After months of internal debate and numerous rounds of revisions, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy is finally out. The 29-page document is designed to provide the American people, allies, and adversaries alike an idea of what the United States seeks to accomplish in the foreign policy space, how it intends to go about achieving the goals it sets out for itself, and what the White House will and will not tolerate. As one might expect, the Washington foreign policy circle’s heartbeat went up a few dozen beats a minute the moment the document was posted on the White House website.
Overall, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less a strategy than a guidepost of what the administration intends to do. Indeed, the term “strategy” is somewhat of a misnomer; the real purpose of these efforts is to cobble together a series of general frameworks and concepts, region-by-region, that all of the different stakeholders in the executive branch—the National Security Council, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department, etc.—can rally around. That’s precisely why the drafting process took so long—everybody needs to be on board, and any one principal or department can hold up the product if they don’t think their equities are being defended.
With all this being said, there’s plenty in Trump’s strategy that is uncontroversial, right, and frankly refreshing. Unlike the national security strategies of yesteryear, when the phrase “rules-based international order” was sprinkled throughout the pages like confetti at a parade, Trump only uses the phrase once (on page 19)—and in a mocking tone. This will spark histrionics from the liberal internationalists among us, but the phrase has long since outlived its usefulness and is one of the world’s most prevalent myths anyway. Any rules in place are easily broken by the major powers, including the United States, whose history before, during, and after the Cold War is riddled with regime change wars of various stripes, covert operations against adversarial governments, and sanctions regimes against a slew of states (Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Nicaragua to name just a few) that aim to cause economic implosion. U.S. officials tend to get on their soapboxes and preach about universal values but frequently don’t practice their own gospel. At least we’re no longer pretending.
The objectives outlined in Trump’s manifesto are pretty conventional as well. For instance, the U.S. doesn’t want cartels and people-smuggling rings running around unhindered in the Western Hemisphere. It hopes to maintain a predominant position in its own near-abroad, which every great power has done since the dawn of time. The U.S. military should be equipped and trained to the highest standards. Who can argue with that? Burden-sharing, in which U.S. allies in Europe and Asia devote more money to their defense budgets and otherwise act as primary security guardians in their own neighborhoods, will now be a priority. U.S. alliances, in turn, will be maintained but reformed to be more equitable. And the U.S. economy will be a top consideration in foreign policy deliberations. None of this is especially noteworthy and is frankly so unremarkable that you wouldn’t bat much of an eye if it was included in Barack Obama’s or Joe Biden’s strategies.
A refreshing tidbit: the United States will now have a focused and clear definition of the U.S. national interest. “Since at least the end of the Cold War,” the document states, “administrations have often published National Security Strategies that seek to expand the definition of America’s ‘national interest’ such that almost no issue or endeavor is considered outside its scope.” This is indisputably true and is one of the cardinal sins the U.S. foreign policy establishment commits on a daily basis: If everything is included as an interest worth defending or promoting, then the U.S. military will be overextended, the U.S. foreign policy toolkit will eventually spread too thin, and the probability of Washington achieving any of its goals goes down immeasurably. In other words, if everything is a priority, nothing is.
Finally, consider me grateful that the administration had a few choice words for the Europeans on the war in Ukraine. To this day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are shuttling between Russian and Ukrainian officials in an effort to solidify a peace process that is actually durable. Multiple drafts of a peace treaty have been revised and exchanged; input has been collected by the Ukrainians and Russians; and various formulations have been proposed with the hope that the core needs of the combatants can somehow be massaged. The fact that this has proven to be much more difficult than Trump envisioned when he first entered office in January doesn’t mean U.S. officials shouldn’t try.
The Europeans, however, haven’t really gotten in on the action and seem more comfortable with carping from the sidelines than being proactive actors. We hear a ton of speechifying from EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, French President Emmanuel Macron, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about the absolute necessity of striking a so-called “just peace” for Ukraine, which sounds terrific in theory. But in practice, it’s not possible, particularly if you use Kiev’s definition of what a “just peace” will entail: a Russian troop withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian land; Russian compensation to the tune of tens of billions of dollars; the prosecution of Russian officials and soldiers for war crimes; and ironclad Western security guarantees for Ukraine. The Europeans have said again and again that the latter item on this list won’t happen unless the U.S. military takes the lead in the arrangement. And as far as the others, the notion that any demands on this wish-list will be met is, to put it charitably, unlikely. Any peace accord in Ukraine, assuming one is reached, will be composed of ugly compromises and awful terms for the Ukrainians due to the facts on the ground as they currently exist. Ignoring this reality is akin to expanding the war for another few years, at the risk of an even worse battlefield position for Ukraine if negotiations re-commence.
Yet there are some troubling aspects to Trump’s strategy we shouldn’t sweep under the carpet. Trump’s determination that U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere should be protected is not a bad thing in and of itself, but the way the administration has attempted to pursue this objective has the risk of alienating the very countries in Latin America we need as cooperative partners.
The ongoing U.S. strikes on supposed drug-carrying boats in the Southern Caribbean is perhaps the biggest case in point. With the exception of Trinidad and Tobago and perhaps the Dominican Republic, no other state in the region supports what the Trump administration is doing. Colombia, traditionally Washington’s biggest security partner in Latin America and a country whose intelligence often leads to drug interdictions by the U.S. Coast Guard, is highly contemptuous of unilateral U.S. military action. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has called the U.S. boat strikes a campaign of extrajudicial killing, which is not far off the mark.
To Trump, the strikes represent bold American action to get a handle on a problem, drug trafficking, that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. But to the vast majority of the region’s governments, what Trump is presently doing is the worst form of U.S. hegemony one can imagine, sparking memories of past U.S. interventions—the 1954 U.S.-sponsored coup in Guatemala; U.S. covert actions in Cuba; the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic; the contra wars of the 1980s in Nicaragua; and the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama—that were either failures, produced civil wars (in the case of Guatemala), or paved the way for unpopular governments (like Manuel Noriega’s immediate successor in Panama). Add the often inexplicable U.S. tariffs on Brazil as well as U.S. meddling in Argentina and Honduras’s elections and you can quickly understand why the Western Hemisphere might grow tired of a bumbling, big hegemon to the north whose preference is to throw sticks rather than carrots.
The Middle East section is also a bit odd, not because of what Trump ostensibly seeks to do there—deprioritize the region from U.S. grand strategy—but rather because of its inaccurate depiction of how the regional security environment looks at the moment. You’d be forgiven for thinking the Middle East’s major conflict points have been resolved. They haven’t been, nor is U.S. mediation likely to be the silver-bullet the Trump administration claims it is.
Trump’s peace plan in Gaza is still in its initial stages, and the ceasefire that was supposed to lead to a new political order in the Palestinian enclave has been violated countless times by both Israel and Hamas. The Board of Peace that will administer the technocratic, post-Hamas interim administration in Gaza is still nowhere to be found—indeed, the Palestinian government isn’t even formed yet. Israel continues striking Lebanon on a daily basis. And Israeli forces raid Syrian territory as if it was an extension of the West Bank—raids that complicate Trump’s own strategy with Syria, including but not limited to normalizing U.S. relations with Damascus and bringing the Israelis and Syrians into some kind of deescalation agreement. Iran’s nuclear program, meanwhile, is not “obliterated” as Trump likes to say, only significantly damaged. Iran’s strategic calculation after the U.S. bombing campaign last June is likely the same as it was before the bombs were released.
In short, Trump’s policy document isn’t fabulous. But it’s not a travesty either. And given Trump’s propensity to make policy on the fly, it can hardly be called permanent.
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