Much as the Trump administration’s policies toward vaccines or climate change or economic policy ignore history, science, and basic math in ways that actually harm the interests they are supposed to advance, so too does the new U.S. National Security Strategy reject the lessons, principles, and facts associated with two and a half centuries of America’s relations with the world in ways that will put our country and our allies at potentially grave risk.
Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent “peace proposal” for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the Deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.
Whereas past U.S. National Security Strategies have focused on advancing U.S. values like democracy and the promotion of the rule of law, this document is infused with contempt for democracy, an implicit rejection of core principles of international law, and a studied softness bordering on admiration toward global bullies.
The result has been that whereas in the past such strategies have been seen as little more than yawn-inducing exercises in pro-forma wonkery, the latest edition is producing alarm and criticism worldwide, primarily from U.S. allies.
Indeed, while one might hope this document too is ignored in the way its predecessors have been, because it so closely tracks with the practice of Trump foreign and national security policy since January, it cannot and should not be shrugged off so easily.
The introduction to the document, ostensibly written by President Trump, provides the usual litany of dubious assertions we have come to expect. The president who has blown up the world trading system, withdrawn from key alliances and organizations, gutted our diplomatic resources, and exchanged insults with our allies, asserts that he has restored American strength and leadership. The man who has threatened allies with invasion, boasted of attacks around the world, and has a carrier battle group waiting to attack off the coast of Venezuela has claimed once again that he is a peacemaker. But throughout he also hints at what is to come in the document as he reframes the greatest threats against the United States as being immigration and wokeness.
These last points tie into what is the core thrust of the “strategy,” the decision of this administration to align itself with the leaders and political parties worldwide who advocate for and seek to advance ethno-nationalist, anti-globalist, often anti-democratic agendas. This is the alliance of the global right led by Vladimir Putin but also including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, India’s Narendra Modi, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is a group that vilifies immigrants and minorities, promotes odious ideas of national ethnic purity, and embraces authoritarianism as the best path to achieve its goals.
The clearest sign of this shift in the policies and ideology of this administration come in its already highly controversial and inflammatory sections of the strategy implicitly condemning centrist and liberal governments in Europe and supporting the right-wing groups opposing them. Rather than framing, for example, Russian aggression as the greatest threat Europe faces, the document characterizes the moment when “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” as the looming danger that must be averted. It pledges the U.S. to promoting parties that resist immigration, warning that, if unchecked, current policies could lead to “civilizational erasure.”
While the section is called “Promoting European Greatness,” it is clear that what the document wants to advocate is the promotion of Europe’s white Christian past. In a sop to another hobby horse of the right, European tax and regulatory hurdles they often complain of, the document blends the two issues when it says, “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
The strategy also condemns European policies that restrict speech (often hate speech) of the far right, much in the way MAGA does in the United States, by asserting that they constrain “free speech.” All in all, it is one of the harshest critiques of much of modern Europe ever produced by a U.S. administration and a promise that the United States will help work to promote what amounts to a Europe of more Orbans and fewer Macrons.
European leaders were quick to bristle at officials asserting that the countries of the continent did not take U.S. advice on how to organize or conduct themselves, one going so far as to call the document a “frontal attack on the European Union.”
Harmonizing and dovetailing with the Europe section of strategy was a section on the war in Ukraine that had to make Kremlin strategists smile. It argued for achieving the kind of “peace” that Moscow would like, one that came quickly and without, for example, NATO expansion that could conceivably include Ukraine. At the same time, it presented the U.S. as a country seeking to help restore ties between Russia and Europe. Criticism of Russian aggression or war crimes was not to be found anywhere. Seeking “stability” with Russia is cited as a priority.
It will be interesting to see whether as Europe contemplates later this month its future strategy in Ukraine, this document motivates them to embrace a stronger, more independent posture, perhaps rejecting the U.S. opposition to releasing Russian assets for the benefit of Ukraine and thereby sending a message that Europe recognizes the Russian threat even if the U.S. does not.
In the Western Hemisphere, the document calls for a U.S. policy that harkens back to the paternalistic interventionism of the colonial era. The centerpiece is what it characterizes as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially says, this is our hemisphere, we will do as we like here, other major powers need to butt out or deal with Washington.
The corollary to the corollary is shifting U.S. military assets and priorities from elsewhere in the world to the business of protecting our borders from immigrants and so-called “narco-terrorists” as we have recently witnessed. This has likely implications in terms of shifting U.S. troops from Europe and the Middle East (which the document suggests no longer needs to be a top military priority for the U.S.), and it is expected that a soon to be released Defense Department strategy document will underscore and amplify this objective.
In other words, again, much as Russia is doing, the Trump approach is to assert an American right to imposing our will on our “near abroad.” Why? No rationale is seemingly required beyond the fact that we are strong, and they are weaker than we are. (This is the Might Makes Right Doctrine or the Trump Corollary to Thucydides’s assertion that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”)
No such meddling is seen, as it happens, as necessary in the Middle East, where the document calls for respecting local governing traditions and, by implication, not promoting democracy but rather welcoming it when and if it might show up.
With regard to Asia, while there is language blandly reiterating U.S. concerns about China unilaterally reclaiming Taiwan and about maintaining the viability of our alliances that might support that goal, it is offset by language seeking a better working relationship with the People’s Republic and an absence of the kind of criticisms of Beijing that have often accompanied such documents in the past.
Frankly, if I were Taiwanese and reading the document and Trump’s body language these days (and noting Miller’s new assignment making sure administration policy does not get in the way of successful meetings between Trump and Xi Jinping next year), I’d be worried. The language on Taiwan is formalistic and almost invites lawyerly debate about the terms by which annexation might be acceptable.
Reading the document, beyond the influence of the likes of Putin and Miller, you can also sense another hand being involved. From tariffs to sending the U.S. Navy into the Caribbean to imposing our will in our neighborhood to more willingness to be open to China, you’ve got a foreign policy described in the NSS that would have seemed familiar and comfortable to Trump’s favorite president, the man who presided over the end of the last “Gilded Age,” William McKinley. Well, maybe McKinley, plus given the soft view toward known aggressors, perhaps also a touch of Neville Chamberlain.
That their policies ultimately produced a wide variety of unhappy outcomes should have served as a warning to the document’s authors, but as I noted at the outset, the Trump national security strategy is as resolutely deaf to the lessons of history as it is to the complaints of our allies. Which is why, if you hear any applause at all accompanying its release, it will most likely be coming from the direction of America’s rivals and adversaries worldwide and, you know, the racists who do not realize the degree to which immigration has been a central key to the growth and greatness of the United States and many other enlightened nations worldwide.
