suffers from structural disadvantages: genuine technological competitiveness with the United States would require substantial deregulation of the digital sector, a policy shift incompatible with the Union’s current institutional framework and regulatory paradigm. Even when the European public desires more control of social media on the continent, the EU is currently ill-suited to initiate any shift in either direction – towards censorship or deregulation – without turning completely imperial or without compromising its supranational power. Indeed, the DSA is the ultimate test of the question of “sovereignty”. Whoever wins the question, the system of a small state liberal democracy will be over. The Americans understand that, understand their overwhelming tech superiority, and naturally smell blood in the water, as is evident from the NSS.

But there’s a second wrinkle. What the Americans, especially the American ‘civilisationalist’ right don’t get, is that American strategic thought lies in the historical efficacy of very astute American imperialism, which derived its success precisely from its covert character, eschewing the overt manifestations that have characterised traditional empires. In simple terms, Americans succeeded for a greater part of 80 years because their leaders were not crude. American imperialism was subtle, and welcoming. The Founders were opposed to any crusading impulse, an instinct that continued unimpeded till at least the First World War. Even when world wars changed the character of the republic, the American hegemony was garbed under the question of a unifying narrative of liberty, a set of universal values, dressed up in Jazz in the 1930s, Rock and Roll and Hollywood during the Cold War, and the warm glow of computer games and finance-infused supremacy of the 1980s and 1990s.

In this context, a transition to explicit imperialism clashes with its own structural problems, such as America’s mass-democratic institutions, as well as societal ambivalence toward hierarchical elitism, and the inherent tensions between an open, mass-democratic polity and the requisites of a governing system that would demand prudence, a meritocratic race-neutral elite and amoral realism. The same mass-democratic character results in an uneasy oscillation between hemispheric isolation and a crude civilisational crusading impulse. The United States was founded as an egalitarian republic devoid of the traditional aristocratic elites that enabled classical empires to insulate policy from public volatility and sustain protracted commitments. Naturally, it now results in incoherence in foreign policy, particularly toward Europe, where hegemonic aspirations collide with reluctance to bear the requisite costs. A demand for allies to augment defence contributions therefore clashes with a simultaneous opposition to any emergence of an autonomous European tech-military-industrial complex and a natural European imperial elite leading a super consolidated continental rival antithetical to American primacy. As Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently remarked, these imperatives are irreconcilable, such that a Europe divested of American security guarantees would pursue greater independence.

This transatlantic strategic inconsistency is by design. The Cold War-era diplomats understood that. Zhou Enlai reportedly once said to Henry Kissinger: ‘the trouble with you Americans is that you never know where you will be six months from now’. That’s a truth European diplomats understand as well. A Eurocrat also reportedly said in 2024 that ‘trying to build a long-term strategy with the United States is like playing chess with a partner who might flip the board every four to eight years.’

True populism and overt imperialism are incompatible. The problem with a certain segment of civilisationalists is that they cannot rationalise their ode to ‘Western’ canons with the severely anti-populist and anti-democratic sensibilities of all major schools of western thinkers: Plato and Thucydides, Smith and Chateaubriand, Madison and Marx. Verhofstadt’s earlier quote about the US being an Hispanic power may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the risk is that the ultimate direction of American right wing civilisational politics means Europeans might eventually not consider America to be part of the same civilisation. A significant chunk of European elites already consider America to be a land of revolutionary yahoos determined to sow chaos and race war in the continent, an instinct in no way discouraged by the recent behaviour of certain Trump officials, who seem to have swallowed their own propaganda of a Europe in perpetual decline and conquered by ‘inferior races’ of migrants and Muslims.

One lesson from the last year and half is that the intellectual dimension of American right wing ‘counter-elitism’ often cohabits uneasily with a worldview that is proudly anti-intellectual. Trump himself is a cosmopolitan upper-class New Yorker, and clearly only who cares about not being taken for a ride. In that way, his instinct mirrors that of the Founders, who warned against being unwise in implicating America with artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of European politics, and against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. A classical Trumpian strategy of burden shifting would entail a somewhat detached United States, in the President’s own words, one only satiated with commerce and not chaos, and disinclined to worry about any crusading ‘civilizational’ question.

Unfortunately, Trump appears to be a spent force and his movement now risks being controlled by outright ideologues who are no different than the neoconservatives they deride. All the ‘Europe Erasure’ stuff is ideological and low-class coded, and is likely not coming from the principal. We ‘should stop a foreign policy of hectoring and moralizing’ as the Vice President, JD Vance said. Ideally, that rule should also include Europe, where the pursuit of burden shifting and civilisational politics will prove to be incompatible ambitions in the long run. The administration should preferably choose the former over the latter. Indeed, there’s a central contradiction between civilisational politics on the one hand, and realism and burden shifting on the other: ultimately, the former is largely ahistorical and cannot be brought to its logical conclusions – anti-populism, race-neutral empire – under the conditions present today, in an era of ‘democratic’ politics. And yet, the NSS is a coalition management document, and it thus reveals the contradictions within Trump’s support base.

However, the contradictions between civilisational politics and burden shifting are also a question of mathematics and failed ideology. For a start, Poland and the Baltics spending even 15 per cent of their relative GDPs on defence is frankly irrelevant compared to American security, and compared with Germany spending 5 per cent. ‘We have conceived the two wars which we fought essentially as two holy crusades, engaged in by a good people against an evil one. It so happened, that what was really at stake in those crusades was not at all the extirpation of evil of its own sake, but the restoration of the balance of power in Europe’, Hans Morgenthau once wrote. There is a simple reason why Western Europe has been historically important to US grand strategy, regardless of what the civilisationalists believe: geography is destiny.

Another problem with the Huntingtonian civilisational politics is that it brings about some of the worst instincts of the noughties, which is evident from the resurfacing of discredited ideas from the War on Terror in 2025. Samuel Huntington’s worst academic tract is still a staple for people who cannot see the world beyond a binary lens. The book that practically justified the 20 years of  ‘War on Terror’ and is now leading America onto a collision course with Europe, and to some extent, the majority of Europeans, who don’t need an overtly imperial hyperpower in America. And it will result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, in creating a European empire that will not see America as an ally, much less as part of the same civilisational bloc. One lesson of international history is that any Jacobin power tends to be balanced by a coalition feeling threatened by the export of revolution, something that the American Founding Fathers clearly understood. Power, after all, begs to be balanced.

The central contradiction in the new American National Security Strategy is this: a prudent burden shifting and ahistorical civilisational politics are not compatible goals. Civilisational politics can only be implemented by overt imperialism, which America is unwilling and incapable to pursue in Europe while simultaneously withdrawing the US military backstop and urging European rearmament. The American far-right are a minor force in charge of a big and unwieldy coalition, and won’t succeed in permanently reshaping Europe in their own image, but will for all practical purposes invite an actual European civilisational backlash.

Likewise, the Europeans also need to understand that if the EU is, as its champions claim, the ‘greatest peace process’, then it could survive and consolidate after any process of American retrenchment. However, if it is merely a product of American hegemonic peace, then it won’t survive an American retrenchment. Eurocrats won’t succeed in regulating the world in their own image, with no means of enforcing their vision. Empires require martial force and narrative control. Without them, everything else is impotent noise.