The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy marks a deeper shift than a routine policy update. It codifies a worldview that rejects the premises of US grand strategy since the Cold War: a formal repudiation of permanent global domination and a recalibration of priorities away from perpetual intervention. For critics of endless foreign entanglements, some of its critiques—especially about overreach in the Middle East—ring true. But the document does not return to classic restraint. Instead it advances a transactional nationalism framed in civilizational terms and an assertive hemispheric interventionism that risks replicating the destabilizing errors it claims to remedy.
Europe’s treatment in the NSS is startling. It warns of “civilizational erasure” driven by migration and low birth rates and questions whether future majority non-European NATO members will remain aligned with the US. The administration openly seeks to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory,” expressing hope for ascendant “patriotic European parties.” This is no ordinary alliance dispute; it’s an ideological intervention. Aligning with right-wing nationalist movements against elected governments marks a radical departure from past US practice and contradicts professed respect for sovereignty. If America rejects exporting liberal democracy to authoritarian Gulf regimes, it cannot coherently promote nationalist conservatism in Europe without embracing selective interference.
Perhaps the clearest signaling of a new posture is the so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: a proposed readjustment of US military presence toward the Western Hemisphere, including lethal action against drug trafficking and military buildup around Venezuela. This lays bare the strategy’s contradiction. The NSS criticizes endless nation-building yet contemplates expanded military roles in Latin America while conducting strikes in international waters and weighing regime change. Attention to the hemisphere is overdue, but there’s a critical difference between engagement with partners and reasserting hegemonic military prerogatives. US history in Latin America—shaped by the Monroe Doctrine—should counsel caution. The NSS’s economic rationale for hemispheric dominance—claiming it will help grow the US economy into the 2030s—misreads what drives prosperity: trade, innovation, and investment, not military dominance. Heavy-handed intervention risks undermining the commercial ties the administration claims to prioritize.
On the Middle East, the NSS offers a sharper diagnosis than many predecessors. It recognizes diminished US dependence on regional energy, the disproportionate share of American resources tied to Middle Eastern conflicts, and the counterproductivity of lecturing Arab regimes on governance. These are welcome acknowledgments. Yet the prescription is troubling: encouraging reform only when it emerges “organically” can rationalize tolerating authoritarianism so long as regimes do business with Washington and maintain ties with Israel. There is a middle path between crusading democracy promotion and raw realpolitik—one that combines restraint with consistent principles. The administration’s willingness to scold European democracies over immigration and speech while cozying up to restrictive Gulf monarchies suggests transactional calculations trump principle.
Notably absent from the NSS’s foreground is an intense focus on China. Unlike previous US strategies that made strategic competition with Beijing central, this document emphasizes maintaining “mutually advantageous” economic ties grounded in reciprocity and fairness. That could be a corrective to bipartisan moves toward a new Cold War. Managing competition while preserving economic interdependence can be sensible. But the NSS’s silence on broader ideological, technological, and Indo-Pacific security dimensions reads less like principled restraint and more like strategic ambivalence. Without a clear plan to address technology competition, regional alliances, and long-term rivalry dynamics, the approach risks drifting between engagement and neglect.
The core failing of the NSS is the absence of a coherent vision. It catalogues grievances—against the post-Cold War consensus, European weakness, illegal immigration, unfair trade—but offers little constructive architecture for the international order it seeks to shape. It rejects global domination, yet endorses assertive hemispheric intervention. It criticizes alliances while failing to define how or when they should be used. It exalts sovereignty but intends to influence allied electorates. Previous strategies, for all their flaws, aimed at shaping a stable, prosperous order; this document reads more like a manifesto of resentments and transactional priorities than a roadmap for enduring American leadership.
Advocates of restraint confront a dilemma. The administration claims their skepticism but betrays its tenets in practice. Non-intervention cannot coexist with military strikes in the Caribbean; respect for sovereignty cannot coexist with efforts to cultivate political movements against allied governments; prioritizing US interests cannot coexist with alienating partners essential to those interests. What is presented as restraint is better described as incoherent nationalist transactionalism with selective interventionist impulses.
American foreign policy does need recalibration: the Middle East should not dominate strategy; European allies should carry heavier defense burdens; trade should be fairer. But none of that requires abandoning alliances, embracing civilizational politics, or reasserting hemispheric control by force. Rejecting one set of policy mistakes only to commit new ones is a poor bargain. What’s required is strategic restraint paired with principled engagement—not the selective, transactional approach the NSS outlines.
The central question is whether the dissonance between this document and the realities of global politics will force a correction, or whether the costs of this approach will match or exceed those of the older consensus. History suggests the latter is likelier, and that should concern anyone interested in genuine strategic reform.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
