OPINION:
Every American president publishes a National Security Strategy because, as the strategy recently released by the Trump administration says, “all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why.”
The rub, of course, is that the National Security Strategy also lets America’s adversaries know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why. Would a chess grandmaster tell his opponent exactly how he plans to checkmate him?
The National Security Strategy is not a “grand strategy.” It can’t be because, in just over three years, a new White House resident may have different priorities.
Recall that President Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy asserted that “of all the shared problems we face, climate change is the greatest and potentially existential for all nations.”
Based on that misreading of the science, John F. Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, tried to persuade Chinese ruler Xi Jinping to join the U.S. and Europe in a global war on carbon dioxide.
He failed. In 2024, construction of new coal plants in China hit a 10-year high.
A “top strategic priority” of President Trump’s new National Security Strategy is restoring “American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear).”
Additional goals include rooting out “so-called ‘DEI’ and other discriminatory and anti-competitive practices that degrade our institutions” and regaining control of critical supply chains.
Mr. Trump’s National Security Strategy prioritizes Latin America, another area where Mr. Kerry got it wrong. As secretary of state in 2013, Mr. Kerry announced: “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” I suspect he meant to imply that the Obama administration respected the nations of Latin America.
Yet the 1823 Monroe Doctrine wasn’t about respect. It was a warning to European empires that their intervention in Latin America would be viewed as hostile to the United States.
The new National Security Strategy offers a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
Sensible, but why not call a spade a spade? It’s China and Russia that have been intervening most boldly and damagingly in Latin America, along with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah. One example of the latter: the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that left 85 people dead and 300 wounded.
By contrast, the first Trump National Security Strategy, published in 2017, made clear that Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang were all serious threats to American power and interests.
Since then, the communists, neo-imperialists, Islamists and dynastic cultists in North Korea have dramatically increased their cooperation.
In February 2022, just days before Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s longtime ruler, and Mr. Xi announced a “no-limits” partnership. To support Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine, China has been supplying Russia with computer chips, radars and ingredients for ballistic missile fuel.
Tehran has been providing Moscow with Shahed drones, along with technology and components for a drone factory in Yelabuga, about 600 miles east of Moscow.
On the assembly lines are thousands of North Korean slave laborers. In addition, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator, has sent Mr. Putin thousands of soldiers and tons of munitions.
At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the tank where I do my thinking, we have long recognized China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as constituting an “axis of aggressors.” Each threatens one or more free and democratic neighbors. Each seeks regional hegemony. Together, over time, they plan to make American greatness a distant memory within a transformed international order in which they make the rules and we obey them.
The new National Security Strategy, I’m disconcerted to say, disconnects these dots and depicts China as merely a competitor whose ambitions can be managed.
Russia also gets off the hook. The National Security Strategy expresses hope for “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” and the reestablishment of “strategic stability.”
Has it not become obvious that Mr. Putin wants conquest, not peace? A repeat of President Obama’s 2009 “reset” would be an exercise in futility.
Mr. Putin’s immediate goal is to turn Ukraine into a vassal, like Belarus, or a possession, like Tatarstan. Longer term, he wants to reestablish the Russian empire, which, for seven decades, was disingenuously rebranded as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
That’s a threat to Europe, a region the Trump National Security Strategy calls “strategically and culturally vital.” The document goes on to warn, however, that many European nations face “civilizational erasure” if policies such as mass immigration and climate alarmism, leading to deindustrialization, continue unabated.
“We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete, and to work in concert with us to prevent any adversary from dominating Europe,” the National Security Strategy asserts. Memo to NATO members: You need America. Make sure America needs you.
The new National Security Strategy foresees the U.S. becoming less involved in the Middle East thanks to the “expanding” Abraham Accords under which Israel and the pro-American Arab nations cooperate and combat “radicalism.” Not impossible.
Final note: My FDD colleague, retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, points out that the National Security Strategy neglects even to mention ongoing “Chinese and Russian cyber threats” to American transportation, communications, energy and financial systems.
Take Beijing’s Volt Typhoon. This cyberespionage group has been infiltrating our critical infrastructure for almost five years, pre-positioning to disrupt or sabotage essential services during a future conflict, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
To deter or, if necessary, defeat this threat, Mr. Montgomery writes, requires significant strengthening of America’s offensive and defensive cyber capabilities — urgently.
A lesson that should have been learned by now: Nothing endangers America’s national security more than threats to which we turn a blind eye.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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