OPINION:
President Trump’s second-term National Security Strategy has produced predictable objections from many in the Washington foreign policy establishment.
At the heart of these concerns is an aversion to the strategy’s main virtue. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, a U.S. strategy document forces genuinely difficult choices about American strategic objectives and undertakes long-overdue prioritization.
Simply put, the Trump administration has written a document that acknowledges a central truth of strategy: If everything is important and urgent, nothing really is.
Contrary to much commentary about it, the National Security Strategy explicitly acknowledges that “we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others.” This aligns with long-term American (and previously British) strategic thinking, which seeks to prevent the rise of a hegemon capable of posing an existential threat.
Coupled with the National Security Strategy’s reiteration of the centrality of Asia to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests in the 21st century and the administration’s reiteration of its first-term support for a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” the message is clear: China remains the great power most able to directly threaten core American interests.
In defining those core American interests, the National Security Strategy revives the traditional American concept of “hemispheric defense” and ties it directly to defense of the homeland. A focus on the Western Hemisphere (expanded to include Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic) is not only logical but also especially timely, given the growing economic and even military presence of China, Russia and Iran.
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Thus, the National Security Strategy’s declaration of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine calls for the countering of extra-hemispheric meddling in the Western Hemisphere. The foreign policy mandarins may snicker, but most Americans instinctively understand the strategic coherence of prioritizing direct threats to our immediate geography over distant adventures.
It is precisely this logic that lends the strategy relevance often lacking in similar documents. Too often, U.S. government strategy documents constitute “wish lists” of American goals, functionally and regionally, with little regard for resources or the attention of policymakers. The Trump National Security Strategy is ruthlessly direct in this regard: The defense of the homeland, the Western Hemisphere, and the regional balance in the Indo-Pacific are priorities; everything else, from Europe to the Middle East to Africa, is of secondary importance.
Although this may discomfit some American intellectuals still living in the post-Cold War era of unbounded U.S. global ambition, it reflects the truth of today’s world. U.S. interests are more significantly affected by developments in the Caribbean and the South China Sea than in Eastern Europe and the Sahel, and our resources are far more limited than in previous decades. To pretend otherwise is inviting overstretch and giving unrealistic signals to partners and allies about Washington’s capacity in the years ahead.
The National Security Strategy’s critics are particularly incensed by its treatment of Russia and Western Europe. On the former, the document is appropriately quiet, befitting a declining power of limited relevance to the United States in the medium and long term. Russia’s demographic, military, economic and societal weaknesses have been on public display since the disastrous invasion of Ukraine. To pretend that Moscow poses a long-term threat to the United States on par with the Chinese Communist Party is to substitute appropriate abhorrence of the Putin regime for a clear-eyed reading of strategic reality.
The Trump administration is laying the intellectual groundwork for a world in which Russia constitutes a regional challenge Europe can manage rather than a global one that necessitates deep American involvement.
Western Europe (and the European Union) comes in for particular antipathy in the National Security Strategy, provoking howls of outrage from across the Atlantic and Washington’s bien-pensants. Yet the strategy is revelatory of two truths: First, Europe’s relative economic and military decline, coupled with U.S. priorities elsewhere, increasingly makes the Continent ancillary to American concerns. Second, Western Europe’s recent retreat from the core liberal values that constitute America’s most significant political inheritance from them — including regression on freedom of speech, religion and political pluralism — has furthered the growing divide.
In short, with the fulcrum of geopolitics moving east, what is Western Europe’s claim to a close connection with the United States if it is simultaneously rejecting the values Americans most associate with European civilization?
Mr. Trump’s National Security Strategy will likely be remembered long after the predictable outrage of its critics has subsided for accurately diagnosing the world as it is, rather than the world as it was or as we might wish it to be. By insisting on prioritization of effort and making difficult choices about America’s role in the world, the president is preparing American grand strategy for the realities of the 21st century. His successors will thank him.
• Alexander B. Gray, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, served as deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff of the White House National Security Council from 2019 to 2021.
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