This article was originally published by the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics.
European leaders are in disarray over the Trump administration’s rapidly eroding commitment to the transatlantic alliance. During the past year, the U.S. government has slapped heavy tariffs on the EU, campaigned for Eurosceptic politicians and claimed sovereignty over Greenland. In response to Chancellor Merz’ criticism of the U.S. war with Iran, Trump has ordered the withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany and promised further retributive measures. At first glance, Trump’s foreign policy seems petty and erratic. But there is an underlying logic to his anti-European agenda.
In the wake of Trump’s breakthrough victory in 2016, Yoram Hazony, an Israeli American intellectual and ex-Netanyahu aide, and Chris DeMuth, a coalition-builder and deregulation advocate of the American right, sought to steer the U.S. conservative movement in a more nationalistic and illiberal direction. They began assembling thinkers, activists and politicians under the banner of national conservatism. Today, that movement includes dozens of conservative figures, including Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
In the wake of Trump’s breakthrough victory in 2016, Yoram Hazony [and Chris DeMuth], sought to steer the U.S. conservative movement in a more nationalistic and illiberal direction. [Today], that movement includes dozens of conservative figures, including Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
Over the years, the national conservatives (natcons) have articulated a geopolitical vision for the Trump administration. Numerous thinkers have contributed to that effort, but three have led the charge: Yoram Hazony, Michael Lind, and Michael Anton. Hazony is the central organizer of the natcons. His 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, serves as a manifesto for the movement, and politicians like JD Vance, Viktor Orbán, and Giorgia Meloni have cited its influence on their worldviews. Lind is another leading light of the natcons. His 2020 book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, illustrates the movement’s overarching critique of neoliberal politics.
Anton has wielded the most direct influence of the three on US foreign policy. Back in 2016, he made his name for an infamous essay, “The Flight 93 Election”, which urged conservatives to embrace Trump in the name of civilizational survival. In 2025, he served as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, and he is widely credited with crafting the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS).
Collectively, Hazony, Lind, and Anton have laid out the contours of a national conservative worldview, which sees Europe as a once great civilization rotting under the bureaucratic institutions and liberal norms of the European Union. To counter that rot, they seek to undermine the EU and empower radical right-wing politicians across the continent. At the same time, they see Europe as a marginal player in the game of great power competition. They believe that the continent must subordinate itself to the United States or become a plaything of rival empires. Trump’s foreign policy embodies the natcons’ hostility towards the EU and demand for European fealty to U.S. power.
The national conservative worldview
Michael Lind, Michael Anton, and Yoram Hazony were all, at one point or another, affiliated with America’s traditional conservative establishment. In the 1990s, Lind worked for major conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation and The National Interest. In the 2000s, Michael Anton served in various roles in the Bush administration, including as press secretary for National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. In the 1990s and 2000s, Yoram Hazony led the Shalem Center, an American-style think tank in Jerusalem funded by conservative billionaires Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson.
Over time, the natcons came to believe that the conservative movement, and Western politics more broadly, had been captured by a cabal of managerial elites.
Over time, the natcons came to believe that the conservative movement, and Western politics more broadly, had been captured by a cabal of managerial elites—corporate executives, puppet politicians, civil servants, nonprofit leaders and other educated professionals. Michael Lind calls that complex “the administrative state.” After the Cold War, he explains, key sectors of the global economy were taken over by transnational corporations. Instead of investing in productive activities at home, those (Western) companies exploited cheap labor abroad. Instead of paying their public dues, they cycled their riches through tax havens. Instead of engaging in democratic debate with workers, they devised trade deals which covertly undermined labor regulations.
According to the natcons, the rise of transnational corporations was not the result of economic modernization. It was the policy of a transatlantic class of neoliberal elites. Those elites intentionally outsourced their productive capacities, avoided taxation and democratic deliberation to line their pockets and cement their rule. Through campaign financing and donations, they assumed control of key political offices and nonprofit organizations. At the same time, they supported the construction of a centralized “European-style” bureaucracy, exemplified by regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Those agencies promoted progressive priorities while leaving the most exploitative practices of the managerial elite—offshoring, tax avoidance and democratic capture—untouched.
The natcons do not just oppose the transnational operations of the managerial elite. They are infuriated by its multiculturalism, which the natcons equate with civilizational suicide. In Michael Anton’s view, only homogenous societies, those united by a single language, religion, culture, and race, can be stable and prosperous. Neoliberal elites, he decries, have opened their arms to hordes of incompatible immigrants, people who have little in common with “founding-stock” Westerners. On the one hand, those elites have welcomed low-wage immigrants to undermine domestic labor and create a new constituency for their rule. At the same time, they have facilitated a Great Replacement of the West’s traditional white majority. Neoliberal elites, continues Anton, claim that white people are guilty of innumerable crimes, and they seek to dilute their majority in favor of various minority groups. In his words, it is “demographic warfare … tyrants have been known from time immemorial to move populations around so as to hold conquests more securely. What’s unprecedented is a regime importing foreigners to harm its own people.”
The natcons also believe that neoliberal elites have undermined the cultural foundations of international peace and security. In Yoram Hazony’s estimation, a nation is “a kind of fortress surrounded by high, invisible walls,” which can protect “its own special inheritance, its own treasured culture, in a garden in which it can flourish unmolested.” International peace, he explains, is a natural state of affairs among nation-states which respect one another’s ethno-cultural homogeneity and sovereignty. Diversity, the mixing of national cultures, weakens that equilibrium. By promoting multiculturalism, argues Hazony, Western managerial elites have empowered rabble-rousing minority groups and incentivized foreign powers to intervene in the name of protecting those groups.
Their condescending vision of Europe
In the national conservative imagination, the European Union is the ultimate embodiment of the managerial elite, their administrative state and neoliberal-multicultural ideology. According to Lind and Anton, it was “a fraud from the beginning” that proved to be “a miserable failure.” The EU was sold to the public as a means of facilitating business, travel and peace. In reality, it created a platform for Brussels-based elites to cannibalize decision-making power in critical fields like trade and border management. Just like the managerial elites of Washington, DC, the bureaucrats of Brussels served the interests of transnational corporations and nonprofits, and they destabilized the continent in the name of multiculturalism and open borders.
In Hazony’s view, the EU is an empire, a “universal state with no natural boundaries…governing in the name of universal doctrines.” While EU leaders like to speak of pooled sovereignty, they have constructed a bureaucratic autocracy which imposes directives on member states through regulatory agencies like the European Commission and judicial bodies like the European Court of Justice. In the name of upholding liberal norms, the EU undermines the independence of nation-states, which it considers to be remnants of a primitive age of provincialism. Overall, the natcons contend that “the euthanasia of the European Union as an institution is overdue.”
Despite their rhetoric, the natcons do not believe in a world of sovereign nations. For them, global politics is primarily about spheres of influence, hierarchical blocs of countries led by dominant nation-states. Lind identifies three important blocs in the world today—a U.S.-led bloc of the Americas, a China-led bloc of East Asia and a Russia-led bloc of Eurasia. Within each bloc, he claims, free trade and immigration are possible. Among them, however, the logic of zero-sum competition reigns supreme.
Lind identifies three important blocs in the world today—a U.S.-led bloc of the Americas, a China-led bloc of East Asia and a Russia-led bloc of Eurasia.
Despite its “imperial” character, Europe occupies a weak position in that geopolitical imaginary. It is a peripheral region situated between the United States and Russian spheres of influence. As such, it has three options: “remain a U.S. protectorate, drift into neutrality or … become a ‘shatterbelt’ for which external powers once again compete.” At best, claim the natcons, Europe can forge a new special relationship with the United States, an industrial partnership. According to such an arrangement, Europe would retain privileged access to U.S. investment and technology. However, it would have to disengage from rival blocs and submit itself to the geopolitical directives of the United States.
The Trump administration’s NSS is a clear reflection of the natcons’ condescending vision of Europe. It mentions the EU only once, characterizing it as a nefarious entity which undermines national sovereignty and Western civilization through open borders, censorship and regulatory suffocation. The NSS calls on the United States to help Make Europe Great Again, to restore its civilizational self-confidence by challenging the EU’s liberal and bureaucratic politics. For one, it asks the United States to cultivate “patriotic” right-wing movements across the continent. Additionally, it calls on the government to pry open sensitive EU markets to US goods and services.
Real-world implications
MAGA’s opposition to Europe is not simply theoretical. Trump has turned it into a reality. Soon after taking office, he declared a 30% tariff rate on all EU goods, demanding complete market access for the United States with the aim of reducing its trade deficit. Trump has sought to end the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Russia, including major territorial concessions, and he has repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland. He has called the EU a decaying force for accommodating immigrants from non-Western countries and for enforcing regulations that are unfavorable to U.S. energy and tech companies. To cultivate anti-EU sentiment, the Trump administration is channeling funding to radical right-wing think tanks across the continent.
While Trump’s ever-changing whims and fancies play an important role in the articulation of U.S. foreign policy, he is the figurehead of a national conservative movement that is full of ideologues intent on reshaping America’s role in the world. Trump’s political ascent and the rise of the natcons have revolved around their promise to take down the managerial elites of Washington, DC, and their administrative state. Through his two terms in office, Trump has broken down the key institutions of America’s welfare state, especially those dealing with education, housing, consumer protection and foreign aid. Today, he is taking that project to Brussels. EU leaders must appreciate that the Trump administration’s assault on Europe is not a personal vendetta but an overarching goal of the US conservative movement.
EU leaders must appreciate that the Trump administration’s assault on Europe is not a personal vendetta but an overarching goal of the US conservative movement.
Beni Kovacs is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program with a PhD in Political Science from Queen Mary University of London. His research explores the radical right in the United States and Hungary—where they come from intellectually and how they envision domestic and international politics.
Image made by John Chrobak using “Michael Anton” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; “Michael Lind” by New America licensed under CC BY 2.0; “Prime Minister Keir Starmer meets US President Donald Trump” by Number 10 licensed under Open Government Licence v3.0. All other assets used are in the public domain.
