America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia

U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki | Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Last week’s release of Trump’s National Security Strategy made one thing brutally clear and that is that the United States is no longer fully shaping its own foreign policy. The document reads like parts of it were written in Moscow and stamped in Washington without anyone even attempting to hide the fingerprints, marking the first time in modern history that an American president has published an official strategy that openly attacks America’s closest allies, encourages the collapse of Europe’s stability, and advances Russia’s strategic objectives point by point — a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview disguised as U.S. doctrine.

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.

Meanwhile, Europe continues watching the United States move from rhetorical hostility to active operational steps. It would be one thing if this were just Trump’s repeated attacks, but Trump’s team has spent the entire year demonstrating its hostility to NATO. Pentagon officials privately informed European governments that they must assume the majority of NATO’s conventional defense by 2027 or America will begin withdrawing from core coordination mechanisms, a threat that struck diplomats as both impossible and unmistakably political. Meawhile, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau berated European allies for “bullying” U.S. defense firms while previously attacking NATO as “a solution in search of a problem” via an X post he quickly deleted; Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipped a key NATO ministerial altogether, an absence unheard of in decades and another clear signal; U.S. troops were quietly pulled from Romania at a moment Russia’s continues to escalate against NATO; and Europeans have already been cut out of Ukraine negotiations that directly determine their own security.

And Europe should not pretend to be shocked. The writing has been on the wall for years — from Trump during his first term trying to withdraw from NATO, to the blood-boiling 2018 Helsinki meeting where Trump publicly sided with Russia’s intelligence services, to his public encouragement last year that Russia should attack “delinquent” NATO members, to throwing Zelenskyy out of the Oval Office earlier this year. It was always clear where this would lead, and now the NSS merely formalizes the policy architecture for a geopolitical betrayal that has been unfolding in plain sight.

European leaders are no longer pretending this is rhetoric. They recognize exactly what they are witnessing — the formal alignment of the United States with the geopolitical goals of a hostile regime. The leaked call among Macron, Merz, Stubb, and Rutte, where leaders privately acknowledged Trump forcing Ukraine to surrender territory and warned that Kyiv must never again be left alone with Trump’s envoys, marked the first moment European officials admitted, publicly via a leak, that Washington had crossed the line from partner to a threat.

As I wrote nearly two years ago for CEPA, warning Europe about the threat Trump poses should he return, and that core threat has never changed:

“His words… can only reasonably be read as threatening to encourage Russia to attack NATO members failing to meet their ‘defense spending obligations.’ … Trump’s evident willingness to, yet again, cozy up to Vladimir Putin… underscores the urgency of addressing foreign interference in democratic institutions. The specter of a leader willing to sacrifice international stability for personal gain should be deeply alarming, and a warning of what will come should Trump win.”

That warning was not hyperbole then, and it reads more relevant now, as Trump’s NSS formalizes that very posture.

Because the NSS is not merely a strategy document but a signal to Moscow that Trump is prepared to hand Russia the greatest geopolitical victory of the post–Cold War era. It tells Europe that the United States has abandoned its role as a guarantor of stability and recast itself as a source of disruption inside its borders. And it tells Ukraine that Trump is willing to treat its very survival as a bargaining chip — a tool for transactional business deals, ego maintenance, and the approval of Putin, whose influence over him has never been subtle.

The United States is no longer acting as an independent power. It is behaving like a Kremlin satellite executing the foreign policy goals of a regime that has spent decades trying to dismantle the West, and Putin no longer needs subtlety, because Trump operates out in the open. The only question left is whether Europe recognizes the danger quickly enough to defend itself before the alliance holding the democratic world together collapses under the weight of a strategy written for America.

And this comes at a moment when Russia is escalating its war of annihilation against Ukraine, murdering Ukrainians every single day with missile barrages, glide bombs, torture chambers, and mass abductions; when it is expanding its shadow war across Europe with drone incursions into NATO airspace, sabotage operations against infrastructure, arson attacks, and espionage operations. Yet even as Russia accelerates its war, Trump’s NSS makes clear that his priority is not confronting Moscow but “reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia,” language that amounts to rewarding genocide and aggression with diplomatic accommodation and treating the Kremlin, not as a terrorist state, but as a partner whose demands must be met. It is a strategic posture so inverted that Moscow barely needs to conceal its escalations anymore, because the U.S. now views “stability” as something achieved not by constraining Moscow’s aggression but by reshaping Europe to accommodate it.