Trump’s National Security Strategy: Atlas Shrugs
Hopefully the policy document won’t have much to do with the administration’s actions.
THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY, a public document each new administration is required by law to publish, is as a rule not a terribly accurate guide to each administration’s actual policies. In fact, as Eliot Cohen, my cohost on the Shield of the Republic podcast, likes to point out, most government strategy documents are not too useful. They tend to be, as the second Trump administration’s NSS correctly points out, “laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes.” Most of the past NSSs have been bureaucratic compromises filled with hortatory assertions about what the U.S. government ought to do with precious little indication of how these ends are to be accomplished. With rare exceptions (like NSC 68 and the controversial 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, both of which were classified, rather than public, strategy documents), these state papers tend to sink rapidly into oblivion. Still, all National Security Strategies, when matched with an administration’s actions, can tell us something about the preferences, priorities, and central tendencies that are likely to inform any given administration’s approach to policy. They therefore merit close attention.
The first Trump administration’s NSS was written by serious people and marked a crucial inflection point by noting that the United States was moving away from the kind of conflict which had marked the previous decade and a half—namely the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations of the fight against violent Islamist extremism—and had entered an era of great-power conflict, in particular with a rising China and a revanchist Russia. The document, although festooned with references to America First, was clearly in the mainstream of U.S. post-World War II strategic thinking—even as Trump’s speech announcing its publication suggested that he had never read the document, nor did he agree with its reliance on working with and through America’s traditional alliances.
The strategy published late last week with no fanfare presents something altogether different. Filled with chest-thumping pomposity, shrill rhetoric (and more than a whiff of white nationalist/supremacist idiom), it marks a sharp break not only with the post–Cold War trajectory of American strategy, but more broadly with the direction of U.S. national security strategy since 1941. With 27 instances of Trump’s name in a mere 29 pages of text, it is a strategy document worthy of North Korea.1 It represents an expression of Trumpism in full, with its invocation of immigration restriction (where one hears echoes of Stephen Miller’s fear of a “great replacement” of white people by racial and ethnic minorities), national sovereignty (a rejection of pretty much all of the post–World War II institutions that were meant to provide alternatives to military aggression and beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilism), industrial strength (a paean to the America of the 1950s and 1960s when Trump grew to maturity), and military dominance (a naked effort to appropriate the mantle of Ronald Reagan).
The document pedantically notes that strategies are about setting priorities and matching ends and means. It has precious little to say, however, about ways—the concepts or courses of action meant to link objectives to the nation’s underlying resources. There are, as one would expect from a document issued by the Trump administration, invocations of the president’s “unconventional diplomacy” and reliance on tariffs and other instruments of economic coercion, but precious little of the kind of specificity that one finds in, for example, NSC 68. Rather, the document is replete with platitudes about the importance of Americans loving their country and its heroes. In particular, it is gobsmacking to see the NSS invoke U.S. “soft power” given the fact that this administration has eviscerated the Voice of America and other broadcast tools, fed the U.S. Agency for International Development into the “woodchipper” (in the evocative words of former DOGE-master and soon-to-be-trillionaire Elon Musk), and turned the U.S. Institute of Peace (last week renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace) into a hollowed-out husk.2
The core of the strategy comes in a sentence midway through the document. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” This resignation from the role of chief maintainer of the global order is what marks the real break from eighty years of American foreign policy. No longer will the United States, as President Kennedy said in 1961, “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” In fact, the success of liberty around the world is explicitly jettisoned as one of America’s core interests in this document. In the place of democracy promotion and human rights we now have autocracy promotion with a strict injunction not to “hector” our Arab partners about their form of government or abuses of human rights. Instead, we will promote the fortunes of right-wing parties in Europe to protect the supposed threat against Western civilization from mass migration. To be sure, immigration in Europe is a real issue and assimilation of large migrant populations is a challenge. It is one, however, that Europe’s fascist-adjacent right-wing parties are likely to make worse rather than better.
The NSS rightly says that strategy is about setting priorities, and this strategy clearly prioritizes the Western Hemisphere, a region which the document correctly notes has been neglected for too many years. But the grandiloquent enunciation of a supposed “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine represents less a novel departure in policy than a reiteration of the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary, which asserted the American right to exercise “international police power” in the hemisphere. The NSS’s reliance on using economic tools of coercion to persuade Latin American governments to accede to U.S. preferences on immigration, transnational crime, and other issues replays the “dollar diplomacy” of the 1920s and simply repurposes the 1895 Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that “American fiat is law” in the Western Hemisphere. Even this, though, would be preferable to the administration’s actual practice in the Caribbean: gunboat diplomacy.
Yet the most dangerous and damaging departure of the strategy comes from its evident downgrading of America’s most powerful strategic comparative advantage against our great-power competitors: Our system of alliances and special relationships. Although the document is full of rhetorical praise for alliances, in its specifics it calls for policies that undermine and could potentially destroy them.
It is striking, for instance, that the strategy’s goal for our multilateral alliance in Europe is not protecting it from the very real threat of Russian revanchism and an ongoing hybrid war against NATO but rather to “correct its current trajectory.” Beyond its extension of America’s domestic culture war to the European theater, the strategy depicts the United States not as the guarantor and backstop of European security but rather as a mediator between Europe and Russia to overcome the continent’s “attenuated relationship” with Russia and disenthrall Europeans from what the administration seems to consider a wrongheaded notion that Russia represents an “existential threat.” Combined with recent reports that the administration has given European leaders a two-year deadline for taking over primary responsibility for their own security, lest the United States withdraw from participating in some of NATO’s planning efforts, it is hard to imagine anything that could do more to unravel the transatlantic relationship than the policies advocated in this document.
China hawks looking for the kind of clarity about the challenge posed by the PRC to security in the Indo-Pacific that was evident in the first Trump administration’s NSS will be sorely disappointed. The new NSS largely defines the strategic competition with China in economic terms, suggests pushing our Indo-Pacific allies to choose between economic relations with the PRC and the United States, and calls for deterring a conflict over Taiwan “ideally by preserving military overmatch as a priority.” This seems to be more a wish than serious policy, since it is not at all clear that the United States currently maintains an ability to overmatch the PRC with conventional forces in the region—nor is the administration devoting anything close to the budgetary resources necessary to do so.
Like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, the new NSS makes some valid points along the way, not least that a rebuilt and reinvigorated defense industrial base is the sine qua non of future national security, as the congressionally chartered National Defense Strategy Commission I co-chaired with former Rep. Jane Harman argued in its report last year. But the overall gravamen of this strategy document is to recur to the pre-1941 strategic posture of “Hemispheric Defense” or “Fortress America.” It is ill suited to the very real and serious challenges that a tightening axis of adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—presents to global order.
The predictable effect of pursuing the policies indicated by this NSS is the weakening of our alliances with two baleful consequences. The first is that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will read in this document a diminishment of America’s attachment to its allies, and an openness by the United States to economic blandishments that will further weaken those ties, which will open up the prospect that further aggression by these leaders between now and 2029. Second, the weakening of U.S. security guarantees worldwide will quicken the danger of nuclear proliferation. The absence of a reliable security guarantor gives states an incentive to seek self-help, and the most effective form of self-help in Hobbesian world is a nuclear weapons capability. We neglect at our peril to recall that as recently as the 1970s, Sweden, South Korea, and Australia all dallied with the possibility of creating their own nuclear deterrents. It will not take much to set a cascade in motion that will lead to a much more dangerous world.
Although the NSS was published in the first week of December, it is dated “November 2025.” Its finalization therefore lines up almost exactly with the 84th anniversary of the sailing of the Japanese Imperial fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor, destroying not only the main force of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and 2,400 American lives, but the previous incarnation of the dangerous policies this strategy endorses.
The Trump NSS sketches out an approach to national security policy that carries with it very real dangers. In this case, it is reassuring that these documents rarely describe actual policy. It will be imperative that members of Congress—especially senators—who still understand the dangerous world in which we live, and the risks and perils of the Trumpist approach, exercise vigorous oversight and use their power to prevent the United States from pursuing some of the more damaging initiatives that the administration seems bent on pursuing. If they do so, it is likely that this document will descend into the obscurity that it, like many others before it, so richly deserves.
Eric Edelman is co-host of The Bulwark’s Shield of the Republic podcast and was co-chair of the national defense strategy commissions in 2018 and 2024. He previously served as under secretary of defense for policy and as ambassador to Turkey and Finland. His views are his own and do not represent those of any organization.
Other NSSs contain references to the presidents in whose name they are issued, but not nearly at this scale, and almost all of those references are to State of the Union addresses or other speeches that the presidents had made in office prior to the publication of the NSS.
Full disclosure: I served on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace from 2011 to 2022.
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