No one thinks President Donald Trump is going to consult his National Security Strategy as he considers how to respond to international crises, but the document still provides important insights into how the administration sees the world. And the latest iteration, like much of his foreign policy, is a mixed bag.
The 33-page document released Thursday night by the White House is overflowing with sweeping aspirations and generalizations but short on details. What it aims to offer instead is a corrective to what this administration sees as undisciplined moralizing by foreign policy elites that led the United States into a kind of strategic insolvency.
By being everything all at once, it risks being nothing at all. “America First,” the document explains, means being “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’” Good luck with all that.
But it’s not all pablum. Some ideas threaded through the strategy are quite sound. Trump’s relentless focus on burden-sharing in Asia and Europe has ruffled feathers, but it’s laudable, and long overdue, to push allies to spend more on defense. So is the admission that isolationism is a non-starter “for a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours” — a message more than a few administration officials would benefit from internalizing.
Other points are more debatable. Unchecked migration has angered enough voters for Trump to ride to victory twice. But it’s not useful to lump economic and assimilation concerns with fear-mongering about heading off “invasions” of drug cartels, human traffickers and terrorists. That has yielded a confused and confusing policy on Venezuela.
Similarly, a maniacal drive to address trade imbalances through bilateral diplomacy, often by threatening sledgehammer tariffs, has brought mixed results at best. Yes, tariff revenues are flowing in, but pressure on consumer prices is building. And bullying accelerates a rebalancing of the international order. See India’s warm welcome this week for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A few elements of the report border on bizarre. The document foreswears imposing values on autocratic societies while simultaneously vowing to meddle in the internal affairs of other democracies, “especially” those of allies.
On Asia, the strategy evinces a clear understanding that the U.S. must remain economically predominant. The document correctly identifies Chinese economic coercion and Beijing’s attempts to distort global trade as threats. An emphasis on securing U.S. supply chains is valuable. The language on Taiwan is also adequately muscular and linked to securing access to trade routes in the South China Sea.
Ultimately, there’s plenty to work with in this grab bag of ideas. But like its predecessors, this is less a strategy than a mood board.
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