On the Trump Admin’s National Security Strategy: what it is, what it means, and how real is it?

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In lieu of a proper introduction, I will instead offer up some historical quotes about US foreign policy, for reasons that you will instinctively understand.

Egyptian President Gamel Nassar had some choice lines to describe US foreign policy too:

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”

“With the Soviet Union, you know where you stand today and where you will stand tomorrow. With the United States, you never know where you will stand tomorrow—and sometimes not even today.”

“America is like a beautiful woman who changes her mind every night. You can love her, you can fear her, but you can never be sure what she will do in the morning.”

And then there is this recent classic from Russia’s chief diplomat, Sergey Lavrov:

“The USA is agreement non-capable.”

The point of sharing these quotes is to highlight the obvious fact that US foreign policy has long been unpredictable. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if it were a middling power. When a superpower routinely upends the table, it makes life very, very difficult for those countries that have become “states of interest” for the Americans. Creating and pursuing foreign policy strategies require a lot of time and effort, meaning that they are very rarely predicated on short-term trends. When the predictability of foreign actors is removed from the strategic equation, the foundation of any plan becomes very weak.

Earlier this month, the White House issued its 2025 National Security Strategy vision in a 33 page .pdf document available for all to see and read here. This is an action that the US Executive Branch is mandated to do, ever since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. The point of this exercise is to articulate the vision of the President of the United States of America regarding foreign policy, so as to effectively communicate said vision to Congress and the American people. It does not mean that it is an official foreign policy strategy, since this area of governance is the responsibility of both the executive and legislative branches of the US Government.

Because this is the Trump Administration, and because of the fever pitch that has coloured both of his terms in office, a lot of attention is being given to this iteration of this mandatory document. This document is intentionally high-level (meaning that it purposely doesn’t drill down into specifics), keeping within the tradition of previous administrations. However, attention is warranted this time, because the vision outlined by President Trump per this document indicates a significant break in both the USA’s approach to and philosophical arguments regarding how and why it conducts its foreign policy. Despite the obvious Trumpist (think: transactional) touches interspersed throughout this document, what it does represent is a stated desire to break with certain idealist practices of recent administrations in favour of a more realist approach and worldview, one that stresses respect (if we accept the document at face value) for national sovereignty, and an admission that US global hegemony is simply not possible.

So what we are left with is a document that outlines a new vision for US foreign policy, one that has determined that taking on both Russia and China simultaneously is the wrong approach to securing American national interests. This makes it very worthy of closer inspection and analysis (something that I have been thinking about deeply since it was first made available to the public a fortnight ago). Before we begin to dive into it, I am asking you all to temporarily suspend your cynicism and take the strategy outline at face value for the sake of this analysis. I will once again repeat that this is not official policy, and there is a very strong chance that it will never be adopted as that.

Two and a half years ago, I published an essay entitled Turbo America to describe how I interpreted US foreign policy. This was the culmination of several years of essays, and was received quite well. Unfortunately, a lot of people misconstrued what I said in that essay, either deliberately or through failure to grasp the concepts that I had outlined in it (while others didn’t even read it and decided to make up new definitions for a concept that I created), leading me to post a simplified version of my argument. In this simplified version, I reduced my Turbo America thesis down to four points:

Here is what Turbo-America means in concrete terms:

1. continued direct and indirect conflict with Russia, whether military (no appetite for direct here, so it’s done by proxy), economic, or diplomatic
2. boxing China in through the use of targeted economic policies/sanctions, and the beefing up of The Quad, alongside efforts to cobble together an “Asian NATO” that would do to Beijing what NATO has been doing to Moscow
3. Disciplining, streamlining, and homogenizing its own allies to align these countries with the USA politically, economically, culturally, and socially more than they already are i.e. creating unofficial new states of the United States of America via micro-management, targeted sanctioning, espionage, etc.
4. Imperial management via overseeing/managing conflicts in the US Zone of Influence, with the conflicts in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon being the best example at present

The reason why I bring up Turbo America is that this new document can be seen as a partial repudiation of it, for reasons that we will discuss shortly. The significance in this is that, if taken at face value (once again), this strategic vision is a repudiation of the liberal interventionist approach that has dominated US foreign policy for over a generation now. This repudiation is made abundantly clear in the document:

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

………

They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.

This does constitute a rejection of the approach up to the end of the Biden Administration. When taken in tandem with Trump tearing up international trade covenants and institutions in favour of bilateral deals, it does signal an end to globalism, both economic and political. In short: if made real, it would serve to end what is commonly referred to as the ‘rules-based order’. The Trump Administration has effectively concluded that the present economic and security architectures no longer serve the American people as well as they once did, and that a new approach is warranted to pursue US global interests and maintain American power on the world stage.

The document makes clear the administration’s hostility to globalism:

And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.

Distrust of international institutions such as the United Nations has always been present in Republican circles, but this time around it is much more pronounced. Yes, the Dubya Regime did pursue a unilateralist approach that did its best to eschew the multilateralism of the Clinton era, but it still did present its case regarding Iraq at the UN over and over again.

More importantly, this strategy places great emphasis on respecting the state sovereignty of other states, something that was entirely absent from earlier GOP governments. This creates significant problems for the hyper-interventionist set in DC, as they tie the right to state sovereignty to certain individual rights, often the result of recent social trends in the USA. If transgressed, these states can lose their right to sovereignty if the Eye of Sauron glares down at them. The repeated emphasis on national sovereignty concedes the point that not every country should turn into the USA, whether culturally, politically, or socially. USAID has become a notable casualty of this desired policy shift.

‘Core, vital national interests’

Since this vision is high-level, it creates wide avenues of approach for critics of this proposed set of policies. One common refrain will be that this administration seeks to ‘have its cake and eat it too’. Allow me to highlight one example where this is a fair critique:

We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the “forever wars” that bogged us down in that region at great cost.

Ever since the Obama Administration, US foreign policy planners have sought to reduce the American footprint in the Middle East in order to pursue its “Pivot to East Asia”. The problem with this stated desire is that events get in the way, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. We will discuss this region further down in this analysis, but for now I will raise the obvious question stemming from this proposal: What if regional micromanagement is the only way to prevent any perceived adversary from displacing the USA in the Middle East?

The above excerpt is located within a section entitled “What Do We Want In and From the World?” Clearly, keeping the shipping lanes open in the Persian Gulf is deemed a ‘core, vital national interest’, which highlights that this vision is not one of isolationism, a charge that is very often applied to Trump’s foreign policy approach. Instead, it seeks to balance the costs of micromanagement with the interest at stake, in order to reduce the amount of US investment (preferably offloading costs to other actors).

Closer to home, the proposal calls for a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine:

We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

The so-called ‘ruled-based order’ rejected the idea that the globe could be divided into ‘spheres of influence’. Without saying it outright, the USA long claimed the right to involve itself in every corner of the globe where it saw fit to do so, provided that it had the ability in the first place. One of the main reasons why Russia’s letter to the USA just prior to the invasion of Ukraine was rejected was that the Americans could not agree (nor permit) that idea that the country fell within Moscow’s sphere of influence. This is not an official concession that spheres of influence actually do exist, but by planting the Stars and Stripes from Alert Island to Tierra del Fuego, the Americans are tacitly conceding the point.

The Trump Administration has concluded that it cannot govern the entire globe and seeks to take a step back, without totally disengaging from it. “Cut the fat”, is the obvious method being outlined, as that fat brings no benefit to the USA, only unnecessary burdens. Any which way you look at it, this is sensible policy.

The document also re-states perceived American strengths:

• A still nimble political system that can course correct;

• The world’s single largest and most innovative economy, which both generates wealth we can invest in strategic interests and provides leverage over countries that want access to our markets;

• The world’s leading financial system and capital markets, including the dollar’s global reserve currency status;

• The world’s most advanced, most innovative, and most profitable technology sector, which undergirds our economy, provides a qualitative edge to our military, and strengthens our global influence;

• The world’s most powerful and capable military;

• A broad network of alliances, with treaty allies and partners in the world’s most strategically important regions;

• An enviable geography with abundant natural resources, no competing powers physically dominant in our Hemisphere, borders at no risk of military invasion, and other great powers separated by vast oceans;

• Unmatched “soft power” and cultural influence; and

• The courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people.

I must take issue with the first point. The USA is presently in a state of demosclerosis, a condition in which all politics seize up and the battleground is only inches wide. The proliferation of vested interests combined with a low-level political civil war condition means that actual, tangible structural reform is all but impossible when added to its short electoral cycles. For example, Trump’s somewhat clumsy approach to tariffs makes sense if you view it as his attempt to lay the groundwork to restructure the US economy by attracting more investment in manufacturing, with re-industrialization of the USA a common theme throughout this proposal. Hemmed in by a separation of powers, his avenues of approach to this are significantly limited. Making matters worse is that the electoral cycle punishes long-term thinking because it usually involves short-term pain.

Trump and his team are correct when they bring up the USA’s deep pockets, both in terms of its capital and consumer markets. Everyone wants access to both of these, and they serve as powerful tools for the Americans to pursue their interests, and even more importantly, to set the ground rules for engagement. The EU bent over to US designs regarding Ukraine not because of a fear of a Russian invasion, but because they wanted continued access to these markets lest their economies completely blow up (more on this later). Even developing countries prefer to sell low-value exports to the USA rather than re-orient their economies around a potential BRICS bloc. The USA is very rich and this policy proposal intends to keep it that way.

Principles

There are some funny bits interspersed throughout this document, and all of them are true Trumpisms. For example, check out this bit of self-congratulatory exaggeration:

President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace. In addition to the remarkable success achieved during his first term with the historic Abraham Accords, President Trump has leveraged his dealmaking ability to secure unprecedented peace in eight conflicts throughout the world over the course of just eight months of his second term. He negotiated peace between Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the DRC and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and ended the war in Gaza with all living hostages returned to their families.

Suffice it to say that many of these conflicts are not going away any time soon. Cambodia an Thailand were trading artillery barrages only 48 hours ago in a new outbreak of fighting there. I think that we must set aside our own biases and permit the world’s most powerful man to indulge in a bit of self-ego-stroking.

The summary of this section does reflect the desire to have one’s cake and eat it too:

President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being “pragmatist,” realistic without being “realist,” principled without being “idealistic,” muscular without being “hawkish,” and restrained without being “dovish.” It is not grounded in traditional, political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, “America First.”

This is a restatement of principles that form the America First vision, but it also intends to assuage fears of a desire to pursue an isolationist strategy. It implies flexibility over dogmatism, which, again, is sensible.

Several principles of this strategy are listed, but I will highlight ones that I think merit closer inspection:

Predisposition to Non-Interventionism – In the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders laid down a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations and made clear the basis: just as all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights, all nations are entitled by “the laws of nature and nature’s God” to a “separate and equal station” with respect to one another. For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.

Keeping within the themes of realism and flexibility of approach, the Trump Administration seeks to roll back the trend towards greater intervention in foreign states, a trend that has coloured US foreign policy for a very, very long time. This isn’t a new trend, and the USA has been intervening elsewhere for well over a century. We must view this as rebuke to the interventions of the Dubya and Obama eras, where supposed human rights violations would result in a trigger response (think R2P), and where nation-building was seen as a core objective. This doesn’t mean that intervention is totally off of the cards, as the examples of the Neo-Monroe Doctrine and the desire to maintain free shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf already inform us.

Flexible Realism – U.S. policy will be realistic about what is possible and desirable to seek in its dealings with other nations. We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories. We recognize and affirm that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in acting according to such a realistic assessment or in maintaining good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours even as we push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms, furthering our interests as we do so.

A lot of the hostility directed towards the USA is the result of its attempts to engage in social engineering overseas whereby some countries’ societies, customs, cultures, etc. were to be harmonized with that of the USA in the name of “liberal democracy”. The point above signals an end to that experimentation, stressing respect for foreign cultures and national sovereignty. It also would remove leverage that has traditionally been used by the USA to blacken a targeted regime as “authoritarian” or “illberal”, and so on. On a personal note, this is, for me, one of the highlights of the entire proposal.

Which elegantly flows into the next point:

Primacy of Nations – The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.

In short: the end of Globalism and return to the nation-state as the main actor in international relations. Realists and Neo-Realists cheer.

Balance of Power – The United States cannot allow any nation to become so dominant that it could threaten our interests. We will work with allies and partners to maintain global and regional balances of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries. As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others. This does not mean wasting blood and treasure to curtail the influence of all the world’s great and middle powers. The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations. This reality sometimes entails working with partners to thwart ambitions that threaten our joint interests.

In the second part of this analysis, we will delve into specific countries and regions mentioned in this document. The above point is an instance where ‘stay the course’ is actually the case because this is what the USA is already attempting to do in places like East Asia when it comes to China. The Quad is going to get a significant boost in attention and resources (if Trump has his way), because it will play a key part in containing China and perceived Chinese expansionist aims. The question here is: does this include NATO to keep Russia in check?

Priorities

I find it rather curious that the first priority brought up is largely one belonging to domestic politics, but there is a good reason for it:

The Era of Mass Migration Is Over – Who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation. Any country that considers itself sovereign has the right and duty to define its future. Throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners, who also had to meet demanding criteria. The West’s experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom. In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass migration must end. Border security is the primary element of national security. We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking. A border controlled by the will of the American people as implemented by their government is fundamental to the survival of the United States as a sovereign republic.

Besides the points brought in the excerpt above, the implications of such a policy approach permit other states in the American orbit the right to pursue the exact same policy for themselves. When combined with the repeated calls for respecting national sovereignty, the desire to roll back international institutions, and the criticism of the NGO sector, this must be interpreted as a green light for other states to freely engage in immigration-restrictionist politics, free from the fear of punishment by other countries, or more commonly, from international bodies. This is an assist to political parties seeking to curb mass migration.

The following point leapt out at me:

Protection of Core Rights and Liberties – The purpose of the American government is to secure the God-given natural rights of American citizens. To this end, departments and agencies of the United States Government have been granted fearsome powers. Those powers must never be abused, whether under the guise of “deradicalization,” “protecting our democracy,” or any other pretext. When and where those powers are abused, abusers must be held accountable. In particular, the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common government are core rights that must never be infringed. Regarding countries that share, or say they share, these principles, the United States will advocate strongly that they be upheld in letter and spirit. We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

There are two elements to the bolded section:

1. at present, the EU is waging war against Elon Musk and X (no doubt at the behest of the anti-Trump faction in Washington, DC). This policy aims to put them on notice that this kind of behaviour won’t be tolerated from purported allies to who claim to uphold western liberal democracy. It also informs these purported allies that rigging the political game against populists will also be opposed.
2. On the other hand, it runs counter to the previously mentioned respect for state sovereignty that is located throughout this document. Is it a case of “our meddling will be proper when we do it?” It also creates a de facto core US+allies geography, one that includes the Americas, Europe, and the rest of the Anglosphere.

Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting – The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over. We count among our many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense. President Trump has set a new global standard with the Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and which our NATO allies have endorsed and must now meet. Continuing President Trump’s approach of asking allies to assume primary responsibility for their regions, the United States will organize a burden-sharing network, with our government as convener and supporter.

This approach ensures that burdens are shared and that all such efforts benefit from broader legitimacy. The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability. This strategic clarity will allow the United States to counter hostile and subversive influences efficiently while avoiding the overextension and diffuse focus that undermined past efforts. The United States will stand ready to help—potentially through more favorable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement—those counties that willingly take more responsibility for security in their neighborhoods and align their export controls with ours.

One of the most Trumpist portions of the policy proposal, we see here both Trump’s transactional nature and focus on making sure that the USA doesn’t get “ripped off”. So important is this idea in Trump’s mind, that you can find him repeating it over and over again in his social media history stretching back well over a decade now:

The core idea is that US foreign policy must be based around mutual win-wins with allies, and that these same allies must contribute their fair share. A more cynical view is that Trump seeks to extend the world’s largest protection racket. Supporters will say that Europe has been coasting under the protection of the US defense umbrella, allowing it to spend recklessly on its social programs while the Americans shoulder the burden of defense-spending. This is a valid criticism.

We’ll stop here and I will publish the second and last part this week. It’ll be the more fun portion, as it drills down into specific regions and countries, and I will have a lot to say regarding how Europe is characterized in this document.

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