Dear Americans, Your Country Is My Enemy

No, Jeff, you are not my enemy. Neither are you, Kim. Even less so, you, Joe. But your country, the US, is. In the same way that neither Misha, nor Lena, nor Sasha are my enemies, but Russia is. Wait a moment—you might be thinking—it is not the US or Russia, but Trump or MAGA or Putin. Yeah, you might well be right, but Trump and Putin, although they have an undeniable amount of individual (evil) genius, are products of your societies. Now, I am not claiming any form of superiority for European societies. Indeed, European societies give power to a fair amount of shits, and it is probably only a lack of opportunity why Luxembourg's politicians' criminal activities seem to have been limited to fraud and forgery. At least this is true of the last 80 years or so, because in the 17th century, François-Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Luxembourg, apparently ordered things like burning alive the whole population of an undefended city.

You might be thinking that it is a bit quaint, or maybe hypocritical, that I went for Luxembourg instead of the Nazis or the Belgian Congo. I picked Luxembourg because it is probably hard to think of a more peacefully boring society, and because I just wanted to make the point that I believe that you put any society in the right (or wrong) circumstances, and monsters appear. And right now, your country, your society—as represented by the government it has chosen as its representative—has become my enemy.

Why? Why do I say this now? Well, Trump has been making all sorts of declarations for a long time. Vance came to Munich and gave an appalling speech. Greenland and Canada. There have been the tariffs. Bullying. Equivocating about allies or not. You name it. But something really changed last week when the US published its—yours—National Security Strategy.

First, what is in there? It is not very long, about 30 pages, and I wasted some amount of time reading it. Now, I will not try to summarize it, but here is how often a few words appear in the text:

I find this table actually kind of amazing. If you look at the right column, you will evidently see that "climate" is not anything the US considers a risk to its security, which is surely not unexpected, but still curious to the point of lunacy. But returning to the point of this rant, go and admire the role and importance of Europe in the US's National Security Strategy. It gets mentioned twice as many times as the vaunted Western Hemisphere, more often than China, Taiwan, Iran, Israel, and Russia combined. And why and how? Here are a few quotes:

We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.

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.

We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries. [This is the only time climate gets mentioned.]

This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and 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.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.

There is a whole section on Promoting European Greatness. Here are some of the explicit goals:

Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize:

• Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia;
• Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations;
• Building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges;
• Encouraging Europe to take action to combat mercantilist overcapacity, technological theft, cyber espionage, and other hostile economic practices.

Now, anybody who has been paying attention has heard all of that before: the racism, the interference in the internal political process, supporting "patriotic" parties, the nonsense, the divide and conquer, and so on. So, what is new?

The point is that the National Security Strategy is not a tweet, a press declaration, or even a formal speech by the vice president. It is an official document that the US government must produce by law, whose goal is to clarify the official strategic vision of the US to members of Congress, diplomats, different decision makers, as well as foreign governments. This document informs American diplomats what policies they must strive to implement. The same is true for the military, trade representatives, and such, whatever they think about it. Just as not all Russian diplomats probably thought that invading Ukraine was wise, but they push Putin's agenda and work to further it. A cultural attaché in a consulate in Europe was, until now, not bound to collaborate with the local "patriotic" party. Now they are. And the same goes for everybody else, including mid-ranking US military personnel working at NATO, for example.

Now, all of this official US policy is an attack against everything I want. Amazingly, the US has become my enemy.

P.S.: Misha, Grisha, Lena, Jeff, Kim, Joe, this is not personal. I don't think that you are my enemy. My opinion about you has not changed. I know that you hate this as much as I do. When I see you, I will buy you a beer.