Trump crowns himself world king... but kindly lets Russia and China rule their fiefdoms

If the rest of the world wasn't already scared about what the presidency of Donald Trump means for us all, they certainly are now.

- Steve Bloomfield International Editor

The US government's new national security strategy, released on Friday, is abundantly clear about Trump's aims: he does not merely want the US to dominate the world - he wants individual nations to bend to his whim. Sovereignty is for the US only - the rest of us need to follow its orders.

The strategy outlines in great detail the new world order: the western hemisphere belongs to the US; it must intervene to prevent Europe's "civilisational erasure"; democracy and human rights will not be promoted anywhere. In the meantime, there is not a word of criticism of either Russia or China.

Europe got a flavour of this in JD Vance's speech at January's Munich security conference, but this strategy goes further. For the liberal democracies of Europe, this is existential. The strategy criticises Europe's migration policies, its "censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition... and loss of national identities".

It claims that "certain Nato members will become majority non-European" - that is, nonwhite - within a few decades. The great replacement theory has jumped from far-right fringe to US government policy.

There's more. The Ukraine conflict is no longer, in US eyes, an unprovoked war of aggression carried out by Vladimir Putin. It is, instead, a regional issue that needs to be mediated. The United States's role is simply to manage "European relations with Russia ... and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states".

Again, note that it doesn't say "to prevent Russia invading another European nation".

It is also telling that one of the main reasons the US gives for wanting to end the war is to enable it to "reestablish strategic stability with Russia". The US wants to build a fresh alliance with Russia while destroying the one it has with western Europe.