Motus Mentis

The Trump administration has just released (on December 4th) an overview of its national-security strategy. It marks a welcome return to a realistic and pragmatic approach that hews more closely to that of Washington, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams (as outlined so brilliantly in the late Angelo Codevilla’s outstanding book America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations) than we have seen for a very long time. In its embrace of the sovereignty of individual nation-states, it also offers a forcible rebuke to the centralizing globalist institutions and transnational oligarchies that have done so very much damage over the past few decades.

Back in February, I wrote that I believed that the man behind the shaping of global strategy in the new administration was Michael Anton — then the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning — and it appears that it was indeed he who drafted this document. Anton has since retired from the position, and has returned to private life, but some of this document’s more piquant passages are sure to be a lingering irritant in certain bien-pensant academic and journalistic circles. For example:

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

Goodness! If that isn’t Michael Anton, I’ll eat my hat. (As Bernoulli once said of Newton, after the latter had anonymously published a brilliant solution to a mathematical challenge that Bernoulli had posed, “we recognize the lion by his claw.”)

You can read the whole thing here.