The US will strive to “Make Europe Great Again” by boosting the continent’s MAGA-aligned political parties to weaken the European Union, distance Washington from Nato, and manage global affairs in a new group of powers without Europe, Defense One, a US-based news website, claimed on December 10.

The directions of US foreign and security policy are contained in a version of the already notorious National Security Strategy (NSS) that was not made public, Defense One said.

White House dismissed the news report wholesale, calling it "fake news". "There is no alternative, private, or secret version [of the strategy]," White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told PAP.

The document made available to the public earlier this month said that Europe faced “civilizational erasure” due to immigration policies and “censorship of free speech”. It singled out Poland and a few other countries as positive exceptions, playing to the EU-sceptic feelings that appear to be gaining momentum in Poland.

The reportedly undisclosed version of the document, according to Defense One, urges Washington to work more closely with Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, which are countries where pro-American right-wing parties are strong, to draw them away from the EU. The 27-nation bloc is painted in the NSS as a chief source of Europe’s problems.

“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,” the document says, according to Defense One.

The EU’s encroachment on member states’ sovereignty is an important trait of right-wing criticism of the union. Taken together, however, the EU is the world’s third-biggest economy and trumps its main adversary, Russia, almost by any measure.

Still, the US does not see the EU as a global partner anymore. The non-public part of the strategy outlines a plan to form a “Core 5”, or C5, made up of the United States, China, Russia, India and Japan - with a notable omission of the EU or any of European powers.

The group would meet regularly like the G7, with Middle East security—especially “normalising relations” between Israel and Saudi Arabia—proposed as the first theme for discussion, Defense One reported.

The full NSS also devotes space to what it describes as failure of America’s global dominance. “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable,” the document states, before arguing that Washington should only concern itself with foreign actions that directly affect US interests.

That said, the Trump administration will work to prevent China or Russia from filling any void left by a reduced American role, urging cooperation with “regional champions” to maintain order. 

“We will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy,” the document stated, according to Defense One.

Upon the publication of its public version, the strategy rattled Poland, where reliance on US protection has shaped foreign and defence policy for decades.

In Warsaw, the officials attempted to fathom whether decades of reliance on the US can be squared with a document that openly encourages breaking up the EU merely into a group of “sovereign nations.”

“Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem … Unless something has changed,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a post on X, which drew more than tens of millions of views.

The publicly available section of the NSS describes Europe as “strategically and culturally vital,” yet it blames EU institutions for undermining national sovereignty. 

It singles out migration, alleged restrictions on speech, falling birthrates and weakening cultural identity, echoing long-standing arguments used by EU-sceptic parties and by Moscow. Climate policies are dismissed as harmful to both continents, consistent with President Donald Trump’s earlier claim that climate change is “the greatest con job” in the world.

The strategy’s praise for “patriotic European parties” and its call for Washington to champion “aligned sovereign nations” is viewed in Warsaw as an overture to “healthy nations” in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. 

Such a tilt, Polish officials fear, could erode Warsaw’s EU ties at a sensitive moment. Tusk’s coalition is firmly pro-EU and wary of US ideas for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. Warsaw sees those efforts as overly permissive toward the Kremlin.

Right-wing President Karol Nawrocki, by contrast, has highlighted his own links to Trump and echoed the NSS’s criticism of the EU. A recent survey by French magazine Le Grand Continent reported that 25% of Poles now support leaving the EU.

Publication of the strategy sparked a burst of praise among prominent voices in the United States and Russia, sharpening concerns that Washington is edging toward a position more accommodating to Moscow. 

“The EU should be abolished,” Elon Musk wrote on X soon after the European Commission imposed a €120mn penalty on the platform he owns. “Exactly," former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev replied. 

Former Estonian president Thomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on X that “Europe is seen as America’s primary enemy” and argued that no other region is addressed with such “hostility” or “regime change” language. 

The US administration “explicitly wants to replace [Europe’s centrist governments] with right-wing extremists” to turn Europe into “a patchwork of individual countries too weak to stand up to any security or economic threats,” Ilves also wrote. 

Poland and the Baltic states increased defence spending sharply after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Warsaw currently devotes the largest share of GDP to defence in Nato, a point that has won Trump’s approval. Trump has also indicated that he would keep US troops in Poland even as he considers scaling back deployments elsewhere in Europe.