On Sept. 2, when American military aircraft targeted a boat in the Caribbean and reportedly followed it with a strike to pulverize the shipwrecked survivors, it was a new assertion of U.S. imperial impunity. But it was also a confusing one, given the obvious disproportionality between the world’s most expensive military force and the piddling target, which the Pentagon insisted, without offering evidence, was carrying drugs. Was this really what the Trump administration believed its newly rechristened Department of War should be doing?
On Thursday the Pentagon published its much-anticipated 2025 National Security Strategy and confirmed that the answer was, basically, yes. This is precisely what the Trump administration wants to be doing: withdrawing from the military’s conventional arenas, like preparing for possible conflict with rival great powers and instead fighting, with overwhelming shows of swaggering force, the kinds of battles prioritized by online reactionaries. It wants to be fighting those culture wars in other theaters as well, promoting right-wing politics across Europe and encouraging a clampdown on migration not just in the United States but globally.
Among President Trump’s most conspicuous breaks with D.C. tradition is his view of politics as a form of trolling. Whereas the federal bureaucracy usually extrudes texts that are guardedly bureaucratic, the Trump administration is often so needlessly confrontational, the statements seem fake. The scattered and self-contradictory strategy document follows this pattern, including swipes at diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and calls for the reshoring of American manufacturing, a war on the global climate agenda and more military spending by European powers (or else risk American abandonment).
But above all, the 2025 National Security Strategy is the most comprehensive articulation yet of how Trump sees Trumpism playing out on the world stage. It acknowledges the ideological incoherence of the president’s foreign policy instincts but tries to make it a virtue. Global Trumpism, the document asserts, “is not grounded in traditional, political ideology” but “is motivated above all by what works for America — or, in two words, ‘America First.’” The political scientist Henry Farrell called it “Groyper grand strategy cosplay.”
As you might expect if you’ve seen clips of solicitous secretaries at cabinet meetings or similarly sycophantic gatherings of tech chief executives, the text is worshipful toward the president — “President Trump has cemented his legacy as the president of peace,” it declares, as a flotilla sits in the Caribbean, possibly in preparation for a war of choice, and administration figures begin making the argument for attacks on or even an invasion of Venezuela.
It’s also disdainful toward the foreign policy and national security establishment Trump inherited in 2017 and now means to dismantle, offering a brutal if not quite wrongheaded critique of the conduct of America’s foreign policy blob since the end of the Cold War: that the country has indulged vague liberal platitudes rather than clearly defined national interests; endeavored to dominate the entire world, in part through shouldering the burden of open-ended forever wars; miscalculated the support for such projects among the American people; and committed to a kind of globalization that hollowed out aspects of midcentury American strength.
What does the Trump administration propose in its place? Not the now-familiar fantasy of a new cold war, as has animated the fever dreams of American hawks for nearly a decade, but a vision of geopolitics as a global culture war to capture the imaginations of online reactionaries: a fight for Western civilization conducted mostly within borders — between a kind of blood-and-soil nationalism and a permissive cosmopolitan liberalism — and viewed, to a large degree, racially. (Notably, the strategy document refers to God at several points.)
Both aspects of this turn are significant. On China, the strategy marks a shift from the Pentagon’s longtime focus on rivalry, and though it isn’t exactly a surrender to Beijing, it looks unmistakably like a priority downgrade — particularly after the climbdown at the recent trade summit, where tariffs were relaxed, and the shift on high-end artificial intelligence chips, which the United States now says can be sold to China (to which China has said, basically: Not so fast). The 2025 National Security Strategy neither lists China as America’s primary national security priority, as previous documents did, nor cites containment of the rival power as a central goal.
Though the document devotes many paragraphs to the competition between the two countries, the clear emphasis is on the economic aspects of that competition rather than the inevitability of military conflict. It feels almost like a plea that the world is big enough for two great powers, as long as we kind of stay out of each other’s marauding way. In other words, a spheres-of-influence arrangement, which confirms a pattern of engagement visible from the first days of Trump’s second term: a return to the great-power politics of the 19th century, when statesmen divvied up the map and went to work.
But overall, the emphasis of the strategy document is less on what America’s national security doctrine is shifting away from than it is on what it is shifting to. First billing goes to what it calls a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”: defining immigration flows and drug trafficking as core security concerns and asserting unilateral military authority over them throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Hence a “president of peace” presiding over 22 attacks (and counting) on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, unilaterally pushing regime change in Venezuela and treating migrants living peacefully and for decades within the borders of the United States with such violence and cruel indifference that it has inspired rebukes from the new American pope and the conference of American bishops, long seen as an implacably conservative force in U.S. politics. (Among the more head-spinning turns of the post-2015 era is how much the papacy has come to embody global liberalism, of all things, becoming perhaps the most stalwart progressive institution on the world stage for more than a decade, much to the chagrin of MAGA’s many Catholic intellectuals.)
Although the 2025 National Security Strategy is most consequential in its positioning on China and American hemispheric hegemony, the strategy document is spiciest — and probably most revealing — when it turns to Europe.
In February, less than one month into the job, Vice President JD Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference and delivered a blistering indictment of Europe on culture-war grounds, saying that a combination of large-scale immigration, self-undermining progressivism and a kind of acquiescent cultural weakness had brought a continent that was for many centuries the seat of global power to a position of increasing irrelevance.
That language returns here, even more pointedly, as though the backroom boys in the Pentagon had spent the intervening months sharpening their sentences by whetstone. The continent faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” the 2025 National Security Strategy declares, and the reckoning may be coming quite soon. In case the meaning was unclear: “Within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” “I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism,” Paul Krugman wrote. “‘Non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’”
In certain ways, on certain subjects, the document is relatively circumspect about American power, not only backing away from conflict with China but also seeming uninterested in South Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. “The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the 2025 National Security Strategy asserts, and strikingly, Russian officials have already praised the document for echoing their worldviews.
But on migration the document does not limit its vision to America, declaring as the very first foreign policy priority that “the era of mass migration is over” — not just in the United States but around the world. Across the West, it states, the experience of the past few decades is vindication for hard-line views about borders and national culture. It goes on, “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,” gathering a whole laundry list of agenda items for domestic politics as a new statement of purpose for national security strategy and the MAGA-era military.
In theory, it might have been even more extreme. Earlier drafts of the document focused on domestic missions for the military, Politico reported, around the time this fall that Trump spoke to the military about fighting the “enemy from within” and dispatched his Justice Department to identify anti-Trump activists as “domestic terrorists.” For now, at least, the 2025 National Security Strategy leaves that agenda to the side, seeking out similar fights abroad instead.
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