Message to the U.S. Crusaders: Asking for Submission is Un-American

In late May 2025, the U.S. State Department published an essay on “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe” on its official Substack channel.   Given that Western societies face many common challenges, this could have been an interesting opening for constructive dialogue.

Instead, what Samson the Crusader delivers at his masters’ behest is a convoluted, pseudo-intellectualized charge sheet.  Citing Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke and Kant as crown witnesses, the text by Samuel Samson, a Senior Advisor in the State Department who graduated from college in 2021, offers a reinterpretation of Europe’s political and philosophical roots that is as sweeping as it is unexpected.

An unexpected line of attack

After all, who would have expected a line of attack by the Trump administration that would reference “a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics and natural sovereignty” to make the case for questioning European civilization today?

In essence, the charge presented by Samson, the Crusader, writing on behalf of the State Department and the Vance/Rubio camp, is to brand many of today’s Europeans and their governments as heretics to their own traditions.

The devolution of the American model

At the core, the essay offers two propositions: First, most EU countries have been infiltrated by forces only Americans are wise enough to detect.

And second, the interpretation of European political thought, as proposed by the Vance/Rubio political camp in the United States, should replace the political will exhibited by the vast majority of European societies and nations about how to run their own democracies.

What Samson articulates in effect is the devolution of the American model of liberal governance into the Soviet model of client state governance.

The “beat Europe into submission” team

Little wonder, then, that most Europeans today would agree with the core charge of the “beat Europe into submission” team in Washington that they no longer have a sense of “a shared Western civilizational heritage.”

In that assessment, they are not alone. Most Europeans stand in unison with at least half of the U.S. population today. Many Americans, especially those living on the two coasts, are flabbergasted by the Trump administration’s fundamental departure from many American virtues and practices that have long been viewed as core elements of the American — and indeed Western — civilization.

The big diversion

The attempt to charge Europe by abandoning fundamental values is a deliberate, yet highly transparent maneuver to detract from what is happening in the United States at the present time.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance may be claiming that Europe’s biggest threat is not from Russia, but “from within.”  But anybody looking at the United States today recognizes that this phrase far more aptly describes the deliberate strategy that the Trump administration is executing to hollow out U.S. democracy and the rule of law than it describes Europe.

Is Europe really undemocratic?

As for Europe’s presumed lack of democracy, just remember that the hard right — the political force for which Trump officials so ardently advocate — on average probably accounts for no more than 20% of the total electorate in Europe.

Given that most European political systems operate on the basis of proportional representation, the hard right is also represented in national parliaments — although it is usually not part of governments there.  Due to the fact that it lacks a majority, that should not surprise anyone — obviously except for Trump administration officials.

Moreover, as the example of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands shows, when the hard right is a powerful player in a government, it simply runs away from political responsibility.

Trump and Viktor Orban

Another reason why Europeans are so flabbergasted is what is going on in the United States itself.  The Trump team has been able to usurp constitution-bending power, even though it operates only with the narrowest of majorities — and usually just by decree, not acts of legislation.

Say what you want about Viktor Orban — and there is much to be criticized about his conniving ways to castrate civil society as well as any elements of opposition — at least the Hungarian leader has one distinction.  He generally managed to engineer the formally required two-third majorities in order to have a legal basis for the sweeping changes he has seen through in his country. That is notably not the case in the United States.

At present, the venerable U.S. rule of law as well as the principle of checks and balances, long considered central tenets of U.S. political civilization, seem to have more holes than even the most air-filled Swiss cheese.

Moreover, it has become painfully clear in recent months how much of that entire U.S. institutional edifice rests on the naive assumption of trust and goodwill.

A profound case of subject/object disorder

To detract from all of the shameful American, not European(!) realities, the U.S. State Department now argues that the European “promise lies in tatters” and that the powers that be in Europe are on “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself.”

And it reiterates the charge that “across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage.”

Suffice it to say that anyone who presents this argument, be it Mr. Samson, Vice President Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, suffers from a profound case of subject/object disorder.

In other words, it is a deliberate attempt to detract attention from their own actions by blaming the Europeans for what the entire Trump administration engages in — that is, betraying long-standing traditions of American civilization.

The Trump administration “opposite day mindset”

It is a logical and integral part of the “opposite day mindset” that permeates almost everything the Trump administration is doing at home and abroad.

Many — though not all — of the cases cited by Trump officials to prove that “Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance” are reminiscent of the bizarre internecine displays of hyper-ideological splitism of Trotskyite and other Communist student movements in Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Critical reforms under way in Europe

Moreover, especially on the migration issue, many centrist governments in Europe, including the new Merz government in Germany, are determined to put an end to the manifold abuses of the asylum system.

What is most significant on this front is the real pushback against the ultra-liberal rulings that are regularly of  the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. Nine EU countries, including Denmark which is led by a Social Democrat, demand more control over immigration policy.

Battling China — with whom?

Just how confused the current U.S. administration is about its key strategic goals in the world is demonstrated by one fact. Trump’s team has chosen to engage in a fundamental battle with Europe — the very region that the United States urgently needs in order to succeed in the battle to stand up to China in the global power competition.

That disconnect is perhaps not so surprising coming from an administration led by a President who loves autocrats and cozies up to them with great eagerness, while at the same time despising many democracies, not just European ones.

Ironically, many of the Trump administration‘s deeds and words underscore that what it demands from Europe is not just conformity with its own skewed understanding of political and philosophical traditions, but outright submission.

Disinheriting John F. Kennedy and many others

Mr. Samson also finds that Europe, as the presumable key force behind the global liberal project that he despises so much, “is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people.“

Let us just note in passing that this supposedly deliberate trampling of the global liberal project also disinherits John F. Kennedy and many other U.S. presidents, not just those of Democratic Party heritage, from being part of the West’s civilizational traditions.

What is “globalist conformity”?

Finally, the predictable charge by the Trump camp is raised that the future U.S.-European “partnership must be founded upon our shared heritage rather than globalist conformity.”

Globalism is anything but an avenue to advance conformity. Instead, it is very much an effort to seek to move jointly amid differences of approach and policy.

It is an attempt to solve problems that most nations face on the assumption that they may be more effectively addressed when guided by a mindset of cross-border cooperation.

Deliberately mischaracterizing that constructive striving for cooperation with “globalist conformity” is, in the most innocuous of interpretations, a very transparent attempt to say “my way or the highway.”

Whatever may be said about the challenges currently faced by Western civilization — and it indeed faces quite a few — arguing in favor of submission under the political will of one power is definitely not part of Western civilization.

The U.S. State Department is obviously neither perturbed nor satisfied with representing a nation bitterly divided. It evidently wants to extend the civilizational battle that is going on at home to become the guiding principle for dealing with its oldest and most important allies.