Next week, as EU leaders gather in Brussels for the last European Council summit of the year, four of the people occupying those 27 chairs will know their countries have reportedly been identified in this month’s US National Security Strategy as prime targets to remove from the European Union and align with the MAGA regime.
This week a longer, unpublished version of the US National Security Strategy from last week was leaked to the media. According to the website Defense One, the longer version goes much further than the unclassified version. Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the US should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union],” the document reportedly states. “And 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.” Slovakia, the much more tempting target under the leadership of Robert Fico, is an implied fifth.
Hungary is led by Viktor Orban, who sits in the far-right Patriots for Europe group of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Italian Prime Minister Meloni, whose party is the successor to Mussolini’s Fascists (though these days more moderate than it used to be), heads the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists group. Poland’s new prime minister Karol Nawrocki is (de facto) a member of the far-right Law and Justice party, also part of Meloni’s group. Though the presidency in Poland is a ceremonial position and it is the prime minister Donald Tusk who attends European Council summits, it has significant veto power and the Trump administration spent considerable resources working to get him elected earlier this year.
Austria, currently led by centre-right chancellor Christian Stocker, is a puzzling one. More likely they have in mind Slovak leader Robert Fico, whose party was formerly centre-left but is now a non-aligned nationalist party that is closely aligned with Moscow.
The fuller classified document also reportedly proposes to dissolve the G7 and start a new G5 made up of the US, China, Russia, India and Japan – expelling Europe. This is consistent with President Trump’s public comments about the G7, saying it was a “very big mistake” to expel Russia from the (former) G8 and that he would like to see China added to make a “G9”. The first thing on the G5’s proposed agenda according to the leaked document? Helping Israel to normalise its relations with Middle East neighbours like Saudi Arabia.