What the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy Really Means for Europe and the World

Why the new U.S. strategy treats Europe as a problem, not a partner.

There are moments in geopolitics when the real earthquake doesn’t come from a war, a coup, or a coup attempt.

It arrives as a PDF.

While Mark Rutte tells Europeans to prepare for a “big war” (we all know with whom), the White House has quietly released the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), and we should take it seriously.

Because this document is nothing less than the official obituary of the unipolar moment and a blueprint for a much colder, more transactional American foreign policy.

It is also a direct slap in the face of the EU establishment, and a lifeline – maybe – to a different kind of relationship with Russia.

Let’s unpack what is really inside.

Washington Admits: The Empire Overreached

The NSS opens with a confession that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.

After the Cold War, the document says, U.S. foreign-policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in America’s best interest.

They now call this strategy a fundamental miscalculation.

According to the text, the American ruling class:

• Loaded the country with endless global security burdens that the public didn’t understand or support.

• Tried to finance a massive welfare–bureaucratic state and a global empire at the same time.

• Placed “hugely misguided and destructive bets” on globalism and “free trade” that hollowed out the U.S. industrial base and middle class.

• Allowed allies to offload the cost of their defense onto American taxpayers, allegedly dragging Washington into conflicts that had little to do with U.S. interests.

And then comes the key point:
In chasing an impossible goal – global domination – these elites undermined the very foundations of American power: its productive economy, its social cohesion, even its national character. The system is now admitting that its own post-Cold War project has come to an end.

So the question becomes: what replaces it?

From Liberal Hegemony to Kissingerian Realism

If the 1990s were about the “end of history” and spreading democracy, the 2025 NSS is about something very different: survival of the American state in a world it no longer can unilaterally control.

The change is visible in the vocabulary.

The old language of “defending democracy” and “ending tyranny” is pushed to the background. Instead, the strategy emphasizes “pragmatic,” “realistic,” and “consequences.”

The U.S., it says, will not conduct foreign policy as an ideological crusade, but will defend its interests

This is pure Kissinger, whose entire intellectual project was built on:

• balance of power,

• spheres of influence,

• and cold calculations of national interest.

He rejected the Wilsonian fantasy that the U.S. could reorganize the planet according to universal principles. He believed great powers should make unpleasant, cynical, but stable deals.

Trump already tried to inject this realism into his 2017 National Security Strategy. But that document was schizophrenic – half written by the “America First” camp, half by the usual neocon-liberal interventionists entrenched in the bureaucracy.

The difference in 2025 is that the liberal-missionary half has been stripped away.
What remains is the realist skeleton.

Nowhere is this more obvious and more brutal than in the section on Europe.

“Civilizational Erasure”: How Washington Now Sees Europe

There is a section of the NSS titled “Promoting European Greatness.”
It sounds flattering. It isn’t.

First, the document notes that continental Europe’s share of global GDP has dropped from about 25% in 1990 to around 14% today. It blames this on an overgrown web of national and EU regulations that suffocate creativity and enterprise.

But then it delivers a much harsher verdict.

This economic decline, the text says, is “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”

What is erasing Europe, according to Washington?

• Supranational bodies like the EU that undermine political liberty and national sovereignty.

• Migration policies that transform the demographic and cultural landscape and generate social strife.

• Censorship of free speech and the suppression of political opposition.

• Cratering birthrates.

• And the loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Then comes a line that should set off alarm bells in Brussels and Berlin:

If current trends continue, the document warns, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.

In other words, the United States is no longer sure that key European states will even have economies and militaries strong enough to be reliable allies by the 2040s.

For three decades, Europe was presented as America’s co-pilot in the liberal world order – “shared values,” “shared destiny,” all of that rhetoric. Now the U.S. establishment is writing Europe up as a civilization in decline.

And that has direct consequences for policy.

Ending NATO’s Endless Expansion

The NSS lays out several priorities for U.S. policy in Europe. Two of them are important.

1. Strategic Stability With Russia

The document says the broad U.S. policy for Europe should aim at:

“Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia.”

This is code for:
arms control, clear red lines, crisis management: the kind of realist détente that Kissinger defended during the Cold War.

For hawks in Kiev, Warsaw, and the Baltic states, this is a nightmare. For Moscow, it is at least the basis for a conversation.

2. Killing the Theology of NATO Expansion

Then comes the sentence that – in my view – is the geopolitical bombshell of the entire document:

U.S. policy should prioritize “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

For thirty years, NATO expansion was treated as sacred doctrine.
The “open door” policy said any European democracy “able and willing” to contribute to security could eventually join. Questioning this was heresy in Washington, London, or Brussels.

The new strategy quietly walks away from that theology.

It doesn’t say NATO will never expand again, but it says clearly: stop treating expansion as the default, endless project.

In practical terms, this means:

• No automatic assumption of NATO membership for Ukraine or Georgia.

• A shift from “expand to spread stability” to “consolidate to restore stability.”

• De facto acknowledgment that Russia’s security concerns about a permanently expanding Western military bloc on its borders cannot be ignored forever.

For the British establishment – whose entire post-Brexit identity is built on “Global Britain” projecting power through NATO and keeping the U.S. locked into Europe – this is a direct blow.

For Moscow, it looks suspiciously like vindication of everything they’ve been saying since the 1990s.

Washington vs. Brussels: Cultivating Internal Resistance

The most provocative part may be this one line: the U.S. should work on

“cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

This is extraordinary language for an official strategy document.

It means Washington is not just criticizing Brussels from the outside; it is openly talking about supporting political forces inside EU member states that challenge the current direction on migration, censorship, sovereignty, and social policy.

In other words, Washington is signaling that, in this new realist era, its natural partners in Europe are not necessarily the Eurocrats in Brussels, but:

• national-conservative governments,

• sovereigntist movements,

• parties that want to restore control over borders and laws.

If you are Ursula von der Leyen, this is your worst nightmare: the American empire – which you always assumed would protect the EU project – is now considering weaponizing internal dissent against you.

This is where realism becomes very cynical.

How Russia and China Will Read This

From Moscow’s point of view, the new NSS sends a mixed but overall more manageable message.

On the negative side, the United States is not giving up its role as a military superpower or its support for Ukraine. Deterrence remains.

On the positive side:

• Russia is no longer framed as a metaphysical “evil.” It is a rival great power.

• There is an explicit desire for strategic stability rather than permanent confrontation.

• Washington itself is questioning the theology of infinite NATO expansion.

This doesn’t solve the war in Ukraine, but it opens the door for bargaining: over borders, neutrality, arms control, and the future of European energy architecture.

For China, the signal is different. The Indo-Pacific remains the main theater. Economic decoupling, tech controls, and the race for AI, chips, and critical minerals all continue. Perhaps even more intensely.

But if the U.S. is preparing for a more stable front with Russia and writing Europe off as a declining junior partner, that frees up resources and attention for the China front and for consolidating control over the Western Hemisphere: a kind of 21st-century Monroe Doctrine.

We are moving from one big global crusade to several regional chessboards, each governed by raw power politics.

What It Means for the Rest of Us

For countries in West Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond, this shift cuts both ways.

On the one hand, fewer ideological crusades could mean fewer Iraq-style regime-change wars marketed as humanitarian interventions or democracy promotions. The NSS is explicit that the U.S. will not try to remake societies in its own image.

On the other hand, realism means you are dealing with a naked empire:

• trade as a weapon,

• sanctions as routine,

• access to the dollar system and U.S. technology as bargaining chips.

You won’t be bombed because you failed some “democracy” checklist.
You’ll be pressured or even bombed because you sit on the wrong pipeline, the wrong minerals, or you’re flirting with the wrong partners.

No more sermons.
Just offers you can’t refuse, or punishments if you try.

Conclusion: The End of One Illusion, the Beginning of Another

The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy is historic because it finally admits what many have been saying for years:

• The unipolar project failed.

• Globalism weakened the American state instead of making it invincible.

• Europe is not a triumphant model, but a continent in deep civilizational trouble.

In its place, Washington is building a leaner, harsher architecture:

• a fortress America with re-industrialization and harder borders;

• managed blocs and spheres of influence;

• deals with rivals like Russia when necessary;

• and a skeptical, increasingly hostile approach to supranational projects like the EU.

While the illusion of a benevolent, liberal empire is dead, we should not romanticize what comes next, because realism is not peace. It is simply conflict stripped of its moral costume.

For some regions, that may create space to maneuver, to play powers off against each other, to build truly independent policies. For others, it will mean being squeezed even harder, but with fewer pretty speeches to disguise the pressure.

Europe, meanwhile, must decide: Does it continue down the road that its own American patron now describes as “civilizational erasure”? Or does it rediscover the courage to act as a genuine power, not just a bureaucratic empire of regulations and hashtags?

One thing is clear: after this NSS, the old transatlantic story cannot be told with a straight face anymore.

The empire has spoken honestly – for once– and we should listen very carefully.

—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.