This article originally appeared on Peter Juul’s personal Substack, The Dive.
We’re well beyond the point where we ought to take documents like the Trump administration’s just-released National Security Strategy seriously, at least on a practical level. It’s hard to put much stock in such an embarrassingly sycophantic policy document, especially when the administration itself appears to be little more than a pack of scheming viziers to an increasingly nominal president who himself regularly struggles to stay awake during public appearances.
But it’s beside the point to engage with this document as if it’s a matter of policy, programs, or even strategy. It does no good to point out its incoherence and incontinence, much less ponder how what’s proposed in it might play out in the real world or how, if you stand on your head and squint and read it backwards, it might contain worthwhile ideas. The product of ideologues who fancy themselves world-historical thinkers but evince no real understanding of America or its place in a world permanently changed by revolutions in science, technology, and industry dating back a century and a half now, this national security strategy both betrays American interests overseas and perverts America’s traditional liberal values both at home and abroad.
In short, this national security strategy amounts to nothing less than a declaration of moral bankruptcy — a statement of immoral principle that stands in direct opposition to what America ought to stand for and represent in the world. (As always, it’s the self-styled super-patriot who hates his country the most.) It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about Trump’s foreign policy, but the document does effectively distill the Trump administration’s ongoing renunciation of any real American responsibility for global affairs and international security.
Indeed, it’s a foreign policy that Charles Lindbergh would have loved: a not-quite-explicit tripartite carve-up of the globe with dictators in Europe and Asia, with America selling out its allies in those two parts of the world while building a garrison state in the Western Hemisphere to bully our own neighbors the same way Putin and Xi do theirs. Add dollops of insulting illiberalism, crude dollar diplomacy, and thinly veiled racism, and voila: you’ve reinvented the original America First platform.
In the end, this national security strategy is little more than a manifesto for global gangsterism — or perhaps the longest geopolitical suicide note in history.
Let’s look at some of the specifics: the Trump administration promises to abandon America’s allies in Europe while meddling in their own domestic politics. It parrots the Kremlin’s line on NATO, characterizing the alliance as “perpetually expanding,” while seeking “strategic stability” with Moscow — presumably at the expense of Ukraine and other erstwhile American allies. Combined with a purported 2027 deadline for NATO nations to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defenses, a reported lack of communication with key alliance militaries like Germany, and Trump’s own eagerness to sell out Ukraine, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for an effective American withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance.
Worse, the Trump administration has made its intent to interfere in European politics on behalf of far-right political parties and, not incidentally, American tech oligarchs quite clear. It employs racist rhetoric to claim that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years,” with certain states “majority non-European” and therefore somehow uncommitted to the NATO alliance. It goes on to assert that it must “regain its civilizational self-confidence,” primarily through the victory of illiberal far-right parties and politicians like Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban that the Trump administration views as “political allies” whose success it hopes to encourage.
Like Lindbergh and his original America First movement, this national security strategy focuses monomaniacally on the Western Hemisphere. It casts the challenges in this hemisphere—migration, narco-trafficking, and foreign (presumably Chinese) investment in critical industries — as all-important and all-consuming while tacitly dismissing traditional American strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific as “peripheral or irrelevant to our own” interests. These priorities, the document heavily implies, were not the consequence of a careful consideration of American interests in a world transformed by science, technology, and industry, but rather the result of deceit by treacherous foreigners who have taken advantage of the United States to further their own interests at America’s expense.
Nor is it hard to see the crude, Putin-style sphere-of-influence logic behind the Trump team’s obsession with Latin America specifically and the Western Hemisphere more generally (at least beyond their obvious preoccupation with immigration). Given the language of this national security strategy, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump — or, more precisely, his perpetually scheming advisers — would like the United States to do in Latin America what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. We’ve already tasted the rancid fruit of this impulse with Trump’s killing spree in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where American special operators blow small boats allegedly running drugs out of the water and, in the first instance at least, massacre the survivors.
China, for its part, is seen primarily as a commercial competitor and not a strategic problem or geopolitical challenger. That’s hardly surprising considering the general emptiness of hawkish Republican rhetoric on China, and this strategy sends yet another signal that Trump talks tough but has no appetite for confrontation with Beijing — a message reinforced by his deep-seated antipathy toward American allies like Japan and South Korea.
It all adds up to a morally bankrupt vision of a world carved up between real and would-be dictators to suit their own whims and fantasies, one supremely hostile to America’s long-standing interests as well as its traditional liberal values. Put another way, the Trump administration now seeks precisely the nightmarish world that American presidents have desperately sought to avoid for more than a century.
On the bright side, it’s unlikely this strategy will ever be fully implemented; national security strategies rarely guide any administration’s foreign policy so much as they reflect it. Moreover, the Trump administration has so hollowed out America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus — his team, such as it is, remains confined to a small clique when not farmed out to one of Trump’s former real estate pals—that it remains a mystery as to how they’d execute any strategy the administration might come up with. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to serve as acting national security adviser, for instance, presiding over a National Security Council largely denuded of anything resembling real bureaucratic or subject-matter expertise, while America’s military and intelligence agencies have suffered rolling political purges that will likely reduce their own effectiveness over time.
Trump’s attempt to impose gangster rule at home and abroad will eventually, inevitably fail — though it will inflict enormous damage on America and the world along the way. The danger inherent in this national security strategy lies less with the potential that it might be implemented than in the indecent principles upon which it is based and seeks to advance. It exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Trump administration and its foreign policy for all to see, presenting us with yet another manifestation of our wider crisis of national virtue and integrity.
In that respect, however, it may paradoxically prove salutary: this strategy should cause a rededication to the basic moral propositions that make America a worthwhile endeavor, an experiment in liberty and self-government that’s more fragile and endangered now than at any point since World War II. Do we stand for freedom, equality, and democracy in the world? Do we keep faith with ourselves and our friends?
Though he could be quite unsentimental in private conversations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rightly understood that American foreign policy requires a moral sensibility — a spirit that guides it and makes clear that America stands for more than the prerogatives of raw power and the amoral pursuit of national self-aggrandizement offered actual and aspiring dictators as well as self-proclaimed “realists” throughout recent history. As Roosevelt himself explained, “order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.”
America may not be and may never have been the perfect embodiment of its professed liberal ideals of freedom and equality, but that’s both irrelevant and immaterial. But at its best, America has been the main champion of liberal values in a world where they have had few if any powerful defenders and many influential opponents, a standard to which the partisans of human liberty could repair when all else failed. In that regard, then, this national security strategy represents a deep and profound betrayal of America itself—one that must be repudiated in the clearest terms and replaced with a renewed moral vision that Roosevelt and his contemporaries would easily recognize.
There was an idea that was America, and it’s well past time to revive it.
