An America First National Security Strategy
In November, the White House released its new and improved “National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” The last time the Trump administration produced a NSS was back in 2017, early in Trump’s first administration. Compared to Trump’s first strategy—let alone Biden’s interim and then final NSSs—this year’s National Security Strategy marks a hard (but foreseeable) shift in America’s foreign policy. The signs of these shifts have been percolating for years, and in many ways reflect the maturing of nascent pivots and adjustments already underway during the first Trump administration.
As other commentators have rightly noted, perhaps the two most startling elements of this year’s security strategy are first, the hard line taken against Europe for the erasure of its own civilization and the subsequent calling into question of whether America can remain Europe’s ally if things do not change in the near future; and second, the soft but serious approach taken to China’s emergence as a formidable world power.
In many ways, these developments signal the end of American unipolar global hegemony, which grew steadily in the second half of the twentieth century and has reigned supreme since 1990. Drawing down America’s world empire has and will continue to take time, yet given America’s military capabilities and especially her economic strength (and possession of the world’s reserve currency), it is premature to declare that her empire is over. America is still the global leader in many ways, but both the first and, especially now, the second Trump administration have strongly indicated that this is neither desirable nor, increasingly, possible.
The Return of Grand Strategy
“War is a form of political intercourse, a continuation of foreign politics which begins when force is introduced to attain our ends.” So said Julian S. Corbett in 1906 in the “Green Pamphlet,” a short essay on the concept of “grand strategy,” a term coined by Corbett. Similar to Carl von Clausewitz’s quip that “war is politics by other means,” Corbett not only viewed war as the extension of the political, but in war, both military and the financial-commercial-diplomatic dynamic play a critical role. In the Pamphlet—which was later republished as an appendix in Corbett’s original 1911 book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy—Corbett described a nation’s grand strategy in the following way:
Major Strategy in its broadest sense has also to deal with the whole resources of the nation for war. It is a branch of statesmanship. It regards the Army and Navy as parts of one force, to be handled together; they are instruments of war. But it also has to keep in view constantly the politico-diplomatic position of the country (on which depends the effective action of the instrument), and its commercial and financial position (by which the energy for working the instrument is maintained). The friction of these two considerations is inherent in war, and we call it the deflection of strategy by politics. It is usually regarded as a disease. It is really a vital factor in every strategical problem. It may be taken as a general rule that no question of grand strategy can be decided apart from diplomacy, and vice versa. For a line of action or an object which is expedient from the point of view of strategy may be barred by diplomatic considerations, and vice versa. To decide a question of grand strategy without consideration of its diplomatic aspect, is to decide on half the factors only. Neither strategy or diplomacy has ever a clean slate.
Trump’s National Security Strategy evinces both the awareness that war and politics are intertwined, and also that a grand strategy involving all of America’s resources is necessary if war is to be avoided by successful political and diplomatic measures, or, if war is joined, that it must be prosecuted in a comprehensive and coordinated manner.
“To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world,” the National Security Strategy declares in its opening line. Blaming America’s “elites” for “badly miscalculate[ing] America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens” that had no bearing on real American interests, the Strategy maintained that Trump is finally providing a correction long overdue.
What are the final ends or purposes of American existence for the Strategy? Not democracy building abroad, not a higher ROI on portfolios, not an increase in domestic GDP or the ability to extract more tribute from weaker nations, but “the continual survival and safety of the United States as an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given natural rights of citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests” as well as protecting “this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence.” This is indeed a much-needed course correction.
The Return of Nations
The document broke down its grand strategy according to “principles” and “priorities.” It lists ten principles that serve as the overarching political guides for achieving its goals. Five of them relate in part or in whole to the nation as being the core political entity not only of America but of all other countries as well. While this might seem obvious to many, the philosophy of the Liberal International Order that arose after WWII was intentionally (albeit covertly) a denial of nations and a country’s right to its own sovereignty and self-determination.
“The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty … We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive translational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.” While there is a slight conflation between nation and nation-state in these lines (the nation comes first and is the people and their collective way of life; the nation-state is a later geopolitical instantiation of the nation), these are remarkable words nonetheless. With so much talk in the past fifty years of the “rules-based international order,” the “global village,” and “global citizens,” and so little concern for the national well-being of its own citizens, these words denote a firm repudiation of the schemes of globalization.
In addition, the Strategy directly rejected the Neoconservative fondness for foreign interventions (whether through the CIA or airstrikes or nation-building or other means) and instead embraced a “pre-disposition to non-intervention.” Here the documents looks to the inspiration of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and others: “America’s founders laid down a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations and made clear the basis: just as all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights, all nations are entitled by ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God’ to a ‘separate and equal station’ with respect to one another.” Whether the authors of the document realized it or not, they are embracing the Law of Nations (the international political and legal philosophy adopted by the founders and that preceded both legal internationalism and the rules-based international order) and the belief that nations are moral persons with individual sovereignty, agency, will, and moral accountability.
This means that for the White House, liberal internationalism—with its emphasis upon universal democracy, human rights regimes, and legal and economic integration—is out, and great power politics is back. Indeed, the Strategy invokes the “balance of power” terminology of great power internationalism, explaining that “As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others.” Expecting the U.S. to run the world is unreasonable, for “the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international politics.” More than anything, this signals the end of the “unipolar moment” that the United States has filled the last thirty-five years, and reflects the truth that Russia and China have grown to become regional superpowers in their own right.
If preventing these powers from dominating others is still necessary, but it isn’t to happen through U.S. intervention abroad, how does Trump expect to achieve an otherwise worthy but increasingly impractical goal? Precisely by creating a “burden-sharing network” where American allies will spend more on their national defense and be expected to take a lead role in regional security, while America provides support. In other words, America can no longer be expected to come to the aid of Ukraine or Taiwan; Europe must assume a commanding lead in European security, and Japan, Australia, and India (known as “the Quad” when the U.S. is included) must coordinate for security in Asia and the Indo-Pacific.
The Reform of ‘National Interest’
Throughout the National Security Strategy, the phrases “national interest” and “core, vital national interest” are the justification for American strategy and action. Anyone who follows American foreign policy will know that this terminology is not only very common but has formed the bedrock for how left progressives, liberal centrists, and Republican neoconservatives warranted America’s leading international role and foreign intervention over the past eighty years. Want to overthrow a foreign dictator? Find a reason for it to be in America’s “national interest.” Looking to invade Iraq? It’s in America’s “national interest” to prevent WMDs and secure the Middle East’s oil supplies. Concerned about a revitalized and militarized Russia? Of course, defending Ukraine and its nascent “democracy” is in America’s “national interest.” National interest has served as a blank check for warmongering elites for decades.
The 2025 National Security Strategy is subconsciously aware of this phenomenon. While it does not abandon the use of America’s “national interest,” it does seek to correct abuses and refocus the meaning of the term on a narrower set of priorities. “Since at least the end of the Cold War, 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.”
Even Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy did not escape the orbit of liberal internationalism, as it was essentially a continuation of Bush-era foreign policy. There one finds repeated emphasis upon the threat from Weapons of Mass Destruction and Jihadist terrorists, along with the added goals of securing the border from mass immigration and protecting against biowarfare and pandemics. But one also finds the left-liberal ideological bloat that somehow always makes its way under the umbrella of the national interest: supporting the dignity of individuals and promising to help any soul anywhere across the world that might find itself oppressed by cruel regimes who have clipped its freedoms; empowering women and youth by “advancing women’s equality” by protecting the rights of women and girls and supporting “youth empowerment programs”; fighting for religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities everywhere; and reducing human suffering through humanitarian efforts worldwide.
The 2025 statement is mercifully free of such nonsense, which is unfitting for a National Security plan. One will find no mention of human dignity, women’s rights or equality, youth programs, religious liberty, minorities, or reducing the plight of human suffering. This year’s Strategy is shorter, more focused, and more serious than ever before.
Instead of the above distractions, the 2025 National Security Strategy prioritizes, above all, stopping mass migration. Its top priority is a declaration that “The Era of Mass Migration Is Over” and the admission that replacement migration is a real threat: “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” This is a profound statement, as it indicates a rejection of propositional nationhood, the latter of which (in recent years) asserts that anyone can become an American simply by believing and professing the right things, and that all ties of nationality, blood, custom, religion, or language can be overcome by the American creed. Not so, says the 2025 Strategy; people are not blank slates that can be rewritten as Americans at will. Instead, we must not only clamp down on our own immigration system, but “discourage mass migration” across “the Western Hemisphere” as well.
The latter commitment to shoring up what remains of Western Civilization is where the Strategy takes aim at Europe. Europe, it maintains, is in danger of losing its civilization through “erasure.” The “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies … undermine political liberty sovereignty, migration policies … are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence” are all reasons why a future American-European alliance is not assured. In other words, the White House is telling Europe that its current trajectory risks both the historic and present political and military alliances between the two continents. Europe must reform its censorious and tyrannical governments, and it must remigrate millions of non-European peoples it has let in if it hopes to remain America’s ally in the future.
Return of the Monroe Doctrine…
Numerous times throughout the document, the Strategy invokes the Monroe Doctrine and asserts a “Trump corollary” to the Doctrine. While it is not clear exactly what the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine includes, it seems merely to be an application of the basic principles of the Monroe Doctrine for the twenty-first century.
Most readers will be familiar with the Monroe Doctrine, a later appellation given to the 1823 annual address to Congress given by President James Monroe. In that address, Monroe famously laid out the doctrine that no European country may interfere in the governments or territory of any states in the Western Hemisphere. In exchange, the United States would not intervene in European politics and would treat “the government de facto as the legitimate government for us”; and America would seek to “cultivate friendly relations … and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy.”
The Monroe Doctrine was not just about hemispheric sovereignty, however. President Monroe also said this:
With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments. …We owe it … to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extent their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety (italics added).
In other words, Monroe was not just concerned with military intervention or colonization by the European powers, but that any such act would inevitably involve the importation of foreign political systems incompatible with American republicanism.
A modern application of the Monroe Doctrine ought to be concerned with the same. As N.S. Lyons has astutely argued, in recent years, there has been a convergence with China’s communist regime in Europe and the United States. Europe is farther along this route, but America is in danger of permanently adopting, albeit in a more subtle and softer vein, a political model of the Chinese surveillance and social credit state (arguably, we already have this to a degree in America, but it could be much worse—as we all experienced under COVID).
The Trump administration, in embracing a revived Monroe Doctrine, must apply it by aggressively expelling all foreign political systems and influence from America—whether they come from Europe or the East. We have long known that American political elites (especially on the left) were enamored by Soviet communism, and it is no secret that many today admire the efficiency and power of the Chinese government. Trump must disentangle America from Chinese entanglement, whether it be political, economic, NGO work, immigration, foreign students, or the like. Draconian European censorship laws criminalizing online speech or judicial systems that take a light touch toward immigrant rapists and murderers must likewise be repudiated and condemned with the utmost vehemence.
America and the Western Hemisphere must chart their own course. We have the resources to reindustrialize and not be vulnerable to global supply chains. America should exert its influence over Central and South America in order to protect its own citizens and drive Chinese influence out (as the War Department is doing by bombing Venezuelan cartel boats). Ironically, by “expanding” in the West, by annexing Greenland or exerting more direct control over the countries south of us, America could channel her imperial impulse (which she has had from the beginning) away from running the world and toward making the Western Hemisphere Great Again.
… And Emergence of the “Trump Corollary”
Finally, the National Security Strategy touted a return to the Monroe Doctrine as a “Trump Corollary.” This language invokes the “Roosevelt Corollary” that was announced by President Teddy Roosevelt in his Fourth Annual Message to Congress in 1904. There, while Roosevelt assured his listeners that America only wanted to extend a hand of friendship and was not hungry to gobble up land or dominate other nations, he also made it clear that America would now dominate the Western Hemisphere as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine: “and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
While Roosevelt admitted that America must remove the beam out of her own eye and clean up injustices at home, he was primarily driven by the desire to “uplift humanity” and raise barbarous states to a civilizational level. Thus, he was an early advocate of American interventionism and proto-democracy building beyond our own shores, an impulse and vision that twentieth-century liberals would make a foundation stone of their own foreign policy.
Thus, the White House’s use of a “Trump Corollary” should raise a caution in us. Perhaps Trump’s corollary will not be like Roosevelt’s; perhaps intervention in Central and South America is now acceptable, given the different circumstances today and new threats from the East. Either way, the Monroe Doctrine and its focus on American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere should be the gold standard.
Conclusion
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay in The National Interest called “The End of History?” where he argued that all political systems outside of Western liberal democracy had been discredited. The only thing left was the growth and continuation of liberalism as far as the eye could see.
This year’s National Security Strategy buries the Fukuyama thesis under a deluge of history. History has returned. It has returned in the form of grand strategy, and in nations and national sovereignty; in the form of a rejection of liberalism and internationalism, in a refocus of national interests upon what puts American’s first, and in the form of a revived Monroe Doctrine. History is returning, and not a moment too soon.
