Commentary: Donald Trump wants a resurgence in European nationalism

Richard C. Longworth, Chicago Tribune on Dec 19, 2025

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To fix what he sees wrong in Europe, President Donald Trump has prescribed the continent’s ancient and most lethal poison — nationalism.

Nationalism is a patriotism, a love of one’s own country, that has curdled into a hatred both of other countries and of minority groups at home. In the 20 th century, nationalism was the driving force behind the two world wars that destroyed Europe. For 80 years since then, Europeans have worked, with considerable success, to leach this poison. Now Trump wants to return it to its prewar domination of European politics.

All this is in the Trump administration’s new national security strategy, a broad overview of America’s place in the world, its friends and enemies, its priorities and how to promote them. It sweeps across the planet, arguing for U.S. dominance in the Western hemisphere, promoting Vladimir Putin’s Russia not as an adversary but as a potential partner and, in general, truncating American foreign policy from its traditional goal of spreading and protecting democracy to a series of business deals. The main theme is “America First” — a nationalistic slogan if there ever was one.

Europe takes up only three of the document’s 33 pages, but they make frightening reading. Basically, Trump sees Europe committing “civilizational erasure.” By this, he means a “loss of national identities and self-confidence,” brought about mostly by immigration, which is transforming the continent. In the end, some “NATO members will become majority non-European.”

This is, obviously, pure racism, a frequent handmaiden of nationalism. It is the theory of the great replacement, a trope of American white supremacists in which white people become a minority in the United States, but was transported without shame to Europe.

This racist backlash is already a force in Europe, where parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and France’s National Rally threaten to become majority parties. It should be American policy to repel these neofascist germs: After all, when Europe went to war twice in the last century, the U.S. had to intervene, at huge cost in lives and treasure, to end the wars and restore decency.

But no. As the strategy paper says, the U.S. stands for “unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

In other words, what’s good for these neo-Nazi parties in Europe is good for the United States.

The great foe of these parties is the European Union itself, which Trump says undermines “political liberty and sovereignty” and promotes the Europeans’ open immigration policies. In fact, the EU is the most successful economic and political experiment of the past century, a union of 27 countries that stopped fighting each other and turned themselves into a continent of peace and real, if uneven, prosperity.

The purpose of the EU is to bury nationalism by submerging these countries into a larger union. It’s often misunderstood as just an economic union, a glorified trade bloc. In fact, its essence is historic, an attempt by its founders to overcome the continent’s tragic history, by uniting the economies of the member nations so they can never wage war on each other. Its unofficial motto has been “never again” — never again an Adolf Hitler, never again a Holocaust. From the start, the U.S. has backed this process and project, kick-starting it with the Marshall Plan and supporting it through its growing pains, simply because that goal — never again — was in our national interest, too.

Trump clearly understands none of this or, if he does, doesn’t care. What he wants is to run this country in the authoritarian model of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, itself an awkward member of the EU. To this end, the poison of nationalism is his tool.

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Richard C. Longworth is the former chief European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

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