The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy isn’t a strategy. Despite its pedantic condescension of explaining that “a ‘strategy’ is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means,” the document, released on Dec. 5, fails to meet that standard itself. This “strategy” is instead a statement of values. And those values are vandalism against the very things that have made the United States of America strong, safe, and prosperous.
The document lists the first U.S. vital interest as seeking to “ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States” and hilariously plumps for a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine—though what that means is undefined.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy isn’t a strategy. Despite its pedantic condescension of explaining that “a ‘strategy’ is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means,” the document, released on Dec. 5, fails to meet that standard itself. This “strategy” is instead a statement of values. And those values are vandalism against the very things that have made the United States of America strong, safe, and prosperous.
The document lists the first U.S. vital interest as seeking to “ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States” and hilariously plumps for a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine—though what that means is undefined.
Its other priorities are to “halt and reverse the ongoing damage that foreign actors inflict on the American economy,” “support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe,” “prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East,” and “ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.”
The document also lists U.S. assets, but it makes no attempt to explain how President Donald Trump’s domestic policies, such as the moves against university independence or aggressive deportations, will impact the country’s ability to sustain those advantages. Nor does it orchestrate those assets into actual strategy. Instead, it lists principles such as “flexible realism,” (which one smarty on social media rebutted as “flexible surrealism”) without explaining how that will be translated into policies and budgets. It replicates the wish lists of the past strategies that it criticizes.
The contradictions are legion: The document extolls “sovereignty and respect” but ferociously denigrates European sovereign decisions and advocates interfering in their political processes. There are also hilarious lapses of self-awareness, such as the blithe statement that “departments and agencies of the United States Government have been granted fearsome powers. Those powers must never be abused.” Another winner, given the Trump administration’s destruction of 25 years of policy to cajole India into closer cooperation, is the advocacy that Washington “must continue to improve commercial (and other) relations with India.”
It maligns elites and their prior strategies for having “badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.” This repeats the Biden administration’s mistaken idea that predecessors failed to focus on “foreign policy for the middle class.” Both approaches simply fail to make the case that a stable international order underwritten by U.S. security advances prosperity for Americans and others, giving incentives for voluntary cooperation by other states to uphold U.S. power.
But this “strategy” has no positive agenda to advance and provides no reason that other states should assist or accept U.S. interests. It states that “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.” How, then, can the Trump administration persuade other states to assist in advancing U.S. interests?
The administration’s answer is that every state will advance its own interests, but it falsely assumes that while it is interfering in the domestic politics of other countries and failing to assist or protect them, those countries will facilitate and participate in U.S. military operations, utilize U.S. financial systems when Washington is so obviously weaponizing that access, buy American products, and provide access to their resources and markets.
Strategic failures are almost always also failures of imagination. This is a strategy that lacks the imagination to anticipate that other countries are already hedging against U.S. power and could well move to construct a post-American order that shields against U.S. influence. Globalization is advancing, and this strategy will ensure that it advances without the United States. And that means that the objectives of this strategy will be unattainable.
What this so-called strategy does is reject the values of the post-1945 international order. It takes no interest in interstate conflict—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only briefly mentioned—nor does it consider the ideological nature of authoritarian states to be problematic. It is harshly critical of the countries that are allied to the United States and amplify U.S. power, but not those countries actually seeking to undercut U.S. power.
In fact, what this “strategy” does make clear is that the only war that the Trump administration wants to fight is a culture war. And it sees the United States’ adversaries as partners in that war, but it does not see how much U.S. power relies on the voluntary assistance of other countries.
It also fails to recognize that if the United States isn’t the dominant power of the international order, it will be subject to the rules of others. States that are friends and allies of the United States will despair at this strategy; our enemies will be thrilled.
