There was a widespread European reaction of offended sensibilities last week to the customary statement of a relatively new US administration of its strategic objectives. Unlike the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Biden regimes, the Trump administration did not proclaim an ambition remotely resembling “the permanent American domination of the entire world,” which is effectively what Trump accused those presidents of citing as their national aspirations. The Trump conception of American strategy further commended itself for avoiding what it called “laundry lists of wishes or desired end-states and vague platitudes about what we should want”.
The formulation of the Trump administration’s national goals does not make them chronic underachievers in what they do seek: “To be the strongest, richest, most powerful, and successful” country in the world. This might be considered indicative of a superior attitude but it does more or less accurately describe the status the United States has enjoyed for more than 80 years. At least in being rich, powerful and successful, there is nothing in such an ambition that is implicitly disrespectful of any other country.
What seemed particularly to upset Europeans is the Trump strategic statement of the authentic concerns expressed by the US administration that Europe is falling by the wayside both in terms of its competitive economic and geopolitical strength and in its status as a bastion of human liberty and the democratic process. The authors express genuine concern and not snide self-importance in the fact that Europe has descended since 1990 from 25 per cent of the world’s gross economic product, and near-equality to the US, to only 14 per cent now, unlike the United States itself which has moved up slightly to approximately 26.2 percent in the same time.
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