The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy has landed, with not so much a thud as a kind of greasy flutter. Most of the document consists of bombast, sycophancy, lies, inconsistencies, and grotesque self-contradictions. But it also—and this is something missed by the deservedly contemptuous reviews it has received—clarifies some policy preferences and touches on real problems. Like the babble of a thrashing sleeper who alternates between fantasy-laden dreams and cold-sweat nightmares, it is a window into disturbing encounters with the world’s realities.
Once upon a time, these documents were drafted by intellects such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski—both, notably, refugee immigrants. The reports they produced were reasoned, sometimes anodyne, but usually consistent, thoughtful, and historically informed. This NSS seems to have been put together by lickspittles with literary aspirations but no discernible literary skills. Only a disabled cringe reflex, for example, could have permitted the claims that Trump alone has rescued the United States from the machinations of American foreign-policy elites, let alone that he has brought peace (not merely cease-fires) to India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran, or “single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken assumptions about China.” And how would a junior-high English teacher react to the spectacular metaphor invoking Trump’s ability to “surgically extinguish embers of division between nuclear-capable nations and violent wars caused by centuries-long hatred”?
[Eliot A. Cohen: Peace through bungling]
This NSS is a document that can soar only so far as pedantry (strategy is about ends and means—who knew?), and it is oblivious to inconsistency. On the one hand, the administration proclaims a pious and restrained respect for other countries’ customs, beliefs, and political cultures; on the other hand, it has the goal of coercing Europe back to its civilizational roots as understood by the White House’s resident cultural savants. It celebrates American soft power, which is a bit odd given Trump’s unceasing attempts to shut down Voice of America and thereby clear the way for well-funded and sophisticated Chinese and Russian propaganda. It blithely careens between swagger about America’s incomparable strength and terror about its narrowly averted collapse in recent years. It is, in short, an embarrassing mess of a state paper, which appropriately begins with a few boasts from Trump and ends without a conclusion, petering out as it talks about Africa.
But it also has in it three ideas that, stripped of the rants and the brownnosing, are important and at least partially true. The first is that the United States has tended to ignore the Western Hemisphere until a crisis (the Cuban revolution or the near collapse of Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s) causes it to look in its backyard. At the State Department, the power regional bureaus are Europe and the Middle East, followed by Asia; Latin America and Africa are often afterthoughts.
The prescriptions are predictably loopy. What the NSS terms the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is nothing more than an assertion of the right to interfere with any government we dislike. Indeed, I doubt that the administration has any idea what the Monroe Doctrine was originally about—a rejection of European attempts to establish or reestablish colonial rule that was, however, enforceable only by the Royal Navy rather than by the meager American military establishment of the 1820s. There are no real policies here other than deals—nothing about building consensus, establishing deeper ties, or strengthening democratic institutions through, say, the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. Nonetheless, the White House is right to call attention to America’s own backyard.
On Africa, too, which is very nearly an afterthought in the document, there is a kernel of sense: shifting from understanding the continent primarily through the perspective of development aid to one focused on commerce. Although this undervalues some programs—such as the tremendously successful President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), launched by President George W. Bush—it also captures an important idea. For that matter, the administration’s decision to move USAID to the State Department was an entirely sensible move aimed to lend at least some coherence to where and why the United States doles out taxpayer dollars to foreign entities.
And on Europe, the NSS is uncomfortably in the right ballpark in pointing out the challenge of mass migration. If there is one subject that populists in the United States and Europe fully understand that most progressives do not, it is that largely uncontrolled flows of migration produced a crisis in the United States, and far more so in Europe. The White House goes too far in suggesting the probable extinction of European culture, but it has put its finger on a real problem.
This is a populist document. It expresses an undifferentiated loathing of traditional foreign-policy elites, which the administration has shunned. Its intellectual incoherence is that of the angry autodidact, the anti-vaxxer activist, and the anti-Biden conspiracy theorist. This helps account for its ambivalence. The document, like the administration, is split between internationalist and isolationist impulses—offering a commitment to American alliances and a forward presence in Asia on the one hand, and indulging proclivities for “America First” isolationism on the other. In some respects, the NSS reflects the peculiar nature of the Trump coalition, which is composed of different and occasionally mutually antagonistic factions, and above all of the muddled enthusiasms, resentments, insecurities, and vanities of the president himself.
But it also reflects a larger mood. The contempt for foreign-policy elites is nothing new: Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s speechwriter who, in his early 30s, had an advanced degree in creative writing and little expertise in foreign policy, famously sneered at the establishment as “The Blob.” In retrospect, the Biden administration may have been the last gasp of traditional foreign-policy experts such as Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and Director of Central Intelligence William Burns. One cannot count on a Democratic Party ever more influenced by its progressive wing to be any more centrist or thoughtful than the Trump administration, although it may have somewhat better manners. That is a depressing prospect in a dangerous world.
[Anne Applebaum: Why does Steve Witkoff keep taking Russia’s side?]
The one thing the NSS does not present is a coherent picture of America’s adversaries. China is portrayed chiefly as a commercial rival, Russia as a Eurasian power that requires a vague kind of stability, Iran as a menace that has been definitively dealt with by B-2 bombers. Jihadist movements and North Korea are either touched on in passing or ignored altogether.
Strategy for national security is necessary because America has both opponents and outright enemies, who have to be studied and understood if we hope to thwart, contain, or transform them. If we know nothing about them or have comforting illusions about them, or can think about them only in clichés and slogans, the result will be not strategy but mere expressions of an unchained foreign-policy id. Unfortunately, however, judging by both the administration’s behavior and this document, that is what we have before us.
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