The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released last December, was chock-full of terms and phrases which made waves across the world. Europe, and European media, were particularly incensed with the section dedicated to America’s relationship with the continent. The administration pledged to work with “patriotic” parties and to encourage European countries to shake off the shackles placed on it by Brussels.
But one phrase has received the most attention. While lamenting Europe’s economic collapse, the administration argued that something even worse has happened: The continent is facing a “civilisational erasure”. Those who have been supportive of Brussels over the past few years reacted with predictable umbrage at the suggestion. The Guardian suggested that it was just a new way to describe the “great replacement”, and another analyst said the term seems “straight out of science fiction” (whatever that means). Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said the Trump administration’s use of the term meant that Washington was “no longer aligned with Europe on values European [sic] consider essential.”
Put aside the fact that Europeans are not necessarily in agreement with Brussels “on values [they] consider essential”; after all, polling in almost any European Union member state will reveal that the populist Right is either in first, second, or already running the show. At the core of the issue is European denial that there is any sort of civilisational erasure happening.
Much of this is due to a compliant (and oftentimes, state-run) European media ecosystem which does not shine a light on the issues about which the Trump administration is talking. To that end, the Trump administration has conducted a combination of open and quieter diplomacy, as it reaches out to like-minded Europeans, in an effort to both build stronger bonds and to help Europeans see that the wool has been pulled over their eyes.
A major player in this effort has been Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers. Rogers frequently travels throughout Europe, and in doing so uses the influence of her increasingly popular X account to highlight what the administration is referring to when it talks about “civilisational erasure.”
Her posts and travels have taken her around the continent. A particular point of critique has been the United Kingdom, whose government has been blocking a bill on first cousin marriage due to opposition from Labour’s newest constituency, central Asian migrants. And in a video which received millions of views, Rogers used her diplomatic status (which allows for a degree of immunity) to highlight a series of outrageous actions European governments took in which they sided with the rights of politicians and migrants over common people, from a German woman who received more jailtime for calling a rapist a pig than did the rapist, to a British man jailed for burning a Koran and saying Islam is gay, to a woman who called a man who assaulted her a “faggot” in a text message to an entirely different person.
But still, Europeans seem to not understand how this is civilisational erasure. Is this not just keeping the peace? Take the example of the Koran burning. The man, Hamit Coskun, said he came to the UK to warn against Islamism (a warning the UAE recently echoed when they cut scholarships for students over concerns that they would become radicalized in the UK). He did just that in burning a Koran. But he was stopped by an extremist Muslim. Ultimately, the Muslim was let off with a suspended sentence – which meant no jail time – while Coskun was fined. Initially, the news was good: a judge overturned the ruling, claiming he had a right to offend. But months later, the British government appealed that decision, insisting that Coskun had committed a crime. The case is still ongoing.
The British government truly believes it is keeping the peace between its (very newly) diversified populace. It’s not alone: The French government does too, as does Germany, which has had successive leaders who claimed Islam is part of the country (a historical absurdism).
Why have they come to so firmly believe this?
Ironically, because of America. In a leaked cable to Washington from 2005, an American State Department official blasted French authorities over their failure to stop Islamic rioting. But his critique was not that they did not work hard enough to stop the rioting: He attacked France’s “unitary (as opposed to multilateral) integration model”, as well as “the failure of white and Christian France to view their darker, Muslim compatriots as real citizens”. Although elsewhere in the document he admits that most of the rioting was done by Muslims, he repeatedly took pains to declare that the rioting was “not viewed as specifically Muslim”. The obvious solution – denaturalise and deport those who refuse to fit into France’s unitary integration model – is never considered anywhere in the document. Instead, France is condemned for seeking to keep itself France, and is instead expected to become multilateral.
This was the policy of the United States for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, and it was an unfortunate one: A globalisation policy designed to turn the world into one gigantic liberal democracy. Codified in the Bush Doctrine, the result was trillions spent on wars, marketing campaigns, and social pressure campaigns throughout the world – including in Europe – to convince Westerners to abandon “unitary” models in favour of diversifying their populations – in other worlds, in favour of replacing their civilisations with a global soup.
It worked. In 2025, twenty years after that cable was written to Washington, France reacted with umbrage over the Trump administration’s demand that they remove DEI initiatives from their contracts. Such a demand was “tantamount to calling on companies ‘to renounce the inclusion policies’ enshrined in French or European law”. The tragedy of this is that the various European governments do not even realise that they came to this conclusion due to American coercion. The Trump administration knows this, and is desperately trying to reverse the horrendous mistakes made by their governments: It is why DOGE sought to cut millions of dollars from “foreign aid” programmes which funded LGBT groups in Serbia, and it’s why Undersecretary Rogers is constantly seeking to help everyday Europeans see through the lies their governments are telling them.
But eventually, Europeans are going to need to wake up themselves, too. Before their civilisation is well and truly erased for good.
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