It was long overdue and published discreetly, unaccompanied by the usual presidential speechifying so far. And yet America’s new National Security Strategy — the document that in theory will guide foreign policy during the second administration of Donald Trump — speaks volumes about the president’s worldview.
Latin America, already being buzzed by American war planes, won’t be surprised to hear that it is now officially on notice, owing to a newly proclaimed “Trump Corollary” to the old Monroe Doctrine. Europe will be offended by much in the document and should pay attention. China won’t be any wiser, except in knowing that America still, sort of, backs Taiwan. The Middle East, at long last, is shrinking in relative importance. Africa is an afterthought, while North Korea isn’t mentioned at all. By contrast, anti-woke culture warriors should be doing cartwheels.
The NSS is a sporadic document, required by law, that typically signals the gist of an administration’s view on geopolitics. It also guides other papers, such as the National Defense Strategy (also overdue and forthcoming), which have far-reaching bureaucratic and budgeting consequences.
The text produced in the first Trump administration was clear, verging on belligerent, in defining great-power competition with Russia and China (as opposed to the war against terrorism, say) as the guiding principle of US foreign policy. It was also almost certainly never read by the president, who introduced it with a speech that bore little resemblance to its contents.
His second administration’s NSS is different. It is short and apparently worded to fit the attention span and interests of the president. In several passages, it is also well-written, especially as a catchy and populist — but perceptive — critique of the foreign-policy platitudes peddled since the Cold War by Washington’s foreign-policy elite, pejoratively dubbed “the blob.”
Strategy documents for the past three decades, the NSS says, “have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes.” Amen. In particular, the text goes on, “our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.” That’s as pithy a statement of the MAGA rebellion against “liberal internationalism” or the American-led “rules-based order” as you can get.
The NSS’s authors also did their best to navigate around the many contradictions that riddle the president’s foreign policy and by extension the document. His approach, they write, is “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’” A convenient translation: Strategy is whatever Trump says tomorrow on Air Force One, or later in the Oval Office, even if it contravenes everything he said on Truth Social today.
All this preening shouldn’t obscure a shift in some emphases. Several things are consistent: It was always clear that the president views Moscow (not mentioned much, and in part as a potential partner) more favorably than did any of his predecessors since World War II, and that he regards Ukraine’s sovereignty (mentioned in passing on page 25 of 29) as a minor concern of the United States.
China, though, was expected to play a larger, if not the largest, role, since the administration includes notable China hawks who want to shift American resources from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. That mini-pivot still appears to be happening, but is now subsumed within a much bigger reorientation from the world at large to the Western Hemisphere, which Trump seems inclined to boss around. Three months into a mighty military build-up off the coast of Venezuela — and following threats to hemispheric neighbors from Canada to Brazil — that shouldn’t come as a shock.
Some of the harshest and most gratuitous language is reserved for America’s oldest allies in Europe and seems to bear the mark of Vice President JD Vance, who struck the same tone in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February.
The NSS depicts Europe as a continent facing not only “economic decline” but “civilizational erasure,” owing to immigration. The paper also alleges that Europe practices “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition,” a benevolent wink to right-wing parties such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany, which Vance favors but which the European mainstream marginalizes (for good reasons). The NSS concedes that the US can’t “afford to write Europe off” — phew, what a relief — but ominously stipulates that “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
The rest is largely as predicted. The strategy heaps contempt on multilateral and international organizations (which Trump has been quitting, boycotting or deriding), while appearing to bless a return to 19th-century-style spheres of influence: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” Presumably, Trump wants a new Yalta-like arrangement among the US, China and Russia.
And as ever, Trump’s friends, business and golf partners do well: After the document harangues the Europeans for their way of life, it graciously promises to stop “hectoring” the Gulf monarchies into “abandoning their traditions,” which have rarely resembled Madisonian democracy.
I asked Rebecca Lissner what she thought of the strategy; she co-drafted an early version of the NSS during the administration of Joe Biden, before becoming a top advisor to his vice president, Kamala Harris. The paper was “a box-checking exercise,” she emailed me, and “more polemic than policy.” Indeed, it must be the first NSS ever to mention the fight against “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) as a priority in keeping America strong and safe. As in Trump’s first term, it also won’t make much of a practical difference, she thinks, because the president is “too impulsive, erratic, and opportunistic.”
The document is nonetheless worth a read, whether you’re in Beijing or Moscow, Brussels or Berlin, Caracas, Riyadh or even Pyongyang — the latter so inexplicably ignored in the paper. This new National Security Strategy reflects an administration that claims not to have an ideology but still filters the world through its MAGA lenses. It portrays a government that will keep contorting itself to add semantic coherence to the whims of a president who does whatever he wants.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
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