Trump’s National Security Strategy

An Incoherent Disaster Filled With Grievance That Punishes Allies and Cedes Terrain and Initiative to Enemies

This post provides an in-depth breakdown of key parts of the National Security Strategy and why it represents not only a major departure from previous trends in American foreign policy but also a threat to American interests.

Dear readers,

On Friday evening I shared my initial take on the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) published by the White House. Public commentary and responses from European leaders, State Department officials, and administration-adjacent figures have only solidified my initial read on the document. This analysis further reviews Trump’s roadmap for American national security and foreign policy. The bottom line up front: This “strategy” eases pressure on U.S. adversaries, seeks to coerce allies, and binds U.S. influence to the Western Hemisphere while ceding influence in Europe to Russia and influence in Asia to China. This will upend decades of U.S. strategy across both Republican and Democrat administrations which will result in the exact opposite of the strategic stability the NSS professes to pursue. If the concepts and visions for American foreign policy included in the 2025 National Security Strategy are actualized, future generations will look back on this moment as the closing chapter of 80 years of cooperation with post-war Europe and the start of America’s retreat from the world’s stage.

The reality of the Trump administration is that the NSS may be implemented partially or not at all as the current administration has frequently acted on Trump’s whims and personal interests. Nevertheless, the NSS should be evaluated based on the merit of the former strategies that drove U.S. policies and the ability of the departments and agencies to implement the President’s signed strategy.

“Flexible Realism” and “Primacy of Nations”

There are two guiding concepts listed in the first half of the National Security Strategy that are crucial to understanding the Trump administration’s approach towards foreign policy. The first, “Flexible Realism”, calls for the United States to be “...realistic about what is possible and desirable to seek in its dealings with other nations.” This concept is further expanded on, with the strategy stating “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.”

While a proponent of “Flexible Realism” would argue that this strategy prevents over-extension of American resources and allows the United States to engage with international partners without preconditions, we should consider what this policy approach says about the driving force behind American foreign policy in the Trump era. Previously, the United States functioned as the de facto guarantor of security for liberal democracies across the globe. Our free markets, free elections, and the freedoms entrusted to every American citizen represented the ideal form of government and were worth fighting for when challenged at home or abroad. Our allies and our alliances were predicated on mutual respect towards these concepts. Given the spread of democracies across the world through the third wave of democratization, these concepts also created greater alignment between our citizens and the citizens of our friends, which has since increased the likelihood of relationships that endured across changes in governments.

When Washington worked with illiberal governments or authoritarian regimes (be it Putin’s Russia during the Obama-era “Reset” or dictatorships like Uzbekistan during the Global War on Terror) our bilateral engagement carried the expectation that our partner would liberalize and partially align with American concepts of governance. A well-known example of this is that alignment with American laws regarding child labor is a requirement for signing free trade agreements with the United States. While adhering to these principles sets a limit on engagement with some countries, American leadership correctly viewed these concepts as an integral part of our interests in the world. This also helped expand soft-power and cement American norms as being the international standard for telecommunications, finance, and other elements of the modern economy. Those norms, not tariffs and punitive trade restrictions, were the key points of the multilateral trade agreements like Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that President Trump has discarded so easily - even as the National Security Strategy says we should seek to continue to lead in those areas. Additionally, the reference to the “primacy of nations” as a guiding concept in the National Security Strategy suggests that the Trump administration will not pursue cooperation with multilateral institutions, alliances, and transnational nongovernmental organizations. This will undoubtedly further limit the United States’ influence in decision-making processes relevant to international trade and security and generate a power vacuum that will be filled by China, Russia, and Iran.

Under the 2025 National Security Strategy there is no guiding concept, no higher ideal, and no shared values that guide American foreign policy. “Flexible Realism” means working with religious theocracies in the Middle East without objection. “Flexible Realism” means appeasing dictators in the name of “stability” and turning a blind eye to the inherent chaos authoritarians invite. “Flexible realism” means that the only driving force behind American foreign policy are the whims of Donald Trump and the commercial interest of his inner circle. We should remember that the institutions, alliances, and concepts that serve as the backbone of our international system and the post-war order once represented a form of idealism. By adhering to this strategy, the Trump administration has put an end to the notion of America as a “city upon a hill” and a beacon of hope for the free world.

The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine

According to the 2025 National Security Strategy, the United States will begin refocusing its strategic interests away from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and will instead treat the Western Hemisphere as the primary theater for American foreign policy. This includes a reference to a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. As mentioned in my initial reflection, this means that the United States will not tolerate the influence of adversarial peers like Russia or China in the Americas, or the presence of multilateral formats opposed to American interests like BRICS. This also means that the United States will take any actions deemed necessary to retain control over the Western Hemisphere - including using military force against unfriendly governments. This ignores a key lesson of history: the long history of United States’ interference and interventions in the region have not only generated significant distrust (which opponents of the US have used to gain influence and maintain power), but have also compounded many of the problems the US now seeks to solve.

The reference to the Trump Corollary in the National Security Strategy suggests that the current buildup and posturing by the military off the coast of Venezuela is not a one-off response to a political crisis, but is instead a model for American policy towards our Latin American neighbors. While the current deployment off the coast of Venezuela is ostensibly a response to the threat of maritime narco-trafficing from Venezuela, the Trump administration may not see a need to provide pretext to future military actions in the Western Hemisphere.

It should be noted that under the Trump Corollary, the United States’ dominion over the Western Hemisphere will not be synonymous with benevolent, warm relations with our neighbors. The American border will remain militarized and border crossings will likely continue to be restricted with Latin American citizens and residents of the United States experiencing profiling from ICE and other domestic authorities. Parallel to this, the prospect of the United States military using kinetic force will remain a possibility for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is a prescription for flashpoints and fires in our own backyard. While the document makes no reference to the annexation of Greenland or Canada, it’s impossible to rule out a renewed interest by the Trump administration if relations with Ottawa and Copenhagen continue to deteriorate.

“Promoting European Greatness”

Perhaps the most alarming portion of the National Security Strategy is the section titled “Promoting European Greatness.” While much of the document can be seen as the basic outline of the realist, transactional foreign policy, “Promoting European Greatness” reads as a manifesto against the post-war European political project and a reflection of the far-right rhetoric that guides the White House under the second Trump administration. The section shifts from standard claims of Europeans not meeting defense spending to anti-democratic coercion to advance Trump-friendly far-right governments, invoking replacement theory, calling it “civilizational erasure” due to patterns of migration. The Trump NSS squarely targets the European Union and liberal governments while avoiding efforts to protect Western societies from Russian and far-right disinformation campaigns and censorship.

The United States wants Europe to spend more on arms and meet defense spending targets set by NATO while also seeking “Strategic Balance” with Russia. It should be noted that the concept of “strategic balance” remains undefined and open for interpretation - does this mean Russia is subdued and cooperative with the Atlantic community, or that Russia is given free reign and its own sphere of influence? The lack of clarity of what exactly this means may be intentional and designed to accommodate future changes in Trump’s rhetoric towards Europe, Ukraine, and Russia. The United States will also support “patriotic parties” across the continent that seek to subvert the European Union while strictly engaging with individual countries across the continent. Perhaps the most drastic objective included in this section is “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance”, suggesting that countries like Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova will be unable to receive NATO membership in the future. The vision for Europe under the second Trump administration is a fractured continent governed by far-right parties seeking “strategic balance” with an aggressive neighbor that once held dominion over everything east of Berlin. To achieve this vision, the United States will work to undo decades of European integration and destroy a project that was once seen as the cornerstone of the post-war liberal international order.

Indefensible Taiwan and “Traditional Systems of Government” in the Middle East

The 2025 National Security Strategy has major implications for the United States’ role in Asia and the Middle East. In both theatres, the US will be pulling back from its current scope of engagement and will be leaning more on allies and neutral governments to maintain stability. In Asia, this means expecting that Japan, Korea, and Australia spend more on defense in order to maintain strategic parity with China. Although there is no change in America’s Taiwan policy, there is the possibility that without an increase in allied spending that Taiwan becomes “indefensible.” China is no longer described as an adversary or threat to democratic interests abroad but is instead framed as a competitor in trade that may be dissuaded from future conflict. Coupled with the aforementioned long-term outlook on Taiwanese sovereignty, it would appear that the United States no longer views the Asia-Pacific as a region that may be secured from aggression through American and allied deterrence. We are no longer relying on shared values to build connections with our democratic allies in East Asia and turning increasingly coercive on trade in ways that mimic China’s strong arming of the same populations. We must ask ourselves what impact this will have on our ability to coordinate collective defense policies in the region.

Simultaneously enacting policies that will generate resentment among our allies while asking those same partners to dedicate greater resources to defending American interests will create long-term fractures in these relationships. Through this approach we risk alienating allies whose support is integral to meeting the strategic challenge of China.

The Trump administration’s policy vision for the Middle East includes a curious detail regarding democratization in the region. According to the National Security Strategy, the United States will no longer “hector” potential partners in the region about our objections to their “traditional” style of governance. We can infer that this means the United States will no longer reference reform or democratization when engaging with Gulf monarchies or authoritarian regimes throughout the region. I believe this is a short-sighted miscalculation by the Trump administration. This month marks the one-year anniversary of the end of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria: a reminder that even an entrenched autocracy can collapse under its own weight and dysfunction after enough time. Had this policy been the guiding principle for American foreign policy in the Middle East a year ago, Assad’s government would have been labeled one of several “traditional governments” in the region that were impervious to change and potentially worthy of American support and assistance. The inclusion of this clause does nothing to advance American interests in the region or accommodate real power dynamics in the Middle East - it was likely added to facilitate further deals between members of Trump’s inner circle and Gulf monarchies. The Arab Spring showed us how quickly the dynamics in a country and region can change in the face of popular outrage. Our failure to anticipate such a change in Iran in 1979 led to decades of problems for the United States. We should not overestimate the stability of dictators today if we expect to have good relations in the region for the long-term.

Aftermath

By Saturday morning, European leaders and State Department Officials alike had shared public comments on the National Security Strategy online. The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of “patriotic parties” and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is “consistent with our vision.”

Parallel to this discourse, far-right influencers and tech figures like Elon Musk have called to abolish the EU after “X” was fined by the European Commission for violations of transparency standards. While not directly related to the National Security Strategy, the timing of this development added a new degree of fervor to online discourse on potentially dismantling the EU by members of the far-right.

There are few elements of this National Security Strategy that can be seen as objectively beneficial to the United States and to the average American. This strategy is equal parts misguided and incoherent and seeks to maintain American influence in key regions of the world while decreasing our footprint and strategic focus. Coupled with the decimation of USAID, the shuttering of Voice of America, and recent reporting on the potential withdrawal of American forces from European NATO members by 2027, it would appear that the Trump administration has already done lasting damage to American soft power abroad.

The sweeping reversal of U.S. national security strategy has triggered a backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike. Congress, alert to the threats of Trump policy, has looked to legislate restraint. The recent National Defense Authorization Act unveiled near simultaneously with the 2025 NSS secures funding for Ukraine security aid, establishes guardrails that limit the ability of the White House to suspend military intelligence sharing between Kyiv and Washington, and formally authorizes funding for the Baltic Security Initiative. While these provisions are potential counterweights to elements of the 2025 NSS, we must reckon with the reality that there is a pronounced incongruence between the foreign policy vision of the White House and the interests of Congress and the American people.

The question now isn’t “how do we course correct” or “how do we walk-back these policies.” In four years, the next administration will have to piece together a new strategy in a more dangerous world where our presence has diminished and our alliances have been damaged.

Planning for what comes next begins now.

Former Marine Colonel Doug Krugman was a contributor to this post.