BRUSSELS—For years, the U.S. government has published an annual National Security Strategy that lays out how Washington sees the world and its approach to dealing with looming threats, from China to Russia to drug-traffickers in Latin America.

This week, the Trump administration’s version seemed to reserve its harshest tone for a new target: America’s closest allies in Europe.

The 30-page document painted European nations as wayward, declining powers that have ceded their sovereignty to the European Union and are led by governments that suppress democracy and muzzle voices that want a more nationalistic turn.

It says the continent faces “civilizational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognizable” in two decades—as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies.”

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals. European leaders reading the document need “to assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” said Katja Bego, a senior researcher at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

Timothy Garton Ash , a prominent British historian, described the document “as the mother of all wake-up calls for Europe.”

“We’re in this extraordinary position where the U.S. is still objectively an ally of Europe, but subjectively at least in the Trump administration and the view of many Europeans we’re no longer seeing each other that way,” he said.

Since President Trump returned to office in January, most European leaders have worked to address his concerns while currying favor with him . Those efforts have won kind words from Trump, but others on his team display disdain for Europe and antipathy toward many European policies.

Many points in the National Security Strategy echo critiques that Vice President JD Vance first made weeks into the administration, at a security conference in Munich in February. They amplify criticisms of Europe leveled by MAGA supporters and highlight trans-Atlantic differences.

“It essentially declares outright opposition to the European Union,” said Garton Ash. “It’s JD Vance’s notorious speech in Munich but on steroids, and as official U.S. policy.”

The strategy says the EU—an institution that the U.S. helped establish decades ago—and other transnational organizations “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” It also accuses many European governments of “subversion of democratic processes,” though it doesn’t spell out what it means by that.

Europeans have long acknowledged that their slow-growing economies need fixing and that they must boost military spending , though actions to address those shortfalls have been slow or ineffectual. Many European countries are also clamping down on immigration, which has started to fall. The region remains, by any measure, a critical global bastion of capitalism and democracy, and the U.S.’s strongest historical and cultural partner.

Every Western European country scores higher on the global ranking of freedom and democracy than the U.S. does, according to Freedom House, a U.S.-based nonprofit that ranks countries according to measures such as election process, rule of law and individual rights.

The document casts its criticism of Europe in an almost paternalistic tone—the kind of tough love advice one gives a friend. It begins its three-page section on Europe with the title “Promoting European Greatness.”

The tone and pointed criticisms of Europe contrasts with the document’s approach to traditional U.S. rivals or threats like Russia. Russia isn’t mentioned a single time as a possible threat to U.S. interests.

The section on Europe also highlights differences over the war in Ukraine , accusing European officials of holding “unrealistic expectations” about the war. Significantly, it positions the U.S. as more of an arbiter between Europe and Russia, rather than Europe’s ally opposing Russia, which has been America’s role since the end of World War II. The document also calls for an end to NATO being “a perpetually expanding alliance.”

“The document reads like a brief in favor of the Russian position, calling for European states to get back to work with Russia and offering up the U.S.A. as the vehicle to do this,” said Phillips O’Brien , a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, in his daily newsletter. “This is a strategy to destroy the present Europe, to make it MAGA.”

Rather than presenting a more isolationist America—as many in the MAGA movement have advocated—Bego at Chatham House said the document shows the Trump administration wants to actively reshape Europe in its own image.

“Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the strategy says. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

One section lays out a U.S. foreign-policy goal of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” which analysts read as outright American interference in European politics and support for far-right or anti-immigration parties in Germany, France, the U.K. and other countries.

The document makes no mention of shaping political outcomes in other global regions.

Nathalie Tocci , director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome and a former EU diplomatic adviser, said the document lays out a fairly coherent vision of a world dominated by three big powers—the U.S., China and Russia—who have areas of cooperation and zones of influence.

“I think it’s fairly clear that Europe is seen by the administration as being on the colonial menu” for domination by either the U.S. or Russia, she said. “So to me, the real question is: ’What else needs to happen for us Europeans to wake up to this?’ ”

A spokeswoman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, declined to comment on the whole document but pushed back against the assertion that Europe backs harmful migration policies or undermines free speech. She added that the U.S.’s new security policy contrasted with the strong ties Europe has traditionally had with America.

“The U.S. national security has been very much linked to Europe’s security, which explains also all the work we are doing with the U.S. as our key ally and partner,” including on Ukraine, said Paula Pinho, chief spokeswoman for the Commission.

Vance and other administration officials have criticized democracy in countries such as Germany and France, where mainstream parties maintain a so-called firewall that bars them from entering governing coalitions with far-right parties because of the legacy of fascism.

Vance has criticized this as undemocratic, but most pro-democracy experts say individual political parties are free to choose which other parties they would work with, and whether or not they share the same values. And voters can give far-right parties an electoral majority, allowing them to govern without coalition partners.

Vance and others have also criticized Europe for laws that restrict hate speech—a legacy of the continent’s wars. Yet analysts said there seems little recognition that Europe upholds free speech broadly, including criticism of politicians and leaders, unlike Russia and China.