The Trump National Security Strategy Is Good, Bad, and Ugly All at Once

Like the classic Clint Eastwood western, the Trump Administration should have titled its National Security Strategy: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” The good is the NSS’s recognition of the fundamental goal of U.S. national security policy: the defense of American sovereignty. The bad is the confused, at times contradictory, approach to the central national security challenge of the twenty first century: the rise of China. The ugly is the dismissive attitude toward the allies that the United States will need to protect the democracy, individual rights, and free markets that are the last best hope on earth.

Many commentators have begun their review of the Trump NSS by questioning its value. National Security Strategies may advance political or rhetorical arguments that have little influence on the administration’s actual day-to-day conduct. They may provide after-the-fact rationalizations of more ad hoc decisions. Or they may reveal the outcome of inter-agency struggles over the budgetary pie. The world little remembers the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy or believes that it guided the decisions of a President in mental decline.

But a national strategy can have a profound impact. At the beginning of the Cold War, the Truman administration developed America’s core strategy through two documents. The first, George Kennan’s “X Telegram,” set out containment of the Soviet Union as the basic approach, one which predicted communism’s internal failure in the face of patient Western opposition. The second, NSC 68, developed by State Department policy director Paul Nitze, called for the massive military spending required to execute the strategy. Despite the controversies to come over Vietnam, détente, and the Reagan buildup, containment remained the guiding principle of American national security for four decades until the United States prevailed.

Washington may face a similar turning point today. As at the end of World War II, the Cold War finished with the United States in a position of unparalleled dominance. But instead of finding peace, the United States soon faced an ally, motivated by ideology and history, that became a rival. Both then and now, the United States needed a policy guide during a period of deep change in international politics. Trump’s first term NSS made a good start by recognizing that the unipolar moment where the United States strode like a Colossus across the post-Cold War world had given way to great power competition between the United States, China, and Russia.

While we should credit the drafters of the 2025 NSS with an understanding of the moment, they unfortunately could not rise to meet it. Trump’s second term NSS develops no coherent strategy to understand and meet the challenges of this century. The Kennan’s and Nitze’s of our time have yet to emerge.

The Trump NSS's failure to develop a broader strategy for the challenges posed by China and Russia should not detract from its strengths. No one could dispute the declaration of the basic goal of U.S. national security as “the continued survival and safety of the United States as an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given natural rights of its citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests.” The Trump administration has focused on protecting the homeland as perhaps no other in memory has. It has restored control over the southern border and brought illegal migration almost to a complete stop. Reasonable minds can differ over whether the harsh deportation program inside the United States is more harmful than helpful to the nation’s well-being. But there can be little doubt that the Trump administration has restored control over the border, and hence over the territory and population of the United States.

The NSS also announces a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. While the exact definition of the corollary is unclear, the Trump administration has clearly taken steps to counter foreign influence in South America. It is waging economic warfare against Venezuela, a hostile regime that has allied with Cuba, Iran, and even China. The NSS does not grasp the Monroe Doctrine’s true goal: to prevent a foreign power from setting up a base in our neighborhood, from which it could attack us or disrupt our security. Instead, it seeks to expand American influence in the hemisphere to reduce migrant flows, halt illegal drugs, and access natural resources. Nevertheless, overthrowing the disastrous regime of Nicholas Maduro and, ultimately, ending authoritarian rule in Cuba will secure the American homeland against any nearby threats.

From there, unfortunately, the NSS stumbles from good to bad. Traditional American national security goals have expanded beyond our territory. If the first goal is protection of the homeland, and the second is dominance of the western hemisphere, the third has been preventing any hostile power from dominating Europe or Asia, and the fourth has been keeping open the seas, air, and space – the channels of interstate commerce that enable our trade. Even if one accepts that the world has changed from the days of World War II, the Cold War, and even the U.S.’s unipolar moment, the Trump administration provides no strategy to replace these traditional goals.

Because the Trump administration lacks clear strategic goals beyond defending the homeland and the western hemisphere, it struggles to understand events in Europe and Asia. In Europe, the NSS does not understand why the United States has helped Ukraine defend against Russian aggression, but instead blames our NATO allies for stalling a peace agreement. Of course, the Biden administration and Europe could have accelerated an end to the fighting by letting Russia win. The Trump administration seems to believe that the United States once defended Western Europe with NATO and restored their economies through the Marshall Plan out of sheer charity or civilizational sympathy. But the United States instead defended Europe from Soviet designs out of sheer self-interest: to prevent a power from unifying Europe's resources and potentially using them against us.

Even with its decline as a political and military force, the European Union still amounts to an estimated 450 million people and $18 trillion in GDP; the United States has an estimated population of 340 million and a GDP of $30 trillion; China has about 1.4 billion people and $18 trillion in GDP. A Europe dominated by Russia or, worse yet, China, could provide the resources to help strangle the United States. This was the very argument Kennan raised to defend Western Europe against Soviet expansion at the beginning of the Cold War. There will be disputes, as there should be, over whether the Europeans are contributing enough to their own defense. But whatever the outcome of that fight, the United States has an equal interest today in ensuring the resources of Europe are not unified in the hands of a hostile power as it did during World War II or the Cold War.

A similar blindness afflicts the NSS’s analysis of Asia. The NSS contains stirring language about defending Taiwan's independence and ensuring that the South China Sea remains open. “There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters,” the NSS observes. But the White House strikingly does not identify from whom it will defend Taiwan. It declares that the U.S. will work with partners to prevent “aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” (the defense perimeter from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to Indonesia). But again, the NSS does not identify the potential aggressor. The Trump administration further declares that it will fight to keep the South China Sea open. Control over the waters “could allow a potentially hostile power to impose a toll system over one of the world’s most vital lanes of commerce or — worse — to close and reopen it at will.” Again, the NSS stubbornly refuses to name the “potentially hostile power.”

The United States is not defending Taiwan, the first island chain, and the South China Sea from Japan or Korea. The “potentially hostile power” is obviously China. But by refusing to name the potential enemy, the Trump administration cannot provide a strategy that explains why China is the enemy. China has become a rival because of both capability and intent. Beijing has launched an impressive military buildup that has already produced the world's largest navy and may bring its air force and army into parity with the United States in the near future. But its large military did not render interwar Great Britain a potential hostile enemy against whom we planned. To be considered a threat, a potential rival must marry capabilities to hostile intent. And it is on this score that China presents the direst threat to U.S. national security in this century. It has an economy that virtually equals our own in size, a military that may already enjoy regional superiority over our own, and an authoritarian ideology that seeks to overthrow the United States from its leading global role. Communist China has no pacifist record: it attacked American troops in Korea and waged sharp border conflicts with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. American national security would be undeniably threatened by a rival such as China placing the peoples and economies of Asia under its control.

And that brings us to the ugly. Many have commented on the NSS’s capricious attack on Europe for its “civilizational erasure” brought on by “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that 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.” While the NSS criticizes Japan, Korea, and our other Asian allies for not contributing enough to collective defense (again, against whom?), it reserves these cultural insults only for Europe.

At first glance, the NSS’s attack on Europe seems tangential at best. It should not matter whether Europeans respect robust free speech rights or not, encourage broad immigration, or allow right-wing parties to compete in elections. What is essential, as Kennan recognized, is that we prevent Europe’s resources from being unified and used against us. This level of interest in the domestic regimes of Europe is, dare we say it, only something a neo-conservative would love. Recall that it was the neo-conservatives of the Bush administration who believed that the nature of a nation’s domestic regime mattered for purposes of foreign policy. It was President George W. Bush, much reviled by MAGA leaders today, who wanted to spread democracy throughout the world. Taking a page out of the neo-con book, apparently, it is now the Trump White House that will pursue national security policies toward other nations based on their democratic natures. Ronald Reagan would be proud.

But there is a deeper ugliness to the attack on Europe, one that will prove counterproductive to American national security interests. On the one hand, the Trump administration is calling upon European nations to take more responsibility for their own defense, to partner with the United States in securing regional stability (against whom is not stated), and to cooperate against the unnamed aggressors who seem to roam Asia. But on the other hand, the Trump administration has slapped high tariffs on trade with European countries and predicted their cultural extinction. If the Trump administration believes its own rhetoric about European trend lines, the United States will ultimately walk away from NATO. Americans, the NSS believes, will no longer find anything worth defending in Europe once immigrants, EU bureaucrats, and left-wing progressives have fully taken over. Indeed, if the NSS’s arguments hold water, the Europeans themselves won’t find anything worth defending in themselves.

Withdrawal from Europe would be a strategic error of monumental proportions, perhaps on a par with the United States’s withdrawal from world affairs after World War I. Were the Trump administration to dissolve NATO, as Trump allegedly wanted to do in his first term, Russia or China would inevitably expand their influence over the continent. Despite its falling population and relative economic decline, Europe still has resources and capabilities that rival our own. Even though the United States bore the lion’s share of the cost of defending Europe, it advanced our national security interests by keeping the Russians out and the Germans down (as Lord Ismay famously said in describing NATO's purpose). The NSS creates a straw man in responding that Europe has the conventional military capabilities to defend itself; Washington should instead worry about a Europe that would willingly embrace Russian leadership and ultimately pose a threat to the United States. Attacking Europeans for their “civilizational erasure” could only help Moscow in such efforts.

The saving grace of the NSS, perhaps, is that it will not likely govern the foreign and military policies of the Trump administration itself. Despite its skepticism of traditional American national security goals, the White House is still pursuing the defense of Western Europe and seeking to contain China. While Trump swings to and fro in supporting Ukraine, the administration has still worked with Congress to maintain the military lifeline that has held the Russians at bay. In the Pacific, the United States and its allies continue to arm Taiwan and build a tighter alliance structure against Beijing. The NSS’s provocations in print have yet to achieve anything more because they ultimately do not make a strategy that responds to the rise of China. Without a compelling national security guide, President Trump will have to resort to what he does best – making it up on the fly. Even though he might bounce from one side to another, he will have to obey the unforgiving rules of national self-interest that govern international politics.

John Yoo is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin.