When White Racial Rescue Becomes a Foreign Policy and National Security Priority

MAGA’s Fascist Mission to “Save Civilization”

The Munich Security Conference has recently concluded, and once again United States officials have used it as a backdrop for speeches that seek to normalize right-wing extremism and feature rhetoric that echoes Fascist causes and concerns. One of the main purposes of the Munich Security Conference since its founding in the early 1960s has been to monitor and strengthen collective security against perceived threats from powers outside of Europe.

Now the threat is coming from “inside the building,” so to speak. Not only has the United States vowed “resistance” against multiracial democracies in Europe, but the United State government is also treating issues of national purity and “civilization” as vital to national security. This is Fascist thinking.

As predicted a year ago, America is allying with autocrats; treating European and other democracies as virtual enemies, to the grave detriment of collective security; and shredding democratic norms of international law and justice.

America, Ally of Autocrats

This is a main purpose of the “Board of Peace,” created as a dictator-friendly international structure, and of rogue actions such as kidnapping the Venezuelan head of state and claiming his country’s oil, inviting leaders with arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (Putin, Netanyahu) onto U.S. soil, and threatening to invade NATO member territories such as Greenland and Canada.

To boost this new autocratic order and harm democracies, the United States is also re-establishing relations with dictatorships such as Russian satellite state Belarus, known for its corruption and transnational repression, and also bailing out ailing autocrats with financial subsidies (Javier Milei) and other soon-to-be revealed “fixes” (Viktor Orban) to help them stay in power.

White Racial Rescue as a Foreign Policy and National Security Priority

The authoritarians selected for these “gifts” are part of a transnational effort to rehabilitate right-wing dictatorships from the past, consolidate right-wing and neo-Fascist forces in the present, and protect and reclaim European identity. MAGA is using prestigious international gatherings to announce that foreign policy will be aligned with the uber-goal of saving White Christian civilization.

And so, at the 2025 Munich meeting, we witnessed Vice President J.D. Vance criticizing the “firewall” that prevents the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which contains neo-Nazis and politicians who perform Nazi salutes in public, from being accepted into mainstream German politics. Such “gatekeeping” tactics are essential for democracy protection. With the excuse of protecting “free speech,” United States officials such as Vance are targeting the whole idea of gatekeeping and simultaneously doing their best to normalize Fascism.

This is why Vance met with the leader of AfD in 2025, breaking a taboo. It is why MAGA luminaries who operate internationally, such as Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, perform Nazi salutes, and why Musk showed up (virtually) at an AfD campaign event to tell Germans they no longer needed to feel guilty about Nazism.

Elon Musk speaks at an AfD campaign event, January 2025. Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

Brick by brick, the edifice of protection against authoritarianism will be be dismantled, and the memory of those bloody regimes sanitized. That way, a new Fascist order can come into being, and Europe can return to “greatness” by restoring its White Christian identity.

I have seen this before. In 1927, years before Adolf Hitler came to power, Benito Mussolini formulated a holistic plan to revive Italian greatness through White racial rescue and demographic expansion. It was framed as a means of protecting Italian autonomy and security in international affairs as well. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Il Duce declared. “The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.”

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document comes out of this matrix, reflecting Great Replacement Theory and Fascist thinking. It identifies “civilizational erasure” as Europe’s most pressing problem. “We want Europe to remain European, and regain its civilizational self-confidence,” it states. To that end, the United States will prioritize “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” –code for targeting multifaith and multiracial democracies on the continent.

Racial and demographic reasons even dictate antipathy to NATO, with the Trump administration committed to “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance” on grounds that “certain NATO members” are likely to become “majority non-European” (italics mine).

When MAGA is seen as the latest expression of transhistorical and transnational projects of White racial rescue and hegemony, what one Brookings analyst terms an “odd obsession with civilizational self-confidence” is not odd at all.

These themes also featured in the speech Rubio delivered at Munich 2026, which defended “Western civilization” as the shared identity of the United States and Europe and depicted mass migration as a threat to that civilization.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, February 2026. .

When national security is seen as dependent on solving racial problems, the stage is set for the development of a “racial state,” as some historians refer to Nazi Germany, or at the very least, for the unfolding of mass detention and population engineering justified as a response to a national “emergency.”

The Trump administration’s privileging of racial and civilizational concerns in foreign relations, even bringing racial purity considerations into thinking about international alliances, should be front-page news.