A Confession of Disbelief: The Trump National Security Strategy

The new US National Security Strategy (NSS) is not, in any meaningful sense, a strategy. A strategy connects means with achievable ends. What President Donald Trump’s White House released last week is somthing else: a 33-page confession that this administration doesn’t believe in the future and therefore sees no reason to invest in it.

Trump’s NSS oscillates sharply between triumphalism and declinist anxiety. The United States is the greatest nation in history; The United States is being invaded. We are winning; we are losing everything. This is not simply incoherence: it is the cognitive imprint of a movement that experiences demographic and cultural change as an existential catastrophe.

The document announces grandiose objectives without specifying resources,deadlines or mechanisms. Calling it “short-term” suggests that a long-term game is being neglected. But there is no such game. A movement convinced that its world is ending does not plan for the next generation: it lashes out and loots.

The vocation of looting is explicit. “All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their respective countries, especially large government contracts,” the NSS orders. “Any U.S. government official who interacts with these countries must understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.” Diplomacy has been formally converted into a business development operation.

The National security Council is tasked with identifying “strategic locations and resources” in the Western Hemisphere for exploitation. The World calls it what it is indeed: economic predation.

The Council on Foreign Relations observes that in this NSS, grate power competition has disappeared as an organizing principle, replaced by economics as “the ultimate bet.” The document is more pamphlet than strategy, its members say, and non-Americans would do well not to interpret it as an actual statement of intent.

Still, the elimination of great power rivalry is not an oversight. It reflects an administration that has quietly abandoned the project of shaping the international order, as doing so requires belief in the future.

just look at the treatment of allies. The NSS redirects its rhetorical fire toward Europe while noticeably softening its language toward Russia and other adversaries. He warns that Europe runs the risk of a “civilizational annulment” due to immigration and “regulatory asphyxiation.” It demands that Europeans take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, while concurrently declaring that the United States will “cultivate resistance” to current political trends in europe by supporting nationalist and populist parties in European Union countries. This is not alliance management. It is sabotage disguised as burden sharing.

The administration claims to reject the liberal internationalist custom of lecturing others about their domestic affairs. But then it proclaims a hemispheric sphere of influence that denies Latin American countries the right to choose their own paths.