Olga Lautman

12/07/2025

The NSS does not merely “shift priorities.” It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a “new” transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.

What stands out and what the American press will once again miss is how familiar this playbook is, because the NSS mirrors the exact structure of the Kremlin’s longstanding ambition to dismantle the EU from within, serving as a public endorsement of the political parties Russia has spent years financing, amplifying, and weaponizing, and just as we saw this week with Kushner and Witkoff’s disgraceful pilgrimage to Moscow.

The language is pure Kremlin propaganda. Europe, the NSS claims, is facing “civilizational erasure,” and the culprit, no surprise, is the ‘European Union’ — now recast as a threat to “political liberty,” a narrative lifted word for word from the information operations Moscow deployed for Brexit, Le Pen, the AfD, and every other attempt to subvert elections across Europe over the past decade.

Then comes the real disgust — an explicit call for the United States to intervene inside EU member states by “cultivating resistance,” meaning the U.S., just like Russia, is now committing itself to destabilizing Europe from within, using American resources to elevate nationalist factions aligned with Trumpism and, conveniently, aligned with Russia — the exact same operation Russia spent a decade running through oligarchs, cutouts, laundering networks, and covert financing. No need for covert operations because now it will be carried out openly with American tax dollars.

The NSS’s treatment of Ukraine is even more appalling, starting with mentioning “The Ukraine War” as if Ukraine decided to invade itself and is committing genocide and daily terrorist attacks across the country and trying to erase its people, goals that Russia itself has openly stated on many occasions. The section reads as if someone took the infamous 28-point Kremlin surrender plan, demanding no NATO expansion, no U.S. defense priority, no commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty, and a declaration that Europe can “handle its own security,” and injected it directly into official U.S. policy. It is a message crafted to isolate Kyiv at the precise moment Russia continues escalating mass strikes and terror attacks on homes and other civilian infrastructure, and the entire section is designed to steer Ukraine toward capitulation.

And here is the part that should be another wake-up call for Europe: by pledging to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and celebrating the “growing influence of patriotic European parties,” the NSS signals that the U.S. security apparatus may now be repurposed not primarily to counter Russian interference but to reshape political landscapes inside allied democracies. It effectively hints at using American power, diplomatic, financial, informational, and, by implication, intelligence tools, to strengthen nationalist parties and undermine centrist governments that stand in Russia’s way. These are the same tactics Russia has deployed across Europe, the U.S., Canada, and around the globe for over a decade, except now they are poised to be supercharged by the full coercive capacity of the United States government.