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Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, has rejected the Trump administration’s claim that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” because of issues like migration and ethnic diversity.

While she did not criticise the president in personal terms, in evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee she firmly dismissed one of the central ideas in his administration’s new national security strategy.

The document says that “economic decline [in Europe] is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure” and that migration is one of the main reasons for this. It says: “Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less.”

Cooper told the committee that, while the government agreed with some aspects of the strategy (which also calls for higher European defence spending), there were other areas where the UK took a different view.

She went on:

I think [it] wouldn’t surprise you that we’d take a different view on the strength of European democracies, the strength of our freedoms, our support for communities and our social cohesion as well.

And I think if you want to talk about the centuries of civilisation that we have to be proud of, our cultural industries are stronger than they have ever been. It’s a more important part of our economy than it has ever been.

We have strong and diverse communities who are proud to be British, who are an incredibly important part of the kind of country that we are, and we celebrate that, and will continue to do so.

Cooper said it was possible for the UK and the US to have “robust differences” on some topics. And she dismissed that parties had to share Trump’s ideas to be patriotic.

I would also just say I regard my party as a patriotic party as well, and will continue to be very clear about the strength of our country.

I’m very proud of Britain and the diverse country that we are, the creative, dynamic country that we are, and also the strong ally that we are to all sorts of countries across the world.

Cooper was more critical of the Trump document than her junior ministerial colleague, Seema Malhotra, who answered an urgent question about it in the Commons last week.

During that UQ, the former Labour minister Liam Byrne said the document had echoes of “some extreme rightwing tropes that date back to the 1930s”. In a post at the time I described this as a reference to the Nazis, but Byrne subsequently got in touch to say he was not referring to the Nazis but to Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher who wrote The Decline of the West in the 1920s and whose ideas influenced the ‘great replacement theory’ popular with the far right today. Byrne has explained this in more detail in a post on his Radical Centre Substack.