The Trump administration released its long-anticipated new national security strategy late Thursday night, laying out a vision that attempts to reconcile U.S. global dominance with a U.S. retreat from many aspects of its decades-long global role.
The one through line in the strategy—which at various points both promotes and rails against interventionism—is advancing Washington’s ambitions.
“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote in his introduction to the strategy, which he described as a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”
But the opening paragraphs of the strategy—which begins with a textbook definition of strategy as a “concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means”—also slam the American-led post-Cold War global order and foreground a clear departure from it.
“American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the document reads. “Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.”
Rhetoric echoing white nationalist ideas related to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory also permeate the entire strategy, which at one point warns of “civilizational erasure” in Europe and calls for the restoration of the continent’s “Western identity.” The strategy also nods to the Trump administration’s concerns about declining birthrates, stressing how “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children” are essential to the “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health.”
The strategy divides the Trump administration’s worldview into five regions, with prescriptions and principles for allies, partners, adversaries, and everyone else in each of them.
Western Hemisphere
Trump’s refocusing of U.S. influence on its immediate vicinity—one of the first and most prominent parts of the strategy—has been foreshadowed for months, including earlier this week when the administration published a “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine stating that “the American people—not foreign nations nor globalist institutions—will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere.”
The strategy makes clear that this realignment is largely in service of one of Trump’s biggest priorities: stemming the flow of both people and drugs across U.S. borders. “We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea,” it says. That includes a “readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere” and “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force.”
It also blurs the lines—as the Trump administration has already done in practice—between U.S. security, diplomatic, and business interests. “All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts,” the strategy says. “Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”
The strategy also aims to counter China’s inroads in Latin America without explicitly mentioning China, stating that “every U.S. official working in or on the region must be up to speed on the full picture of detrimental outside influence while simultaneously applying pressure and offering incentives to partner countries to protect our Hemisphere.”
Asia
In China’s own backyard, meanwhile, the U.S. strategy aims to corral allies and partners into deterring Washington’s biggest peer competitor. “To thrive at home, we must successfully compete there—and we are,” it says, touting Trump’s deals with Japan, South Korea, and other Southeast Asian countries during his October trip to the region.
The two pillars of that are economic rebalancing and military deterrence, both areas where the strategy urges allies in the region (and elsewhere) to help blunt China’s influence. “We must encourage Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and other prominent nations in adopting trade policies that help rebalance China’s economy toward household consumption, because Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East cannot alone absorb China’s enormous excess capacity,” it reads. “The exporting nations of Europe and Asia can also look to middle-income countries as a limited but growing market for their exports.”
It also seeks to marshal the “net foreign assets of $7 trillion” held by “Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others,” along with the $1.5 trillion in assets held by international financial institutions such as the multilateral development banks, to counter China. Here, too, however, the plan is decidedly America First. “This administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they serve American interests,” the strategy says.
Despite Trump’s eagerness to reach and maintain a trade deal with China—described in the strategy as needing to “be balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors”—the strategy does not give ground on two of China’s biggest military ambitions. “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” it says. “We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
At the same time, the Trump administration aims to push more of that military burden onto countries such as Japan and South Korea. “We must urge these countries to increase defense spending, with a focus on the capabilities—including new capabilities—necessary to deter adversaries,” it says.
Those goals also include a prominent role for India, despite Washington’s relationship with New Delhi being near its lowest point in two decades under Trump. “We must continue to improve commercial (and other) relations with India to encourage New Delhi to contribute to Indo-Pacific security, including through continued quadrilateral cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the United States (“the Quad”),” the strategy states.
Europe
The burden-shifting and policy prescriptiveness are particularly acute in the strategy’s approach to Europe.
Echoing themes from Vice President J.D. Vance’s infamous Munich Security Conference speech in February, the strategy bemoans the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe, blamed in part on “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence” as well as the continent’s immigration policies. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the strategy says.
And despite the administration’s America First objectives, the strategy says Washington must “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” including by “cultivating resistance … within European nations.” It cites “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” as “cause for great optimism.”
There is a call for yet more interventionism in Europe’s relationship with Russia, where the strategy presents ongoing U.S.-led negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine as necessary “to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.”
While the strategy calls for “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” and a “post-hostilities reconstruction” that will “enable its survival as a viable state,” it doesn’t provide much detail on the conditions for ceasing those hostilities. Instead, it slams “European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war” and accuses them of ignoring their people’s wishes. “A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.”
It does, however, echo a key Russian refrain on Ukraine’s membership in NATO, listing “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance” as a key U.S. goal.
Middle East
By contrast, the strategy’s approach to the Middle East reflects a major departure from the long-standing U.S. goal of promoting democracy around the world. Partnering with countries in the region “will require dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without,” it states.
That policy reflects a broader principle of “flexible realism” laid out near the top of the strategy. “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The enduring conflicts in the region, the Trump administration contends, are less problematic “than headlines might lead one to believe.” The document argues that Iran has been “greatly weakened” by Israeli and U.S. strikes, the Israel-Palestine conflict “remains thorny” but is on the path “toward a more permanent peace,” and Syria “remains a potential problem, but … may stabilize and reassume its rightful place as an integral, positive player in the region.”
The aforementioned Gulf countries, meanwhile, are a key source of “support for America’s superior AI technology” cemented by Trump’s dealmaking trip through the region earlier this year.
On the whole, “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was,” the strategy proclaims. “It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment—a trend that should be welcomed and encouraged.”
Africa
Out of a 29-page strategy, the Trump administration dedicates only three paragraphs to Africa, a region that has long received little attention from U.S. policymakers in Washington. The new strategy is blatantly transactional, with a clear focus on striking partnerships that will boost U.S. business interests and generate investment returns.
“For far too long, American policy in Africa has focused on providing, and later on spreading, liberal ideology,” the strategy declares. Going forward, it says, the United States must pivot from an aid-oriented approach to one focused on trade and investments with countries that have “committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services.”
Immediate opportunities for investment—which, the strategy notes, have “prospects for a good return” and can “generate profits for U.S. businesses”—lie in the energy and critical mineral sectors. The United States can also help negotiate settlements to ongoing conflicts and contribute to conflict prevention, the strategy says, although Washington “must remain wary of resurgent Islamist terrorist activity” and avoid “any long-term American presence or commitments.”
