Trump’s White Christian Foreign Policy
The National Security Strategy document that the Trump administration released on Friday was only secondarily American—that is, rooted in our nation’s foundational creed (however imperfectly followed) of human equality. It was primarily a document rooted in white Christian nationalism.
The primacy of this deeply anti-American set of beliefs was made particularly clear in the document’s section on Europe. It was already plain to see in Trump’s refugee policy, which now welcomes almost exclusively white South Africans, and in Vice President Vance’s claims of the superior American legitimacy of the descendants of the immigrants from Northwest Europe who came before 1880. But the administration’s strategic goals for Europe plunge us even deeper into the muck of white Christian nationalism.
Europe, the document proclaims, faces “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less … We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
In other words, the European Union regulates U.S. corporations in ways that sometimes favor European workers and consumers over our corporations. In other words, migration from Asia and Africa is diluting the white, Christian essence of traditional European civilization. To forestall this dilution, “American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”
The administration has already made clear who our “political allies” are in the struggle to keep Europe European. In Germany, it’s the AfD, the far-right neo-Nazi party to which Vance has pledged his support. In the U.K., it’s Nigel Farage’s racist Reform UK party.
“Over the long term,” the strategy document continues, “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” (Of course, the signatories of the NATO charter in 1949—veterans in the war against the Nazi domination of Europe—were affirming their opposition not just to Stalinism, but to fascism and religious intolerance as well.) The current administration’s policy for Europe, the document concludes, should prioritize such policies as “Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That is, the same resistance to Black and brown immigration that defines Trump’s domestic policies as well.
In that sense, our national-security strategy is now officially aligned with Trump’s assessment of Somali immigrants to the U.S. as “garbage.” (That he made that comment during a meeting with his cabinet, and that not one of his cabinet members so much as blinked when he said it, tells us all we need to know about the rich white trash whom Trump has appointed to run our government.)
The normalization of this bigotry on the American right, that is, goes well beyond Tucker Carlson and his stooges. Indeed, it now graces the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, where staff columnist Barton Swaim wrote last week that “an unbiased observer [in which category, we may assume, he includes himself] could be forgiven for thinking Minnesota’s Somali population isn’t capable of assimilation.”
The problem with the Somalis, Swaim has figured out, is that they’re Muslim. Citing the work of British historian Tom Holland, Swaim argues that while Christianity acknowledges the legitimacy of governments, even secular governments, Islam does not. He quotes Holland’s assessment that “Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset,” which apparently compels him to conclude that “Minnesota’s Somali population plainly doesn’t think of itself as digestible.”
As the key factor in whether an immigrant can truly become American is religion, Swaim then goes on to make the case for permitting Latin Americans to stay here. After all, these “illegal aliens [come] from nations that, for all their dysfunctions, are indelibly Christian.”
Which is to say, white Christian nationalism isn’t confined to yahoos, if indeed it ever was. From JD Vance to Barton Swaim, it now barfs upon us all from some highly educated gullets. But whether flowing from the gutter or a gold-plated toilet, it remains the foremost negation of our foundational creed.
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