Trump says Europe risks being wiped away unless societies change

Ben Sills, Bloomberg News on Dec 5, 2025

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The Trump administration said that European civilization is at risk of “erasure” as a result of decades of economic decline, political censorship and immigration.

In a 29-page National Security Strategy published Friday and signed by President Donald Trump, the administration said that Europe’s cultural and political failures pose a bigger threat to the continent’s way of life than its poor economic performance.

“This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” the report said. “Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

Almost a year after Trump returned to office, the ideological divisions between the U.S. and its traditional allies in Europe have become stark. The White House has lashed out over European Union regulation of U.S. tech companies, offered public support to far-right parties across the continent and threatened to cut off support for Ukraine unless Kyiv makes sweeping concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. has also been encouraging some European nations to hold up an E.U. plan to release some €90 billion (105 billion) of new funding that Ukraine needs to maintain its fight against the Russian invasion, according to diplomats who spoke to Bloomberg.

The report blames the E.U. for many of Europe’s problems, saying the bloc has undermined political freedoms and failed to clamp down on immigration that the U.S. said is fueling social tensions. The report also attacks what it calls censorship and restrictions on opposition political movements.

The U.S.’s main goals in Europe will be to secure a quick end to the war in Ukraine, to cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” to open up the continent’s markets for U.S. companies and to prevent the further expansion of NATO, the report says.

“Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States,” the report said. “Not only can we not afford to write Europe off — doing so would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve.”