When two authoritarian leaderships weaponize fear, Europe becomes the battlefield of a manufactured ideological crisis.
Trump casts Europe as collapsing, a narrative eagerly echoed by the Kremlin. The supposed “existential threat” is political fiction. The true risk lies in the authoritarian agenda that seeks to portray diversity as decay and push Europe backward. Europe needs confidence, unity, and openness — not fear-driven regression.
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By Diotima
The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy frames Europe as a continent facing “existential threat.” The Kremlin’s immediate applause reveals that this is more than geopolitical commentary; it is a coordinated narrative aimed at pressuring a Europe still struggling to articulate a unified vision for itself.
Trump’s warning that “Europe may disappear” is not grounded in evidence but in political anxiety: the anxiety that pluralism, migration, and democratic diversity have reshaped Europe into something unrecognizable to the far-right imagination.
The story he tells follows a familiar script: Europe is not dealing with challenges; it is “being altered” — no longer white enough, Christian enough, or conservative enough. This is political fiction dressed up as strategy.
And the most telling reaction comes from Moscow.
Putin and Trump share more than admiration — they share a worldview. They both need the West to appear divided, fragile, and culturally exhausted. Their ideological bond is anchored in the same authoritarian triad: “Homeland – Religion – Family,” deployed as a tool of control and regression.
Both leaders present themselves as defenders of “civilization,” yet they fight against its pillars: freedom, openness, and diversity. Their message is simple and dangerous: diversity equals decay; minorities equal threat; social change equals collapse.
Europe’s real danger is not migration, nor multicultural transformation.
It is the attempt to push the continent back into a fearful, monolithic past — enforced by two leaders who project their own anxieties onto an entire civilization.
Europe is not disappearing.
What is disappearing is the fantasy that it can return to a 19th-century world ruled by fear, suspicion, and nostalgic authoritarianism.