President Donald Trump’s latest security plan offers a baffling array of contradictions that amount to the resurrection of a “failed grand strategy” already attempted by one of his predecessors, the Wall Street Journal wrote in a scathing editorial.
The White House unveiled a security strategy last week that explicitly rejects “the ill-fated concept of global domination” on the part of the U.S. and calls for working with allies to “maintain global and regional balances of power.”
The document downplays the real threats facing the U.S.—namely China and Russia—while all but calling for the break-up of the European Union, which it accuses of censoring free speech and suppressing political opposition, the opinion editors of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Journal noted.
Those fighting words are only reserved for the U.S.’s allies, though.
“The Administration lectures Europe on free speech while saying we should ignore how the world’s dictatorships govern themselves,” the editors wrote.
But the “contradictions” don’t end there, they added.
The strategy calls for rallying allies in a joint effort to oppose Chinese economic might while also celebrating tariffs imposed on products from those allies that make them less likely to trust the U.S.
It says the U.S. must lead the world in science and technology, but it rejects the need for quote-unquote “global talent.”
And when it comes to Russia, the document “counsels ‘strategic stability’ with the power that invaded eastern Europe and has been deploying nuclear blackmail against the U.S. and NATO,” the Journal’s editors wrote.
“Congratulations on making the Ukraine war harder to end,” they added. “Mr. Putin will wield the strategy as proof that NATO expansion and European decadence justify his imperialism.”
Moscow, predictably, was thrilled with the new strategy, the BBC reported.
“The adjustments we’re seeing… are largely consistent with our vision,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an interview over the weekend. “We consider this a positive step.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the new security strategy, which calls for non-intervention even as Trump bombs Iran and threatens to invade Venezuela.
The document also contains “welcome” references to U.S. political freedom, free enterprise, and civil society as sources of national power, the editorial noted.
“They read like interjections from somebody in the Administration—is that you, Marco?—who isn’t prepared to cede the world to spheres of influence,” the editors wrote, in a nod to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The strategy further implies that rather than being isolationist, the Trump administration wants to actively reshape Europe in MAGA’s image, Katja Bego, a senior researcher at London’s Chatham House think tank, told the Wall Street Journal.
Ultimately, the new strategy suggests there’s a battle underway to define MAGA foreign policy, though it’s “oddly unrealistic” about the threat the U.S. is facing from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the editorial board wrote.
“But you can bet America’s enemies are reading this document, and what they’ll see is a country consumed with its own infighting and unwilling to be honest about the real threats from China and Russia,” they added.
President Barack Obama was similarly “naïve” about America’s adversaries and “retreated” from U.S. leadership, the editors wrote.
“The mystery is why Mr. Trump is reviving much of that failed grand strategy in his second term,” they continued.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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