A Document For a New American Century (Part 1 of 2)
On the Trump Admin's National Security Strategy: what it is, what it means, and how real is it?
In lieu of a proper introduction, I will instead offer up some historical quotes about US foreign policy, for reasons that you will instinctively understand.
Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State, frequent critic/observer of American foreign policy)
“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”
Winston Churchill (1946, slightly adapted in later retellings)
“The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”
Talleyrand (attributed, about the U.S. in the early 19th century)
“America is a giant boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate—nor can one predict in which direction it will move.”
Vladimir Putin (2014, after the U.S. shifted from “reset” to sanctions)
“It’s extremely dangerous to try to build a relationship with the United States… Agreements with America are valid only until the next election.”
Zhou Enlai (reportedly said to Kissinger in 1971–72 about American policy swings)
“The trouble with you Americans is that you never know where you will be six months from now.”
Anonymous senior European diplomat (quoted in The Economist, 2024, after another U.S. policy reversal)
“Trying to build a long-term strategy with the United States is like playing chess with a partner who might flip the board every four to eight years.”
Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore’s founding leader, in multiple interviews)
“The world’s tragedy is that the most powerful country is also the most unpredictable. America’s domestic politics is the weather system that drives global climate.”
Egyptian President Gamel Nassar had some choice lines to describe US foreign policy too:
“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”
“With the Soviet Union, you know where you stand today and where you will stand tomorrow. With the United States, you never know where you will stand tomorrow—and sometimes not even today.”
“America is like a beautiful woman who changes her mind every night. You can love her, you can fear her, but you can never be sure what she will do in the morning.”
And then there is this recent classic from Russia’s chief diplomat, Sergey Lavrov:
“The USA is agreement non-capable.”
The point of sharing these quotes is to highlight the obvious fact that US foreign policy has long been unpredictable. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if it were a middling power. When a superpower routinely upends the table, it makes life very, very difficult for those countries that have become “states of interest” for the Americans. Creating and pursuing foreign policy strategies require a lot of time and effort, meaning that they are very rarely predicated on short-term trends. When the predictability of foreign actors is removed from the strategic equation, the foundation of any plan becomes very weak.
Earlier this month, the White House issued its 2025 National Security Strategy vision in a 33 page .pdf document available for all to see and read here. This is an action that the US Executive Branch is mandated to do, ever since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. The point of this exercise is to articulate the vision of the President of the United States of America regarding foreign policy, so as to effectively communicate said vision to Congress and the American people. It does not mean that it is an official foreign policy strategy, since this area of governance is the responsibility of both the executive and legislative branches of the US Government.
Because this is the Trump Administration, and because of the fever pitch that has coloured both of his terms in office, a lot of attention is being given to this iteration of this mandatory document. This document is intentionally high-level (meaning that it purposely doesn’t drill down into specifics), keeping within the tradition of previous administrations. However, attention is warranted this time, because the vision outlined by President Trump per this document indicates a significant break in both the USA’s approach to and philosophical arguments regarding how and why it conducts its foreign policy. Despite the obvious Trumpist (think: transactional) touches interspersed throughout this document, what it does represent is a stated desire to break with certain idealist practices of recent administrations in favour of a more realist approach and worldview, one that stresses respect (if we accept the document at face value) for national sovereignty, and an admission that US global hegemony is simply not possible.
So what we are left with is a document that outlines a new vision for US foreign policy, one that has determined that taking on both Russia and China simultaneously is the wrong approach to securing American national interests. This makes it very worthy of closer inspection and analysis (something that I have been thinking about deeply since it was first made available to the public a fortnight ago). Before we begin to dive into it, I am asking you all to temporarily suspend your cynicism and take the strategy outline at face value for the sake of this analysis. I will once again repeat that this is not official policy, and there is a very strong chance that it will never be adopted as that.
Two and a half years ago, I published an essay entitled Turbo America to describe how I interpreted US foreign policy. This was the culmination of several years of essays, and was received quite well. Unfortunately, a lot of people misconstrued what I said in that essay, either deliberately or through failure to grasp the concepts that I had outlined in it (while others didn’t even read it and decided to make up new definitions for a concept that I created), leading me to post a simplified version of my argument. In this simplified version, I reduced my Turbo America thesis down to four points:
Here is what Turbo-America means in concrete terms:
continued direct and indirect conflict with Russia, whether military (no appetite for direct here, so it’s done by proxy), economic, or diplomatic
boxing China in through the use of targeted economic policies/sanctions, and the beefing up of The Quad, alongside efforts to cobble together an “Asian NATO” that would do to Beijing what NATO has been doing to Moscow
Disciplining, streamlining, and homogenizing its own allies to align these countries with the USA politically, economically, culturally, and socially more than they already are i.e. creating unofficial new states of the United States of America via micro-management, targeted sanctioning, espionage, etc.
Imperial management via overseeing/managing conflicts in the US Zone of Influence, with the conflicts in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon being the best example at present
The reason why I bring up Turbo America is that this new document can be seen as a partial repudiation of it, for reasons that we will discuss shortly. The significance in this is that, if taken at face value (once again), this strategic vision is a repudiation of the liberal interventionist approach that has dominated US foreign policy for over a generation now. This repudiation is made abundantly clear in the document:
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.
………
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.
This does constitute a rejection of the approach up to the end of the Biden Administration. When taken in tandem with Trump tearing up international trade covenants and institutions in favour of bilateral deals, it does signal an end to globalism, both economic and political. In short: if made real, it would serve to end what is commonly referred to as the ‘rules-based order’. The Trump Administration has effectively concluded that the present economic and security architectures no longer serve the American people as well as they once did, and that a new approach is warranted to pursue US global interests and maintain American power on the world stage.
The document makes clear the administration’s hostility to globalism:
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.
Distrust of international institutions such as the United Nations has always been present in Republican circles, but this time around it is much more pronounced. Yes, the Dubya Regime did pursue a unilateralist approach that did its best to eschew the multilateralism of the Clinton era, but it still did present its case regarding Iraq at the UN over and over again.
More importantly, this strategy places great emphasis on respecting the state sovereignty of other states, something that was entirely absent from earlier GOP governments. This creates significant problems for the hyper-interventionist set in DC, as they tie the right to state sovereignty to certain individual rights, often the result of recent social trends in the USA. If transgressed, these states can lose their right to sovereignty if the Eye of Sauron glares down at them. The repeated emphasis on national sovereignty concedes the point that not every country should turn into the USA, whether culturally, politically, or socially. USAID has become a notable casualty of this desired policy shift.
‘Core, vital national interests’
Since this vision is high-level, it creates wide avenues of approach for critics of this proposed set of policies. One common refrain will be that this administration seeks to ‘have its cake and eat it too’. Allow me to highlight one example where this is a fair critique:
We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the “forever wars” that bogged us down in that region at great cost.
Ever since the Obama Administration, US foreign policy planners have sought to reduce the American footprint in the Middle East in order to pursue its “Pivot to East Asia”. The problem with this stated desire is that events get in the way, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. We will discuss this region further down in this analysis, but for now I will raise the obvious question stemming from this proposal: What if regional micromanagement is the only way to prevent any perceived adversary from displacing the USA in the Middle East?