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Pictured above is Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times. In his column published in the December 13, 2025, hardcopy version of the paper, Friedman characterizes what is going on in American politics as a "Third Civil War." That characterization is highlighted in the hardcopy headline - "The United States Is Entering Its Third Civil War." Online, Friedman's headline reads this way: "Trump Isn’t Interested in Fighting A New Cold War. He Wants A New Civilizational War."
What quickly attracted my attention to Friedman's column was this statement, contained in a pull-quote (again, I'm citing to the hardcopy version of his column): "Trump wants to define the American homeland, and determine who belongs in it."
In thinking about who "belongs" in the United States, Trump and J.D. Vance, our current Vice President, both have a hang-up about "race" and "ethnicity." Both of them suggest that our national definition is both linked to, and properly limited to, those whose progenitors came here from Western Europe, and who are, for the most part, both White and from a Judeo-Christian background.
In fact, and to the contrary, the greatest thing about the United States is that our "nation" has never been defined by a shared racial or religious legacy. We are, to use that now-suspicious phrase made famous by John F. Kennedy, a "nation of immigrants."
What does, then, define an "American," if it is not race, religion, or origin?
What defines an "American" is the fact that Americans are self-selected and self-designated by having pledged their lives and fortunes to the proposition that "all persons are created equal," with an equal opportunity to act both individually and collectively. This means that our national identity is connected to our acceptance of the "political" definition of who qualifies, as specified in both the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
And who are those who qualify? Who qualifies is anyone who accepts what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution say about how we will live together, and build what I try to get people to understand is a "political world."
As I bring this blog posting to its finish, let me quote from Friedman's column (emphasis added):
To me, the deep backdrop to Trump’s National Security Strategy [is that] he is not interested in refighting the Cold War to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy. He is, in my view, interested in fighting the civilizational war over what is the American “home” and what is the European “home,” with an emphasis on race and Christian-Judeo faith — and who is an ally in that war and who is not.
The economics writer Noah Smith argued in his Substack this week that this was the key reason the MAGA movement began to turn away from Western Europe and draw closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia — because Trump’s devotees saw Putin as more of a defender of white Christian nationalism and traditional values than the nations of the European Union.
Historically, “in the American mind,” Smith wrote, “Europe stood across the sea as a place of timeless homogeneity, where the native white population had always been and would always remain.” However, “in the 2010s, it dawned on those Americans that this hallowed image of Europe was no longer accurate. With their working population dwindling, European countries took in millions of Muslim refugees and other immigrants from the Middle East and Central and South Asia — many of whom didn’t assimilate nearly as well as their peers in the U.S. You’d hear people say things like ‘Paris isn’t Paris anymore.’”
Today’s MAGA-led American right, Smith added, does “not care intrinsically about democracy, or about allyship, or about NATO, or about the European project. They care about ‘Western civilization.’ Unless Europe expels Muslim immigrants en masse and starts talking about its Christian heritage, the Republican Party is unlikely to lift a hand to help Europe with any of its problems.”
In other words, when protecting “Western civilization” — with a focus on race and faith — becomes the centerpiece of U.S. national security, the biggest threat becomes uncontrolled immigration into America and Western Europe — not Russia or China. And “protecting American culture, ‘spiritual health’ and ‘traditional families’ are framed as core national security requirements,” as the defense analyst Rick Landgraf pointed out on the defense website “War on the Rocks.”
And that’s why the Trump National Security Strategy paper is no accident or the work of a few low-level ideologues. It is, in fact, the Rosetta Stone explaining what really animates this administration at home and abroad.
Let us use Friedman's "Rosetta Stone" to understand what political proposition is being suggested to us.
When we have understood that, when we are clear about what is being proposed to us, let us then reject that proposition - outright and unequivocally - since it is clear that this proposition is so profoundly "unAmerican!"
