– “I needed several days to absorb the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, to re-read it, to listen to reactions, to compare it to the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published in 2017. My conclusion, published in the Atlantic (gift link here), is that it isn’t really a strategy document at all:
It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.
For those who aren’t familiar with these kinds documents, a National Security Strategy is designed to guide America’s large, powerful and talented security apparatus: the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the counter-intelligence agents of the FBI. It’s supposed to set priorities, to help formulate policy even at the lowest level of government. In this iteration, so dramatically different from the 2017 version, Trump’s national security ideologues are clearly directing America’s security institutions not to worry about any of our opponents:
A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.
Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either. The new document makes only a vague allusion to a Chinese economic presence in Latin America and to a Chinese threat to Taiwan. When discussing this latter possibility, the authors drop their swaggering language about American power and slip into bureaucratese: “The United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
Other rivals and other potential sources of conflict get no mention at all. North Korea has disappeared. Iran is described as “greatly weakened.” Islamist terrorism is no longer worth mentioning. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still “thorny,” but thanks to President Donald Trump, “progress toward a more permanent peace has been made.” Hamas will soon fade away. The American troops who are still fighting in Somalia and Syria—and in some cases dying—are ignored, as if they didn’t exist at all.
The document identifies only one real problem for the United States. The enemy is not a country, but a set of ideas:
It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy. This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.
This is a watershed: America’s closest allies and trading partners in Europe are now redefined as civilizational enemies. Elsewhere in the world, it seems we are not interested in anyone else’s domestic politics (“we seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change”). Only in Europe is it now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so. My guess is that the goal is even more far-reaching. The Trump administration wants a weak, divided Europe, one that is easy for our tech companies to dominate, maybe easy for Russia to conquer. We don’t know how this will work in practice. Will American diplomats now overtly support European far-right parties, and other organizations that seek to undermine European democracy? Will American spies conduct covert operations intended to destroy the European Union? Regardless of what actual policies emerge, it is clear that Europeans, if they want to maintain their sovereignty, will have to stick together. This is a turning point in European history comparable to 1945 or 1989: Either Europe begins to speak with a single voice in the world, or the nations of Europe will fall under the influence of others. But this is also a moment of great danger for the United States. If we cannot identify the countries that actually wish to harm us, then we will be surprised when they do…”
