“The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.” –National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) articulates a fundamental shift away from the post–Cold War bipartisan consensus that assumed increasing economic interdependence and the diffusion of political authority beyond nation-states—in a word, globalization—would generate peace and prosperity. The Trump strategy rejects those premises. Instead, it grounds US national security in four core commitments: (1) protecting the American homeland; (2) promoting American prosperity; (3) projecting peace through strength; (4) advancing US influence in a world of sovereign nations.
Where previous administrations—Democrat and Republican—have treated globalization and transnational governance as inevitable, the Trump NSS exposes this rhetoric of “inevitability” as a choice that carries costs. It argues that globalist frameworks have empowered non-accountable actors (corporations, ideological networks, and international institutions) at the expense of citizens, workers, and national sovereignty. Rather than viewing geopolitical competition as outdated, the NSS asserts that great-power rivalry has returned, and that the United States must defend its cultural and economic vitality against those powers (China, Russia) and diffuse transnational systems that undermine democratic self-determination.
Readers need to be able to deconstruct the rhetoric of inevitability coming from corporate state propagandists. Framing globalization and transnational governance as “inevitable” performs a specific kind of ideological work: it recasts contested political projects as objective historical destiny. By transforming deliberate strategies into impersonal processes, such rhetoric depoliticizes choices that would otherwise demand public justification, while recoding dissent as resistance to reality rather than disagreement over ambitions and aims. It obscures elite machinations by portraying the people as backwards and naïve. Inevitability language thus functions as a legitimating device, shielding ambitious institutional agendas from democratic contestation by presenting them as the unavoidable tide of history rather than as risks knowingly assumed. It is a profoundly anti-democratic rhetoric.
Embedded within Trump’s broader argument is a pointed assessment of Europe’s situation—an analysis that is predictably receiving widespread criticism in the corporate state media but that represents one of the most philosophically coherent portions of the memo. If readers don’t have time to read the entire memo, they will profit from reading section “C. Promoting European Greatness,” which begins on page 25 of the memorandum. We are early down the path Europe has been on for quite a while. I want to focus on that section next. I conclude this essay with a note about the political character of nationalism.
The NSS portrays Europe as confronting a convergence of pressures: (1) demographic decline combined with unmanaged migration flows; (2) cultural and civilizational uncertainty, where traditional identities are increasingly viewed as illegitimate; (3) transnational governance structures (e.g., EU bureaucracy) that insulate major decisions from the democratic will of individual national electorates; (4) economic stagnation outside of small competitive zones, producing frustration among working classes; (5) political fragmentation, with populist parties rising in response to elite indifference.
The memo describes these factors as contributing to what it terms “civilization erasure”—the weakening of Europe’s inherited civilizational foundations: accountable democratic institutions, cultural continuity, national self-determination, rule of law, and stable borders. The NSS argues that the strength of the West historically comes not from supranational structures, but from sovereign nation-states cooperating freely. Europe’s classical nations—Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland—are the engines of advanced political systems, economic and technological innovation, and humanism and science. When those nations lose sovereignty, Europe loses its vigor—and, I will add, elites and barbarians alike become emboldened. Thus, the report frames the European Union’s push toward deeper integration as strategically risky: it consolidates authority in distant institutions while weakening the democratic legitimacy of national governments. This creates a vacuum in which public discontent grows, fueling social fragmentation.
The NSS explicitly asserts that cultural integrity is a component of national strength. When a society loses its confidence—when its historical narratives are delegitimized or portrayed as inherently oppressive—it becomes less coherent and less capable of defending its interests. Europe, in this framing, is experiencing a loss of faith in its civilizational inheritance, a diminished capacity to regulate migration according to national priorities, a cosmopolitan and elite culture suspicious of national identity itself, and an erosion of social trust necessary for political stability. By calling this “civilization erasure,” the memo is arguing that Europe risks dissolving the very preconditions of democratic sovereignty. As I have long argued, the preservation of Western institutions and the rule of law requires a common culture rooted in Enlightenment principles, values that emerge from European Christian civilization.
The NSS argues that a strong, self-confident Europe is essential for US security. A fragmented or demoralized Europe becomes a weak partner. The document thus encourages reaffirmation of national sovereignty, respect for distinct European cultures and histories, a shift toward secure borders and democratic accountability, and partnerships with governments willing to defend these principles. This section of the memo is a call for renewal, urging Europe to reclaim the civilizational confidence that once made it a central pillar of the West. I could not agree more with the Trump Administration’s assessment here, and those who regularly read my work know that I have made this argument on this platform for years. Indeed, this is the theme of Freedom and Reason: A Path Through Late Capitalism. Nationalism is the path. Otherwise, globalism will replace capitalism with a transnational corporate state order, which will not carry over the Enlightenment freedoms—conscience, expression, and individualism. This is what I have identified as the New Fascism.
Whenever I tell a leftist that I am a nationalist, they assume that I am a right-winger. This is why I frequently remind readers of a crucial point: nationalism has been mislabeled as exclusively right-wing for propaganda purposes; historically, nationalism has been left-wing, including anti-colonial sovereignty movements, socialist nationalism (not nationalist socialism, i.e., fascism, which is a form of corporate statism with globalist ambitions), and working-class movements that fought for sovereignty against empires and oligarchies.
A left-leaning defense of nationalism can be articulated in several key ways. Progressives often champion democratic participation and fair economic systems, typically couching their rhetoric in “worker rights.” But these desires are impossible to secure when decision-making migrates upward into opaque transnational bodies that lack direct democratic accountability. That progressives support administrative-technocratic rule and transnational governance structures betrays their leftwing rhetoric. When multinational/transnational corporations can relocate production globally, open borders to mass migration, bypass environmental and labor rules, and pressure governments through capital mobility, workers lose leverage. When corporate power can command the rules of speech, democracy fades. National sovereignty—including borders, democratic control of economic rules, policymaking, and industrial policy—is essential for protecting working-class interests.
A key insight shared by both populist left and populist right is that globalization has redistributed power upward, not outward. Corporations have benefited from offshoring production and open borders, which have allowed them to take advantage of cheap foreign labor and drive down the wages of workers in the West. Financial institutions have benefited from deregulated capital flows, amassing vast concentrations of wealth in ever fewer hands. Managerial elites have benefited from cosmopolitan mobility. Working people in all nations—American, British, French, German, Italian, Swedish—bear the costs. The NSS’s critique aligns with this understanding: transnationalism has facilitated elite integration while undermining local democratic communities.
So, on the occasion of Trump’s NSS memo, I return to the argument I have been making for years: the traditional left/right divide is no longer the primary axis of politics. The new divide is, on one side, populism-nationalism, emphasizing borders, cultural continuity or integrity, democratic control, and economic fairness for citizens; the other side, progressivism-globalism, which emphasizes borderless labor markets, transnational governance, and the moral obsolescence of nation-states, portends the demise of democracy and human freedom. Understanding the real bifurcation points is how one explains the rise of populist and nationalist movements across Europe and the United States. These movements include both left-wing (in the liberal sense) and right-wing (conservative/traditionalists) variants, but they share a common concern: the disempowerment of ordinary citizens by global systems they did not vote for and cannot influence. The struggle is not between capitalists and the working class but between corporate elites and the masses.
We need to return to and reinvigorate populist nationalism as a bulwark against the New Fascism. A healthy nationalism—civic, democratic, pluralistic—anchors political legitimacy in the people, limits the power of corporate and transnational bureaucracies, fosters solidarity and mutual obligation, protects local cultures and traditions, and ensures borders reflect the interests of citizens, not economic elites. This is the form of nationalism compatible with left-wing commitments to democratic participation, labor, and the general welfare. One may wonder why self-described leftists (socialists, etc.) are not populists, but the fact that they oppose populism tells that they are not really on the left, but instead on the side of corporate state power. How that happened is a topic I have addressed in several essays on this platform. But the fact that it happened is incontrovertible.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy memo should therefore be seen not as a backward-looking or xenophobic document, but as a coherent defense of sovereign democratic nations in an era of transnational dominance. Its analysis of Europe—particularly the argument concerning cultural confidence and the concept of civilization erasure—reflects growing popular concerns across the Western world. The grand strategic debate of the twenty-first century is no longer left versus right. It’s populism versus progressivism, democratic nationalism versus globalist managerialism. Europe and the United States are witnessing parallel movements because ordinary citizens sense that the social contract has been renegotiated without their consent.
A left-leaning, pro-worker, civic nationalism provides a compelling counter-vision: one rooted in the belief that nations remain the only institutions strong enough to defend democratic participation, protect workers, regulate markets, and preserve cultural continuity against the homogenizing forces of global capital. In that sense, the NSS’s argument about Europe is not merely an assessment of foreign policy—it is part of a larger global realignment, one in which cultural integrity, democratic republicanism, and national sovereignty are the fronts in a struggle to save Western civilization.
freedom and reason 