Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy reveals an administration that is preparing for the wrong dangers and in denial about genuine threats. What the White House presented on Friday as a hardheaded, realistic assessment of the geopolitical landscape more closely resembles France’s Maginot Line—a massive fortress built before World War II to stop a German attack that never came while failing to anticipate the one that did.
The document is remarkably different from the one the president issued in his first term. At that time, President Trump’s NSS broke new ground by focusing American strategy on great-power competition with China and Russia. Those countries, the strategy said, “challenge American power, influence, and interests” and are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”
The Biden administration, which I served in, built on this idea in its NSS, which placed strategic competition at the center of U.S. strategy and said that China “is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”
[Eliot A. Cohen: Trump’s security strategy is incoherent babble]
Trump’s latest NSS is a blunt repudiation of the idea—widely shared among Republicans and Democrats—that the United States is in a strategic competition with rival powers. It prioritizes threats from the Western Hemisphere, European civilizational decline and overregulation, and trade deficits but says nothing about the Russian threat to U.S. interests and views China almost entirely through the lens of economic security. The strategy is silent on Beijing’s ambition to displace Washington as the world’s leading power and evinces hope that the U.S. can forge a “genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.” The stance is hardly surprising given Trump’s words and actions over the past few months, but it is still extraordinary. Are we actually meant to believe that Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or, for that matter, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea have become more benign since 2017? Of course they haven’t.
In fact, Americans face many new threats from China and Russia. With an operation by a group that the U.S. government labeled Salt Typhoon, China has compromised U.S. telecommunications networks and can now listen to calls or read text messages by any American it chooses. If you feel like your communications might be of interest to the Chinese Communist Party, you should be using only encrypted apps for messaging and calls. In another operation—labeled Volt Typhoon—China has penetrated U.S. infrastructure, including water-supply plans, electricity grids, and transportation, with a view to conducting destructive cyberattacks on the United States in the event of a war between the two countries. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2025 threat assessment, Russia “is developing a new satellite meant to carry a nuclear weapon as an antisatellite capability,” which, if detonated, “could cause devastating consequences for the United States, the global economy, and the world in general.”
None of these direct threats to the American homeland are even mentioned in Trump’s NSS. The strategy therefore does not explain what the government, Congress, and the private sector should do to fix these vulnerabilities. Instead, it makes one general reference to the need for “a resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters” and “resist and thwart foreign threats.” This neglect is reflected in the administration’s actions. Last week, the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration, intent on smoothing the way for a state visit to China in April 2026, drew back its plan to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security over its cyberattacks on the telecommunications system. The story named Stephen Miller—the White House homeland-security adviser, of all things—as responsible for ensuring that no actions are taken that could threaten U.S.-China détente.
One of the most dramatic geopolitical developments in recent years has been the growing alignment among America’s adversaries and competitors. China is helping Russia reconstitute its military, and in exchange, Russia is providing China with valuable military technology and assistance that could give it an edge over the United States in a conflict. North Korea has sent troops and weapons to Russia in its war against Ukraine, and in exchange, Moscow has helped Pyongyang modernize its military. All of these countries and Iran are cooperating diplomatically against the United States. If a U.S.-China war were to break out, it could easily go global, given these links. Reading the NSS, you’d never know about any of this.
[Thomas Wright: What if ‘America first’ appears to work?]
The strategy also contains no discussion of how the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence might affect the threats facing the United States. White House AI Czar David Sacks has dismissed any discussion of AI risks as “doomerism” and repeatedly attacks those who favor export controls to China, so perhaps the silence around it is to be expected, but the dangers are real. Take cybersecurity as an example. Anthropic recently announced that a Chinese state-sponsored group manipulated its Claude Code tool to attempt to infiltrate roughly 30 targets around the world, including “large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies.” The hackers used “AI’s ‘agentic’ capabilities,” meaning they used AI “not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves.” The company identified this as “the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention.” It will surely not be the last: As AI’s agentic capabilities develop, a growing array of hostile actors will become capable of carrying out large-scale, sophisticated attacks that were once the sole preserve of a small number of national governments.
These dangers are not a secret, nor are they marginal. They lie in plain sight and are arguably the greatest threats the U.S. faces in scale and consequence. So why has the Trump administration chosen to ignore them and to build its Maginot Line (not just as stated in the NSS, but as evidenced by its actions throughout this year) around a trade war, a military buildup in the Western Hemisphere, and a push to undermine the European political establishment? Some of the threats these actions purport to respond to, such as the “civilizational erasure” of Europe, are made up; others, such as drug cartels, are susceptible to far more targeted action than the administration has proposed.
The reason may lie in what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish. Contrary to its protestations about reining in America’s ambition after decades of overreach (what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called “utopian idealism”), it does have a grand plan: The NSS is a blueprint for building an illiberal international order, in which the U.S. can assert dominance unilaterally, strike deals with revisionist powers such as China and Russia, and work patiently to support right-wing populist parties in Europe in overthrowing centrist establishments. One might call it dystopian idealism.
Nowhere is this plan more in evidence than in the section on Europe. The NSS says that Europe is in economic decline and faces the risk of “civilizational erasure” through immigration and the EU’s overregulation. These problems, it says, have created “strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” The administration wants “Europe to remain European,” and thus one of its priorities is “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
As though to drive home the seriousness of the administration’s intentions, on Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his deputy Christopher Landau unleashed a series of posts on X attacking the European Union for its fines on Elon Musk’s social-media company, saying that the U.S. could not remain a partner or military ally to an EU that pursued “policies of civilizational suicide.” Russians close to the Kremlin endorsed the American stance, declaring that Moscow and Washington were aligned in their desire to destroy the EU, and Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the adjustments made in Trump’s NSS “are largely consistent with our vision.”
The Europe section highlights the incoherence of the grand plan. On the one hand, the administration seeks a world of sovereign states and promises to accept other countries for what they are; on the other, with regard to Europe, it advocates regime change and the destruction of the EU, a body that European citizens largely support. A fractured EU will be easy for Beijing to coerce and manipulate, with seismic implications for the United States. Currently, the EU Commission under Ursula von der Leyen is closely aligned with the United States on China, while Trump’s strongest political allies in Europe—most notably Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, and parties such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany—are the most favorably inclined to Beijing. Right now, the U.S. has a good and reliable partner in Europe when it comes to China, and it needs this.
[From the November 2025 issue: The beacon of democracy goes dark]
Even in an illiberal international order, the U.S. will require Europe’s help on matters that run against Chinese interests, such as reducing American dependency on rare-earth metals sourced or processed in China, impeding China’s manufacture of cutting-edge semiconductor chips, and deterring aggression against Taiwan. The administration is deluding itself if it imagines that a fractured Europe with numerous right-wing populist governments will provide any such support. This kind of Europe will cut deals with China and avoid any measures that might antagonize Beijing—some nations because they want to, and others because they are too weak to stand up to China on their own.
The problem with the Maginot Line was not only that it missed where the German attack would come from. It was that France believed that it had defended itself against the only possible threat. The Trump administration’s NSS creates a similar illusion whereby the real dangers are in the Western Hemisphere or from European regulation and multiculturalism, whereas China and Russia are potential partners. But the United States doesn’t get to decide whether Beijing and Moscow pose a threat to the United States. Those countries decide that themselves. The next crisis will not wait for Washington to rediscover strategic competition. If America abandons its allies, ignores clear threats, and treats national security as an extension of a domestic political struggle, the United States may wake up to find that it has no fortress to hide behind at all.
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