This document is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.” So proclaims President Donald Trump in a short letter to “My fellow Americans” introducing the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” or, as commonly known in Washington, the NSS.
Statutorily mandated and released in November, President Trump’s 2025 NSS pleased Trump world. The brief 29-page document enraged Europeans. And it baffled observers on the right and left who – along with Trump’s 2017 NSS, written under the supervision of then-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster – regard the Chinese Communist Party as the greatest and most comprehensive threat to U.S. national security.
Trump’s 2025 NSS boasts of exemplifying strategic thinking’s major virtues: “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’” In parts, the document exhibits the excellent qualities it claims as its own. In other parts, however, the NSS displays impracticality, naïveté, and ideological blindness. Traditional conservative priorities, shrewd observations, and apt policy shifts commingle in the NSS with fanciful claims, glaring omissions, and jaw-dropping leaps of logic. The document gives voice to multifarious moral impulses and priorities characteristic of contending personalities and camps within Trump world without reconciling or even acknowledging the inner tensions. In this way, the 2025 NSS mirrors Trump-administration foreign policy.
The NSS’s opening observations concerning America’s errors about itself and other nations vulgarize recent U.S. foreign policy and skew the NSS’s reshaping of American diplomacy. Echoing hard-left and postliberal detractors of the United States, the NSS levels the scurrilous accusation that “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” Previous administrations may have gone overboard in their enthusiasm for free trade, a rules-based international order, and promoting freedom and democracy abroad. But to portray such enthusiasm as a quest for world domination smears America and plays into the hands of freedom’s enemies at home and abroad. It also obscures American prosperity’s dependence on free trade, albeit more effectively based on fair and reciprocal conduct from America’s trading partners. It ignores the advantages that America derives from an international order that favors freedom and democracy, although less in thrall to international organizations with anti-American agendas and more reliant on responsibility-sharing U.S. friends and partners. And it overlooks America’s interest in promoting freedom and democracy, provided that interest is pursued in a manner more consistent with American resources and capabilities and more focused on using economic assistance, technical training, educational exchanges, and the bully pulpit to assist peoples and nations seeking greater freedom and democracy.
The NSS aims to reflect President Trump’s reorientation of U.S. foreign policy around “the continued survival and safety of the United States as an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given natural rights of its citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests.” To accomplish these desirable goals, states the NSS, the United States must maintain the world’s most powerful military and must cultivate effective alliances; control the nation’s borders; reinforce national infrastructure; and bolster the world’s strongest economy by fortifying the nation’s industrial base, energy sector, and expertise and entrepreneurship in science and technology. America must also define the national interest concretely, respect the nation-state as “the fundamental political unit,” pursue peace through strength, and preserve favorable balances of power around the world. And the nation must maintain its edge in “soft power” based on belief “in our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” and must undertake “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible.”
The NSS undercuts its sober statement of priorities with a flamboyant exaggeration of the president’s diplomatic achievements. According to the NSS, President Trump “negotiated peace between Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the DRC and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and ended the war in Gaza with all living hostages returned to their families.” Yet only in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan has the Trump administration brokered a substantial peace agreement; meanwhile several of the ceasefires for which it deserves credit are at best barely holding. Claiming full credit for major diplomatic breakthroughs where at most partial credit is due erodes the very soft power and spiritual and cultural health that the NSS emphasizes are crucial to American national security.
The Trump NSS elaborates core national interests across five geopolitical regions. Reaffirming the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the NSS promises “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” by ensuring reasonably good governance there that will assist in countering mass migration, cartels, other transnational criminal organizations, and hostile foreign actions. In Asia, the United States will build alliances and strengthen foreign partnerships to correct trade imbalances and inequities, especially with China, and deter war in the Indo-Pacific while maintaining America’s longstanding strategic ambiguity concerning Beijing’s determination to seize Taiwan. Despite its well-known aversion to nation building, the Trump administration seeks to foster “European greatness” by reversing European “economic decline” and, more ambitiously, averting “civilizational erasure” stemming from European policies that undercut liberty and encourage mass migration to the region of groups that refuse to assimilate. In the Middle East, the Trump administration will secure oil and gas reserves, encourage the inflow of international investment, and help friends and partners to deradicalize their populations without demanding democratic reform from the region’s autocracies. In its final three paragraphs, devoted to a continent home to more than 1.5 billion people, the NSS limits itself to rebuking the United States for having promoted “liberal ideology” in Africa and promising instead to concentrate on reducing conflict there and enhancing commerce and trade.
The NSS calls attention to much that is vital. It also downplays or omits much that is vital.
For example:
Notwithstanding the administration’s reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine, the NSS does little to clarify the U.S. stance toward several top-priority transnational threats, starting with great-power adversaries’ hypersonic missiles; nuclear weapons; and aerospace, cyber, and AI capabilities.
Contrary to the NSS’s suggestion that “there is today less to” Middle East conflict “than headlines might lead one to believe,” the region remains considerably more unstable than headlines or the Trump administration acknowledges. Despite President Trump’s touting of his Gaza peace plan, which called on Iran-backed Hamas to relinquish its “military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities,” Hamas never agreed to disarm and insists that it won’t. Iran-backed Hezbollah is rebuilding its military. And the Islamic Republic of Iran endeavors to replenish its ballistic-missiles stockpiles and reconstitute its nuclear program.
The NSS overlooks the ideological dimensions of the China challenge. You would never know from the document that the Chinese Communist Party governs China, that a combination of Marxist-Leninist and Chinese-nationalist commitments shape the CCP’s repressive one-party dictatorship at home and schemes of economic coercion and cooptation abroad, and that the CCP aims to position Beijing at the center of a revised world order that favors authoritarian governance.
Although stressing the civilization that America shares with Europe, the NSS downplays human rights, a pillar of the West’s precious inheritance. The closest the NSS comes to addressing the foreign-policy implications of America’s foundation in unalienable rights is to assert that the natural rights invoked in the Declaration of Independence establish “a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations.” That’s half true. The Declaration indicates that nations that respect basic rights and fundamental freedoms deserve to organize government as they see fit. At the same time, intervention comes in many forms and degrees as the NSS’s praise of soft power elsewhere implies, and “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” condemn “absolute despotism” as unjust and illegitimate. Accordingly, the Declaration’s natural-rights teaching also supplies grounds for intervening, particularly when rulers who systematically violate their citizens’ inalienable rights threaten America’s core national interests.
And the NSS fails to connect preservation of American soft power and renewal of the nation’s spiritual and cultural health to reform of American education. The most brilliant foreign policy will prove futile without an informed citizenry to furnish democratic legitimacy and knowledgeable and competent diplomats to execute it. Yet American K-12 education often omits the essentials of American history. Colleges and universities frequently neglect to require or even offer basic courses in American ideas and institutions while routinely featuring classes that vilify the United States. And American policy analysts and diplomats lack knowledge of the history, language, and culture of the nation-states with which the United States must cooperate, compete, and sometimes do battle. Regarding these vital national-security matters, the NSS says nothing.
For America to remain, as President Trump wants to ensure, “the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth,” administration officials must keep in mind that bluster betrays weakness, political cohesiveness at home is indispensable to accomplishing U.S. goals abroad, and America’s dedication to basic rights and fundamental freedoms must reverberate throughout the nation’s conduct.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter. His new book is "Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.