The intellectual blueprint behind Trump's war on the EU

When Trump ordered 5,000 U.S. troops withdrawn from Germany after Chancellor Merz criticized the U.S. war with Iran, many European officials reached for the word 'erratic.' They are looking at the wrong thing. According to analysis published by the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics via illiberalism.org, there is a coherent ideological engine running beneath the chaos — and understanding it changes how Europe should respond.

The past year has seen the Trump administration impose heavy tariffs on the EU, campaign openly for Eurosceptic politicians across the continent, and assert U.S. sovereignty over Greenland. Taken together, according to illiberalism.org, these moves are not impulsive — they are the policy expression of a movement called national conservatism, or 'natcon,' that has been quietly building its geopolitical vision for nearly a decade.

The movement's architecture matters. Three thinkers have done the most to shape its foreign policy outlook: Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American intellectual and former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu; Michael Lind, a former Heritage Foundation analyst; and Michael Anton, who served in the Bush-era National Security Council and, as of 2025, as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. Anton is widely credited, according to illiberalism.org, with crafting the Trump administration's National Security Strategy.

What do these three actually believe about Europe? At its core, the natcon worldview holds that the EU is not a democratic achievement but a bureaucratic cage built by 'managerial officials' — corporate executives, civil servants, and nonprofit professionals — to insulate themselves from democratic accountability. Lind's 2020 book, 'The New Class War,' provides the economic critique: transnational corporations, enabled by neoliberal policy, offshored production, cycled profits through tax havens, and used trade deals to quietly gut labor protections. The EU, in this reading, is the institutional home of that class.

Hazony's 2018 book, 'The Virtue of Nationalism,' adds the civilizational layer. Politicians including JD Vance, Viktor Orbán, and Giorgia Meloni have cited it as an influence, according to illiberalism.org. The argument: only nations bound by shared language, culture, and religion can be stable and self-governing. Supranational bodies like the EU are, by definition, a form of imperial overreach that erodes the national communities that give life meaning.

Anton supplies the most pointed edge. His 2016 essay 'The Flight 93 Election' framed a Trump vote as an act of civilizational self-defense. His foreign policy thinking, as reflected in the National Security Strategy, goes further: the document, according to iai.it, identifies the defense of 'Western identity and civilisation' as a core U.S. strategic interest — and frames undermining European integration as part of that mission.

The NSS's Europe chapter, as analyzed by iai.it, pledges U.S. support for European 'patriots' — meaning nationalist movements that share MAGA's nativist agenda. It even suggests, according to iai.it, that some European countries may not be considered European 'in a few decades,' a direct nod to the 'Great Replacement' theory that Anton and others have invoked to argue that mass immigration amounts to civilizational suicide for white, Christian Europe.

Vice President JD Vance is the crucial transmission belt between this intellectual world and actual governance. Where Trump's hostility toward Europe is, as iai.it puts it, 'visceral and instinctive,' Vance's is 'deliberate and coherent.' Vance frames the EU not merely as a trade rival but as a community that has 'betrayed its historical, cultural and religious roots' by pooling sovereignty in a system built on inclusion and diversity. His political rise was financed in part by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and Palantir founder, who according to iai.it advocates an oligarchic vision of society centered on major tech monopolies — and who sees EU digital regulation as an existential threat to that vision.

That last point helps explain an otherwise puzzling alignment. Major U.S. tech companies, including those run by Elon Musk, have become vocal Trump supporters partly for ideological reasons, according to iai.it. The EU's aggressive enforcement of data privacy rules, antitrust law, and content moderation standards represents a direct constraint on their business models. The natcon critique of the EU as a technocratic overreach and the tech sector's fury at EU regulation converge on the same target.

The ECFR, in a separate policy brief, frames the overall pattern with a useful formula: Trump is running his domestic agenda abroad. At home, the MAGA project seeks to eliminate the 'deep state,' transform liberal America into nationalist America, and subjugate opponents. Abroad, according to ecfr.eu, the methods mirror that exactly — eliminate alliances and international commitments, transform Western liberal democratic allies into nationalist vassals, and subjugate opponents into exploitative transactions.

ECFR notes that Trump's April 2025 mass tariff announcement alone destroyed as much as $10 trillion in global stock value in under a week — roughly half the EU's annual GDP — before being partially paused. The speed and scale of the disruption, the brief argues, means European leaders cannot simply run out the clock as they did during Trump's first term. The ideological project is more developed, its personnel more embedded, and its ambitions more explicit.

For readers trying to make sense of the daily headlines — troop withdrawals, tariff threats, U.S. officials appearing at rallies for European parties — the natcon framework is the missing key. These are not diplomatic accidents. They are, according to multiple analysts across illiberalism.org, iai.it, and ecfr.eu, the deliberate outputs of a worldview that has been two decades in the making and is now, for the first time, in full control of U.S. foreign policy.

Why it matters — The natcon ideological framework — not Trump's personal temperament — is now the operating system of U.S. foreign policy toward Europe, meaning the disruption will persist regardless of Trump's daily mood swings and will require a structural European response.

Reported by illiberalism.org, ecfr.eu, wsj.com, iai.it, time.com