The Trump administration released its National Security Strategy on Dec. 4. Likely to be mostly unread at home—the fate of most N.S.S. releases—it will surely prove a page-turner among the members of the E.U. diplomatic corps rushing to assess how badly the European-American alliance is faltering. The strategic outline will confirm many worst fears in that regard.

The document includes a deep and likely unwelcome digression on E.U. cultural and economic decline and dysfunction but is shockingly light on direct commentary on (now former?) adversaries like China and Russia. Those geopolitical antagonists had featured prominently in previous iterations of the N.S.S., which is delivered yearly to Congress.

“Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the Trump administration declares. “Over the long term, 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.”

It is perhaps telling that Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, had only kind words for the Trump administration’s new strategic directives. “The adjustments we are seeing, I would say, are largely consistent with our vision,” Mr. Peskov told Russian media.

The Trump administration’s accelerating antipathy toward Europe has been so notable that even Pope Leo, while expressing a hesitancy to comment on such matters, could not stop himself from commenting on such matters, acknowledging the apparent breakdown in the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Asked about the U.S. peace plan for Ukraine as he emerged from his third face-to-face meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Dec. 8, the pope told reporters, “Unfortunately, I believe that some aspects of what I have seen would bring about a huge change in what has, for many, many years, been a true alliance between Europe and the United States.”

The pope added that “remarks that are made about Europe, also in interviews recently, I think, are trying to break apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance today and in the future.”

According to America’s senior Vatican correspondent, Gerard O’Connell, the American-born pope’s observations on that historic alliance reflect the long-standing position of the Holy See. But a difference of opinion on the strategic value of the U.S. relationship with Europe is hardly the only point of divergence between the Holy See and the administration surfaced by the N.S.S.

Migration matters

The document reiterates the Trump administration’s perception of migration as a threat to receiving societies that is best held off however possible, rather than, as the church insists, a reality of the human condition that demands to be addressed practically and mercifully. The strategy outline assesses migration as a phenomenon that a too-soft political liberalism somehow created or at least invites—not a geopolitical crisis resulting from conflict, drought, poverty and climate change, or, in Europe’s case, at least in part from colonial connections.

It is worth recalling that the contemporary migration crisis was propelled by a vicious civil war in Syria, terrorist violence in the Middle East, failing governance in nations like Haiti and authoritarian and climate threats in Central America and North Africa.

In “Laudato Si’,” “Fratelli Tutti” and other formal and informal statements, Popes Francis and Leo urge a different tack on migration. Francis, shaken by the stone-hearted acceptance of the death and suffering of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea, famously described a “globalization of indifference” in an attempt to make sense of collective European inaction to the crisis.

Per the N.S.S., the Trump administration seeks “full control over our borders, over our immigration system, and over transportation networks through which people come into our country—legally and illegally. We want a world in which migration is not merely ‘orderly’ but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit.”

The church, which teaches that sovereign states have the right, even the obligation, to manage their borders, would not argue with the N.S.S. goal of “orderly” immigration but might remind the administration that the common good is not delimited by mapmakers. It insists that migration has to be addressed with mercy and esteem for human dignity, that all people have the right to migrate to escape conflict and economic and climate calamity and that more affluent nations are morally obliged to receive them as far as their wealth and capacity allow.

The Trump administration’s statement is silent on a number of other issues addressed in previous incarnations that have been of concern to the church. Among them, the climate crisis—highlighted as a core threat by the Obama and Biden administrations—and a global call to address inequity, poverty and the global debt crisis. There are no references to the U.N.’s sustainable development goals, the Paris climate accords, global health care or the desirability of nurturing sustainable energy technologies.

Given the president’s antipathy toward what he has called the climate change hoax, it is perhaps no surprise that a crisis confirmed by near-unanimous consensus in the world’s scientific community is not addressed at all in the N.S.S. Other words that don’t appear are poverty or hunger. Africa, the continent that has proved a nexus of a number of global calamities—war, incapacitating indebtedness, disease, drought, mortal competition over resources and ecological ruin because of extractive industries—receives scant attention: three paragraphs at the conclusion of the statement.

But the N.S.S. does bombastically celebrate the Trump administration successes and the greatness of the United States, describing the statement as “a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.”

A ‘soft power’ reset, but how?

After demolishing the federal agency responsible for humanitarian relief and global economic and civic development, the U.S. Agency for International Development, in the new statement the administration acknowledges the value of “soft power” campaigns.

How those soft power networks are restored after the Elon Musk-led dismemberment of U.S.A.I.D. will prove a huge undertaking, but it may not involve traditional partners like Catholic Relief Services that collaborated fruitfully for decades with former administrations, both Republican and Democratic. The Trump White House has criticized nongovernmental organizations as ineffective and money-hungry.

A recent decision to restore U.S. funding for health care in Kenya deliberately cut out such interstitial service providers. A previous fan of humanitarian and development providers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio now deplores them as the “NGO industrial complex.” The N.S.S. suggests that direct aid to U.S.-friendly governments will be its preferred “back to the future” model going forward.

This transactional emphasis is an approach that had been largely abandoned because of the deep dysfunction it engendered. Federal officials managing future cash disbursements may wish to study how corruption and incompetence among government actors in the developing world helped prompt the intervention of N.G.O.s, now presumably sidelined, who could be relied on for effective service delivery and honest accounting.

Alarming rearming

The N.S.S. commits the United States to a record $1 trillion in direct defense spending and highlights plans to beef up and modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

It states: “We want to recruit, train, equip, and field the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military to protect our interests, deter wars, and—if necessary—win them quickly and decisively, with the lowest possible casualties to our forces.” It adds: “We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.”

These commitments, together with the strategy’s repeated demands for higher defense spending among European allies, suggest an impending spike in global spending on arms manufacturing and a conventional and nuclear arms race, the likes of which the church has frequently deplored as destabilizing and a moral scandal. The Holy See has also been among the global leaders pressing for nuclear disarmament and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The administration appears content to continue a peace-through-strength approach, even suggesting a pursuit of peace through invincibility. The church reminds us, however, that peace without justice is likely illusory, that there is value in peace through mercy.

“Today in many places we hear a call for greater security,” Francis declared in “Evangelii Gaudium,” “but until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence…. When a society—whether local, national or global—is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility” (No. 59).

Hemispheric hegemony

The N.S.S. includes a welcome critique of imperial overreach and suggests that the administration rejects dubious nation-building enterprises, presumably with the calamities in Afghanistan and Iraq in mind. It declares a determination to avoid “forever wars” in the Middle East and purports to reject previous U.S. ambitions of world domination.

But the N.S.S. does not express the same misgivings about hemispheric domination, following a model of regional hegemony favored by Russia and China. It accepts such spheres of influence as somehow an organic geopolitical outcome, deriding global cooperation as illusory. “We will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” the N.S.S. states.

This is not your great-grandfather’s “Good Neighbor” policy, however. The document vaguely outlines U.S. intentions to stabilize nations in the Western hemisphere with an eye to reducing migration and containing the illicit drug trade while protecting the highways and byways of U.S. trade.

Finally, the “America First” thrust of the N.S.S. continues the Trump administration’s go-it-alone sensibility in global affairs, which Catholic Church leaders will probably find regrettable. Under the Trump administration, the United States has withheld its charter obligations to the United Nations. It has withdrawn from global relationships and collaborations aimed at addressing world hunger, deprivations of children, human rights, labor conditions and health crises.

The latest strategy statement evinces deep suspicion, even hostility, to multilateral engagement. The church, on the contrary, consistently holds up such efforts as worthwhile, productive, even essential. Pope Francis particularly had encouraged international dialogue and cooperation, accepting the necessity of multilateral institutions like the United Nations to address common concerns and crises.

Pope Leo’s expressions of concern over the president’s wavering commitment to the U.S.-Europe relationship have already created a clamor among pro-Trump Catholics on this side of the Atlantic. Since his election, many Catholics had wondered how often Pope Leo, the leader of a global community of 1.4 billion, might be inclined to comment on the policies of his home nation. But when the world’s most affluent and powerful country sets policy on common good concerns like peace, the arms trade and immigration, how could any pope, regardless of his nation of birth, refrain from engaging? In an interview with Politico on Dec. 9, Mr. Trump somewhat gruffly expressed an interest in meeting with the other most powerful American in the world. “Sure, I will. Why not?” he said.

Should a meeting with Pope Leo come to pass, the two men will have a lot to talk about.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).