Trump’s grand plan to reshape the world order leaves Europe with a difficult choice to make

For 80 years, what bound the United States to Europe was a shared commitment to defence and a common set of values: a commitment to defend democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

That era was inaugurated in March 1947 in an 18-minute speech by President Harry Truman, in which he pledged US support to defend Europe against further expansion by the Soviet Union.

America led the creation of Nato, the World Bank, the IMF and the United Nations. And it bound itself into what became known as the “rules-based international order”, in which nation states committed to a series of mutual obligations and shared burdens, designed to defend the democratic world against hostile authoritarian powers.

Now, the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), published in December, signals that, for the White House, that shared endeavour has ended; that much of what the world has taken for granted about America’s role is over.

The review refers to the “so-called ‘rules-based international order'”, putting the latter phrase in inverted commas: a kind of delegitimisation by punctuation mark.

JD Vance said that the real threat to Europe did not come from Russia but from within

Vice-President JD Vance warned America’s European allies that this was coming in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025.

He told them bluntly that the real threat to Europe did not come from Russia but from within – from those censoring free speech, suppressing political opposition and therefore undermining European democracy. And he was damning about the “leftist liberal network”.

The French newspaper Le Monde said the speech was a declaration of “ideological war” against Europe.

Last month’s NSS codifies Vance’s remarks, and, in black and white, elevates them to the status of doctrine.

“Certainly America is no longer the country that promoted the global values that have been in place since the end of the Second World War,” says Karin von Hippel, who previously held senior positions in the US State Department and is a former Director of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), a Whitehall think tank.

“It is shifting to a very different place.”

So, if the world is indeed moving away from that order, what is it moving towards? And what does it mean for the rest of the world and in particular for Europe?

“International institutions, notably the United Nations, have been marked by dramatically anti-American sentiment, and have not served our or any other particular purpose,” says Victoria Coates, a vice-president at The Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank in Washington.

In the eyes of Coates – who was previously the Deputy National Security Adviser to US President Donald Trump – change to the international order is inevitable in a changing world.

“The other issue we face here is that when that so-called rules-based international order was established after the Second World War, 80 short years ago, China wasn’t a major concern.

“We just have a different world today.”

This rules-based international order, built in the years after World War Two, was created by a generation that had come of age during an era of Great Power geopolitics, and had seen that system descend, twice, into catastrophic global conflict.

That international order, flawed and incomplete though it undoubtedly was, was the legacy of that experience.

But the NSS directly argues that American strategy went astray in the years since – and it blames what it calls “American foreign policy elites”.

“They lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty,” it says.

It suggests that in future, the US will seek to roll back the influence of supranational bodies.

The National Security Strategy says: ‘We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations’

“The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state… We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations…”

Elsewhere in the document, reflecting on the “balance of power”, it states: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.”

The Kremlin responded to the review with praise, saying much of it aligned with Moscow’s own thinking.

“I think Trump, Xi, Putin and their more authoritarian acolytes are seeking to return us to an era of Great Power politics,” says Field Marshal Lord Richards, who, as General Sir David Richards, was the head of the UK’s armed forces from 2010 till 2013.

Yet Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, believes the new Security Strategy is not as radical a break with the past as it may appear.

The Kremlin said much of the review aligned with Moscow’s own thinking

“We need to be careful about the rules-based international order, which is a term that came into general use in the last decade or so,” he argues.

“Look back and you find plenty of violations of the rules, Vietnam for example. So there’s a sort of rosy glow about the past at times and everyone should be careful about nostalgia for what was a complex past.”

Washington’s military operation in the Venezuelan capital Caracas that led to the capture of the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, is an early example of this more muscular assertion of sovereign unilateralism.

Some international law experts have questioned the legality of the Trump administration’s actions, and argued the US may have violated international statutes governing the use of force.

The US maintains its actions were legally justified.

“Under American law it certainly was [legal]” Robert Wilkie, who served as an Undersecretary of Defense in the first Trump administration, has previously told the BBC.

“Maduro – most of our European partners have not recognised his regime so he is an illegitimate figure. Because of that he is stripped of the normal protections that heads of state would have […]particularly when were are looking at constitutional provisions that exist in the United States, that would supersede anything the UN says.”

The NSS claims, for the United States, the right to be the pre-eminent power in the Western Hemisphere, and to bend its Latin American and Caribbean neighbours into alignment with Washington’s interests.

This is a muscular reassertion of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and its promise of US supremacy in the Western hemisphere.

Colombia, Panama and Cuba are all also in the President’s sights.

“This starts primarily with the Panama Canal,” says Victoria Coates. “The degree to which control of the canal is necessary to the United States cannot be overstated.”

China is now Latin America’s biggest trading partner and a major infrastructure investor there. The NSS aims to roll back Chinese influence in Washington’s backyard.

When the canal was handed over to Panama in 1999, says Coates, “we were in the assumption that China was a reasonable actor… That turned out not to be true…

“So making sure that the United States retains a prime position over the canal is critical, and I think Panama is for the first time getting that message from the United States.”

– BBC

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