“America Alone” might be the simplest précis of the White House’s new National Security Strategy, an extraordinary document released Friday that starkly lays out the administration’s broad foreign policy priorities.
In a 33-page wall of words and grievances that self-summarizes as “America First,” it manages to reject European allies with a borderline racist swipe, concede the United States must share power with China and search for new allies in the Western Hemisphere, where currently Washington has few. At times, it would be facile enough to be funny, but the stakes are anything but.
“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” the paper declares early on, although it is unclear if this is a statement of past fact, or a new policy. The place sought for the US in this new world is no clearer either: no longer top dog, more snarling at other rising hounds.
“As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global … domination of others,” it says. “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” The meteoric ascent of China, it says, came at the expense of the US (with little mention of the role cheap goods played in rising US living standards for decades) but can only be checked, not stopped.
The White House sees potential for friends nearer home in the Americas, but risks disappointment. The “Trump Corollary” it declares to the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s provides an appendix to an ages-old proposal the US should dominate nearest its own shores, rather than providing a new idea for 2026. It also fails to mention how few potent allies the United States actually has to its south, as it threatens to bomb narco-networks at will, while pardoning the former corrupt president of drug-plagued Honduras.
Repeatedly, the strategy rides high on weighty, serious rhetoric, yet lacks ideas to match the moment. There is sometimes light relief, notably in the phrase: “Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic,” as if it has just narrowly beaten hot weather to the top spot. But a few sentences later, the reductive trope: “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains thorny,” is a reminder of how many thousands of lives are in the sway of this wobbly, dismissive thinking at the helm of the world’s military superpower.
It reads like a fortified, academic translation of President Donald Trump’s longer Oval Office soliloquies. There are moments that borrow prejudices and gripes more commonly associated with the darker corners of X.com, before the whole effort tails off somewhat abruptly after 210 words suggesting Africa’s resources are about all it’s worth.
But the paper’s most disturbing thinking is reserved for the US’ favorite bete noir: Europe. The echoes of Vice President JD Vance’s corrosive speech in February at the Munich Security Conference run through two pages which accuse – without evidence – European allies of suppressing free speech and democracy, while crippling their own economies through over-regulation. It claims a majority of Europeans are denied democratic expression of their desire for peace with Russia – a reductive take on a continent eager to avoid another conflagration, and seeing the Russian threat manifest itself in sabotage across their capitals.
The strategy borrows from those on Europe’s extremities when it dips into the racist “great replacement” theory to state that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.”
“It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” In other words, Europe will be less White, will therefore turn on America’s alliances when they are “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” and not necessarily “strong enough to remain reliable allies.” It goes further, to suggest the remedy of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” – a nod to overt interference.
Russia is spared, unsurprisingly, similar criticism, and deemed a relationship worthy of “strategic stability.” The US is familiarly cast not as a NATO ally to Europe, but a mediator “to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.” It slams “European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments,” where popular desire for peace is trampled by censorship and the suppression of democracy (a false premise).
A lack of self-awareness is present in its next criticism of Europe as being a military power afraid to defend itself. “This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia,” it notes, ignoring Trump’s red-carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose economy is smaller than Italy’s and whose military still can’t conquer its weaker neighbor.
The priority? “An expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine,” reestablishing “strategic stability” with Russia, and Ukraine’s “survival as a viable state.” The path to this enduring and elusive Trump goal is not addressed, yet the words “survival” and “viable” do not suggest any one ahead will be kind to Kyiv. Putin even gets an undeniable gift, when they call for “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” There are few viable candidates now, but the point is not to spell that out.
It is a profoundly unserious document, for a profoundly serious time, describing Trump’s policy as “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’”
Fittingly in a time of enduring culture wars, the White House seems to have taken an angry red Sharpie to the adjectival form of some ideas, but relishes in a word salad advertising its retreat and dismissal of decades-old values, and allies.