I must admit that the memorandum called “US National Security Strategy 2025” released by the Trump administration is the most exciting political text I’ve read in years. 

When the government of the most powerful country on earth throws overboard the assumptions of what international relations experts call its “grand strategy” over the last 80 years, and does it, not in the sanitized, bloodless jargon of national security technocrats, but in anti-elitist, populist language, that is mind-blowing.

The iconoclastic punch of NSS 2025 is delivered right from the start.

After the end of the Cold War, 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…Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.

Next to its overthrowing an 80-year-old paradigm that guided the US from the post-World War II years through the Cold War years to the post-Cold War years, the most significant departure in NSS 2025 is its break with the key assumption of US security policy since the presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2008), including the first Trump administration (2017-2021):  that Washington must focus its resources on containing China, which was defined as the US’s principal strategic competitor.

Replacing China and the Asia Pacific as the US’s main concern is the western hemisphere, where the document comes out with a reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine, but one fortified with what it calls the “Trump corollary,” that is, Washington “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.”  There is no more stark expression of the rude replacement of the liberal containment doctrine of responding to every threat to the US-led capitalist system anywhere in the world by a “spheres of influence” approach.  

Retreat from overextension and retrenchment is the prime priority that guides the document.

Economics in command

A second key priority, which stems from a belief that economic power is the prime currency of power, is that industrial reinvigoration is the key to national security and that, without a strong manufacturing sector, there cannot be a powerful US military in the long run. NSS 2025 does not discount China as a rival power, but it focuses on China as an economic competitor, not as a military power, as previous NSS’s did:

The future belongs to makers. The United States will reindustrialize its economy, “re-shore” industrial production, and encourage and attract investment in our economy and our workforce, with a focus on the critical and emerging technology sectors that will define the future. We will do so through the strategic use of tariffs and new technologies that favor widespread industrial production in every corner of our nation, raise living standards for American workers, and ensure that our country is never again reliant on any adversary, present or potential, for critical products or components.

To this end, the destructive policies of globalization and free trade will be replaced by an inward focused economic strategy via, among other things, high tariffs, bringing back US capital, and aggressive development and acquisition of cutting-edge technologies.  In other words, the NSS is saying, let’s take a leaf from the playbook of China and the Asian tiger economies.  Let’s plan and protect, aggressively.

No more migration from ‘shithole countries’

A third key priority is ending mass migration, whether of the legal or illegal sort, with the document noting, 

Who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.  Any country that considers itself sovereign has the right and duty to define its future. Throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners, who also had to meet demanding criteria. The West’s experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom.

This is a rendering in abstract, seemingly principled language of the sordid realities on the ground, where undocumented workers are picked up, with no recourse to law, migration is halted from what Trump himself has called “shithole countries,” with Somalia and other Muslim countries as examples, while at the same time, migrants from lily white countries like Norway are welcomed.

Europe as basket case

As some observers have noted, it is the US’s traditional allies that are treated badly in the document, and among these allies, Europe is subjected to the worst rhetoric, with Western Europe characterized as being threatened with “civilizational erasure” owing to uncontrolled migration from non-European societies, the subordination of nation-states to transnational entities like the European Union, with its “regulatory suffocation,” and its wrong policy of preventing a settlement of the Ukraine-Russia conflict.  The section on Europe could have been written by Trump’s close friend and ideological ally, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian strongman.

NSS 2025 sees US engagement with the Middle East as diminishing as the US achieves energy independence and declares Washington will end “America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.”  Instead, US will depend on the cooperation between feudal monarchs like the murderous Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and genocidal Israel to keep the peace.

As for Africa, it remains a footnote, probably one of the few points of continuity with previous NSS’s.

The Asia Pacific: Spend more or else…

On the Asia Pacific, the area which previous NSS’s saw as the principal region of concern (although, in fact, it was the Middle East that was the site of interventionist wars over the last three decades), the NSS says keeping the sea lanes in the South China Sea is a US strategic concern along with the maintenance of the  de facto independence of Taiwan owing to its being a producer of advanced computer chips of strategic value to the US economy. 

What is emphasized, however, is that the defense of Taiwan and the South China Sea must now rely more on the US allies in the region, and this can only be accomplished by increased military spending, especially by Japan and South Korea. In discussions with Tokyo and Seoul, Washington has demanded they raise their military spending from about one per cent to a backbreaking five per cent of GDP!

Throughout the section on the Asia Pacific, China is not mentioned as a military threat but treated mainly as an economic rival with which the United States must “rebalance” its relationship.  

What is going on?  

I think the document reflects the fact that isolationists or “continentalists” have gained the upper hand in the debate within the administration vis-a-vis the internationalists, who are now a small minority, and those who wanted to focus on containing China, with the emphasis on military containment, in the Asia Pacific. NSS 2025 accepts China’s rise and dominant position in the Asia Pacific, while telling Beijing, the quid pro quo is our not tolerating your subverting our political, economic, and military position in the western hemisphere.  Whether you like it or not, we will have a free hand in our backyard, and this includes getting rid of Maduro in Venezuela.

Allies in disarray

The Economist and most other influential western media have howled that NSS 2025 is  a betrayal of America’s allies and an expression of a narrow conception of US interests as one based on economic costs and benefits. They are right.  

Trump is telling them, we’re overextended and have to retrench, radically.  Or, as NSS 2025 puts it, no more playing Atlas carrying the world on our shoulders.

The Asian elites, particularly the Japanese and Korean elites, won’t see the mention of keeping the South China Sea open and maintaining the status quo in Taiwan as indicating continued American commitment. Rather, they will see the insistence on spending much more for defense as a veiled threat that if they don’t reach the five per cent of GDP goal, Washington will have an excuse to cut back its forces now deployed in bases throughout the Western Pacific.

In article published in MEER last June, that anticipated the contours of NSS 2025, I wrote that the  Koreans and Japanese  are not likely to be fooled into thinking “Trump’s approach is simply transactional; they know his ultimate game is strategic withdrawal. They and other global actors know that this political-military thrust goes hand and glove with Trump’s economic strategy, which is to disengage globally while creating an techno-economic Fortress America aimed at keeping foreign goods out, bringing back and padlocking US capital, hoarding knowledge by keeping foreign students out, and preventing the entry of migrants from what he calls ‘shithole countries,’ meaning us. It’s not quite Tokugawa Japan or the Hermit Kingdom of the Joseon Dynasty in Korea, but it’s close.”

As for the Philippine elites, nothing is likely to shake them from their adherence to their longstanding grand strategy, which is to subcontract our foreign and military policies to Washington, even when they’ve been duly warned by NSS 2025 that, hey, you’re going to be on your own pretty soon, dude. 

It’s going to be waking up to a nightmare, and I’m not going to be the last to deny these folks don’t deserve it. – Rappler.com

The author is co-chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South and retired professor at the University of the Philippines and State University of New York at Binghamton.