Neocolonial tactics drive US strategy

The US National Security Strategy for Europe is out.

- Redi Tlhabi

And it reads like a horror story about diversity. Europe, according to Washington, is “unrecognisable”. Its politicians are weak. Its borders are porous. Its people, well, apparently they are a threat to civilisation itself.Let that sink in. The world’s oldest democracies are in danger — not from foreign armies, not from nuclear weapons, but from migration, multiculturalism and demographic change. The US strategy isn’t critique. It’s fearmongering dressed in the language of national security.

The obsession with “civilisational continuity” is not new; it is a colonial construct that tries to divide the world into the “civilised” and the “savage”. It was designed to justify domination, control and resource extraction. “Civilisational continuity” is a fancy phrase for an old colonial trick that marks some people as inherently civilised and others as dangerous.

Under the US strategy for Europe, migration is framed as chaos; diversity as collapse. Europe, the strategy says, must resist, hold its borders and preserve its identity. Otherwise, civilisation as we know it will vanish.

But here's the twist: the same administration that lectures Europe about borders and identity turns around and treats Africa like a giant piggy bank. Ideology for Europe. Profit for Africa.