New Delhi: For Europe, the Trump administration’s MAGA worldview has come home to roost. A classified draft of the recently released 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States is fresh proof of its extensive disengagement from Europe.
The classified draft reportedly outlines plans for a new global bloc, called ‘Core 5’. It includes India with the United States, China, Russia, and Japan. These nations, says the document, will not be “hemmed in” by the requirement of G7 nations that nations be both “wealthy” and “democratically governed”.
The NSS reportedly goes beyond the publicly available text of the Trump administration’s Europe assessment and warnings of “civilisational erasure”, which the document blamed on immigration and free speech censorship.
America’s Defense One and Politico shared these classified details, with both asserting that last week, the Trump administration had circulated a longer, unreleased draft of the NSS. According to Defense One, the unpublished document has set Middle East security, including the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the C5’s first agenda item.
The White House, however, rejected the reports outright. “No alternative, private, or classified version exists,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.
Reportedly, the new strategy also calls for withdrawing the United States from Europe’s defence obligations and redirecting attention towards threats. It names Venezuela-based drug cartels among these threats.
Partnering with “regional champions” is aligned with US interests, it adds.
A Right-leaning Europe
Whether the classified draft exists or not, analysts say its reported contents align with Trump’s long-standing foreign-policy instincts. Scepticism of Europe, comfort with major-power spheres of influence, and a desire to rebuild global structures around a smaller set of nations, he sees as key.
Washington should deepen ties with a select group of European governments that lean Right—Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland—to pull them away from the European Union, the NSS reportedly asserts.
“We should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures, who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life … while remaining pro-American,” adds the document.
The NSS frames this approach as part of a broader effort to “Make Europe Great Again”—a phrase that appears in the unpublished draft but not in the Trump administration’s official release.
It also offers an unusually blunt assessment of American leadership. “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want, and it wasn’t achievable,” the document states, arguing that post–Cold War, US policymakers mistakenly believed in “permanent American domination of the entire world”.
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The new great powers
Politico noted that Trump has long signalled a preference for working with strongmen and major powers over traditional alliances. The sale of advanced Nvidia H200 chips to China and quiet diplomatic outreach to Russia via his private envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were cited as examples of Trump’s unconventional diplomacy.
A former White House official from Trump’s first term told Politico that the C5 concept was “not completely shocking”, adding that there had been discussions that bodies such as the G-groupings and the UN Security Council were “not fit for purpose given today’s new players”.
National security specialists noted that the C5 vision reflects Trump’s worldview. “He sees the world non-ideologically, through an affinity for strongmen,” Torrey Taussig, a former Biden-era National Security Council official, was quoted as saying by Politico.
Europe’s exclusion, she added, “would lead Europeans to believe this administration views Russia as the preeminent power” on the continent.
The new approach would also mark a dramatic shift from Trump’s first-term focus on competition between the “great powers”, with China on his mind, Michael Sobolik, a former adviser to Senator Ted Cruz, said.
Democratic values not-wanted
The proposed C5 is framed as a deliberate alternative to the G7—the long-standing forum of major democracies, comprising the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, with the European Union participating as an institutional partner.
Since its formation in the 1970s, the G7 has served as the meeting point of the wealthy, democratic nations to coordinate policy on global economic stability, security, and governance.
Its membership criteria? Advanced economies, with shared democratic values.
The C5 construct, by contrast, would dispense with those outlines, according to Trump.
The broader strategy, as described in the leaked materials, depicts Europe as lacking confidence and struggling to manage its relationship with Russia.
While the publicly available NSS stresses US support for Ukraine, the classified version reportedly argues that Washington, DC, must negotiate an “expeditious cessation of hostilities” to stabilise Europe and prevent escalation.
European governments, the document suggests, are caught between public demands for peace and political systems too weak to deliver the same.
The strategy, as released, mentions that Europe remains vital to American prosperity, calling its industries, as well as research & cultural institutions, “central to US interests”—even as Washington, DC, seeks to push it towards greater self-reliance. It maintains Trump’s hardening stance on China, declaring that he “single-handedly reversed three decades of mistaken American assumptions” about Beijing.
Reiterating support for the Quad grouping of India, Japan, Australia, and the United States, it even encourages New Delhi to play a greater role in Indo-Pacific security.
The control of the South China Sea—it warns—is a critical US interest, requiring stronger naval investment and cooperation with partners “from India to Japan and beyond”.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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