“It is a shot across the bow of the EU, and even NATO,” he purred, seemingly astonished that the 33-page document ever saw the light of day in its published form without being muted by the more fainthearted Trump aides. Famously, Bannon had once claimed he wanted “to drive a stake through the Brussels vampire.” And now, he and other MAGA influencers get to sharpen their stake with the encouragement of U.S. government policy.
Above all, it’s what Bannon describes as the commitment to “back resistance movements to the globalists” that thrills him most. “It was pleasantly shocking that it was so explicit,” he said of the document’s prioritization of support for so-called “patriotic European parties,” with the aim of halting the continent’s supposed slide into irreversible decline due to mass migration, falling birth rates and the dilution of national cultural identities.
But while Bannon extols Trump’s foreign-policy priorities, former U.S. diplomats fret the administration may be signaling an intention to go beyond expressing its rhetorical support for MAGA’s ideological allies and browbeating their opponents. Could Washington be tempted to launch more clandestine activities? And if the continent’s current trajectory does, indeed, represent a threat to U.S. national security interests by weakening transatlantic allies — as the document claims — would that justify straying into the unsettling territory of covert action?
In short, could we see a reprise of Cold War tactics of political subversion? A time that saw the CIA competing with the KGB, meddling in elections in Italy and Greece, secretly funding academic journals, magazines and think tanks across Western Europe, and disseminating black propaganda to shape public opinion and counter Soviet propaganda.
“[The NSS] could just be seen as a guiding document for people who are trying, in an overt way, on behalf of the Trump administration, to exert influence over the direction of European politics,” said Jeff Rathke, head of the American-German Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
But the former U.S. diplomat worries it could also entail more: “It remains unclear the degree to which other parts of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishment might also see it as a nudge to do things that go beyond simple overt expressions of endorsement and support,” he said. “That, I think, is an interesting dimension that hasn’t really been explored in the media reporting so far.”