What “America First” Leaves Out

 

The 2025 paper entitled National Security Strategy of the United States of America gives some insight into the circle-the-wagons mind-set of the Trump administration. Not unexpectedly, the overall emphasis is on smoothing the workings of the global marketplace in order to benefit American business interests, including the behemoth defense industry. The tone is enthusiastically transactional. The paper explains pretty clearly, at least by implication, why Trump tilts toward Russia and away from Ukraine: more lucrative deals can be effected with Putin than with Zelenskyy, though a “peace” deal could enable commercial deals with both.

The paper exhibits a transparency similar to that of Trump himself and for the most part is written in plain English, though the Orwellian rhetoric in this key passage is thought-provoking: “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’ Say what?

 

The paper, suffused with Trump’s openly nativist, white-Eurocentric worldview, exhibits moments of blatant hypocrisy: “We want to maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power’ through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests.” Do we indeed?  Does it really further our interests to cut off support to the World Health Organization on a planet where disease knows no borders? Do we make more friends by being feared, or by being respected and admired for medical and nutritional generosity?

 

The most blatant omission is the paper’s denial of the global climate emergency, the prime factor that will drive the movement of the refugees Trump wants to bar from both Europe and the U.S. At an even more fundamental level, global security will be unachievable if climate is not addressed with sufficient commitment by the community of nations as a whole. The isolationism of “America First” will not be sustainable. Further, maintaining “peace” by mere strength in arms will become futile as ever larger swaths of the planet gradually become uninhabitable. The “Golden Dome” missile defense shield proposed in the paper will do nothing to defend against the fires, floods, droughts and storms in our future unless we change our worldview from “America First” to ”we’re all in this together.”

 

Just as unapologetic ruthlessness will do nothing to resolve the difficulty of achieving national strengths which are undefinable in military terms. One example is the problem of mass shootings in our country, which are the result of our not yet having come to terms with the contradictions of the Second Amendment. That we are willing to let our children endure the trauma of school shooting drills, let alone school shootings themselves, for the sake of something that was written into the Constitution when the world was a different place, demonstrates a profound cultural-political failure. If only for the sake of our childrens’ mental health, It should be at least as difficult to obtain a license to possess a gun as it is to drive a car. And when roughly one in six families in what is purported to be the wealthiest nation in the world requires food stamps, something has been left out of the reductive definitions of our country’s strengths in the National Security paper.

 

Turning from domestic to international security, the present global system, based in deterrence, is unsustainable for two reasons. First, nations cannot afford to both address climate change and the unfathomably large expense of expanding and renewing their weaponry. If they choose to ignore climate, the resulting chaos will be a major cause of further war. Definitions of deterrence must widen to include continuing to switch into renewable sources of energy because that will deter climate chaos. Instead we have rear-guard resistance by the oil, gas and coal industries, encouraged by government subsidy.  Second, the ongoing arms race, if unchecked, is going in only one direction—toward split-second high-tech annihilation by accident, misinterpretation or madness.

 

American security depends not upon circling its wagons into an unworkable isolation, but in accepting the realities of interdependence, which include first of all the necessity of cooperating with other nations on climate. On the diplomatic/military front, to remain the last best hope of the world, we must stand for values that hover dependably above and behind transactional capitalism and indeed make the market system possible: adherence to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, obedience to international law, continuous improvement of our imperfect democratic processes, and honest calling out of the brutalities of the autocrats, including our own. We must continue reaching out endlessly with arms control initiatives even if others have violated previous agreements or refuse our good-will attempts. There is always the possibility, even if it seems remote at the moment, that an adversary will begin to see that continuing the tired “we build/they build” formula drains away economic resources needed for the schools and hospitals and mass transit that make an essential contribution to the stability and security of nations.

 

“Pragmatic” may mean one thing to me and something else to you. The fixation on the price of everything seems to blind the Trump administration to the value of anything. True pragmatism searches for creative ways to respond to corrupt authoritarian leaders like Putin in a dual context: Worsening climate conditions that will affect the entire planet, and wars that result in nuclear winter may not be the best way to resolve global warming. These become foundational truths that, because they cannot be avoided by any world leader, can form the beginnings of a diplomacy based upon shared self-interest.

 

At present murder, not cooperation on the basis of enlarged self-interest, is the currency of “security” enforcement, on every level, all across the globe. Deterrence is ultimately the threat of nuclear mass murder. Inconveniently free-speaking dissidents like Kashoggi or Navalny are silenced by murder. Possible drug smugglers on the high seas are murdered to send a message. Pregnant Ukrainian women are murdered in a maternity hospital to undermine the morale of a nation that bravely refuses territorial aggression and subjection. It’s a murderous world.

 

What can creative state power do to make it less so? America is strong enough to learn a new role for itself in the world, based in an accurate vision of the realities that lie ahead. What if our security strategy was to aggressively lead on climate and Earth-regeneration? Sadly, looking for opportunities to cooperate could lead to a level of prosperity that seems beyond the comprehension of the people who wrote the 2024 National Security Strategy.

Ukraine—and the Rest of Us—at a Crossroads

 

Our global security system, based in who has the most and the most modern weapons to enforce deterrence, is gradually becoming irrelevant, undermined by the ever-intensifying climate emergency. If any given nation is experiencing droughts, floods and unbearable, even life-threatening heat, what difference does it make if its government possesses more nuclear weapons than its adversaries?

This immense paradigm shift, though it is taking place right before our eyes, is hard to see and harder to keep in mind. Headlines about war eclipse complex stories of semi-visible change. Especially if we are climate skeptics or have a financial interest in not changing the way we operate, it's hard to admit that fires, floods, droughts and hurricanes raising our insurance premiums are tied directly to the climate crisis. Unbearable heat is coming first for the equatorial countries, though unless we change it will come for the temperate ones, too.

The shift includes the realization that everyone on Earth, citizens and governments, makes their contribution to the potentiality of nuclear war and various climate disasters according to individual and collective decisions. This is a form of conscious interdependence that we have never experienced before, even if variations of the Golden Rule, too often ignored, permeate the world’s religions.

Meanwhile we are caught up in the middle of the shift, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the fecklessness and brutality of the presidents of Russia and the United States, as they seem to be negotiating a disgraceful deal to end the war in Ukraine with the insufficient involvement of Europe or Ukraine itself.

All the limitations in the global security system are revealed by Putin’s aggression and America's flailing response—the reality that he can threaten to use nuclear weapons but that he can’t win anything with nuclear weapons, the reality that international institutions including the United Nations have insufficient power to bring Putin to his senses.

At the same time this war which has indiscriminately killed children and pregnant women in hospitals and grandmothers in their apartments is taking place in the larger context of the deep shift outlined above. If the thawing and melting of Russia’s vast frozen tundra accelerates and spews methane, a potent warming agent, into the Earth’s atmosphere, Putin’s dream of recovered Russian greatness will dissolve, as the Earth regresses into forms of chaos that will be far beyond the control of the most wily and paranoid autocrat, be they Russian, American, Hungarian, North Korean, take your pick.

Can we hold in our hearts and minds two opposing conceptions of security? On the one hand, we experience indignation that the people of Ukraine must suffer such monumental injustice, and on the other we also know that aggressive wars led by autocrats lead nowhere and will become more and more a distraction from the immense challenge of climate. Resources we allow to flow into the deterrence system by the trillions will be unavailable for building more solar panels.

Our wars are a monumental failure of our capacity to see ourselves in the other, revealing our shared interest in working together not just to resolve our differences peacefully but to plan for climate effects that are coming for everyone, rich and poor alike.

Putin and Trump are representatives of this tragic shortfall of ethical imagination. Ukraine is paying the price. The pundits are already handicapping the next possible test of obsolete paradigms of power: China and Taiwan. Both of those great nations manufacture software that can help the world make the transition to regenerative technologies more successfully and rapidly. What would a war between them prove, besides providing another occasion for nuclear brinksmanship or far worse?

Beyond the shift lies the possibility of a world where the trillions spent on war and weapons are redirected toward meeting human needs directly, creating a virtuous circle that spirals up into prevention rather than down into violence. Far from being utopian, the shift will be necessary for our survival. Positing the most optimistic scenarios, the damage we have already done to ourselves is going to require an immense educational, economic, military and political reorientation—as one example, think of what it will take in time and resources just to rebuild Gaza.

When it comes to both nukes and climate, my survival depends upon how those on the other side of the planet think and act, and their survival depends upon what initiatives I take. This commonality of self-interest can even be seen as an opportunity, at least in the immediate future. But to the extent we continue to drift (for example, no mention was made  at the latest climate gathering in Brazil of the need to move beyond fossil fuels) the window of relative order that allows for proactive initiative will begin to close.

Choosing life over death, cooperation over competition, poses a direct threat to the arms business, the nearest thing on Earth to a perpetual motion machine.  But where there is deep awareness and agreement that all of us share the human adventure together and each is responsible for all, the required shift will gather momentum. It will release our creative energies toward the real challenge of making our peace with the Earth. Only then can the biosphere continue to sustain us into the next phase of the human story. Fortunately the Earth itself has immense self-healing capabilities if we work with it.

Are We Fighting the Wrong Battle, Mr. Secretary of War?

 The disconcerting speeches of Hegseth and Trump to an assembly of silent, stone-faced military leaders at Quantico on September 30, 2025 revealed three intertwined visions of how armed force should be used to ensure security in our moment. All are familiar, but all three are becoming obsolete. Hardly extinct, but completely outmoded by current and future conditions. A fourth vision of what the mission could be for both our own and our adversaries’ militaries includes a radical consideration of looming climate effects upon military mission and strategy.

The first vision, from Hegseth, was a reversion to the idea that modern wars can be won by a ferociously male fighting culture. The major flaw in this vision of future glorious patriotic wars (setting aside that no one can “warfight” and win a nuclear war)  is revealed by stalemates such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, which became standoffs not from lack of U.S. ferocity, but because we failed to look more deeply inro the political and cultural interests  of our adversaries. The leaders of North Vietnam admired Thomas Jefferson, loathed and feared the Chinese, and wanted out from the colonialism both of the French and of the Americans who tried unsuccessfully to administer an updated version of what the French failed to achieve.

The second vision of war, from President Trump, was that our country can become peaceful if its own citizens are pacified, or forcefully suppressed, by using our own military against them. American constitutional government is designed to prevent just such a regression into civil war, whose story we should want, from painful experience, not to revisit. Mass violence between American citizens who are awash in numbers of guns, motivated by hate and fear, and basically indistinguishable from each other, would not be pretty.

The third vision of security, deterrence, is presently administered by that very group of trained,  intelligent, professional, dedicated military leaders that made up Trump’s and Hegseth’s command-performance audience. It is the establishment vision of war prevention through strength, about which Hegseth discoursed at length before going on to harangue the crowd about physical fitness and the prohibition of beards.

Hegseth declared that the military will no longer get involved with climate change issues, even though there are whole books about how the U.S. military is already having unavoidable encounters with the effects of global warming, including more ferocious storms and rising sea levels affecting bases at home and abroad. Setting aside that the militaries of the world are responsible for more pollutants than any other human institution.

The problem is that deterrence, given an unstable, headlong arms race, will eventually and inevitably break down. It already has. We came all too close to doing ourselves in with the Cuban crisis, way back in 1962. Our vast array of nuclear weapons did not prevent the 9-11 attacks.

But in our own time deterrence has an even deeper flaw: It addresses the wrong war. While we spend trillions updating our nuclear weapons, global temperatures keep rising at faster rates. In another ten years, we will learn to our considerable regret how stupid it was to spend 1.5 trillion dollars on projects like the Lockheed Joint Strike Fighter, instead of using those funds to build a stronger electric grid and hasten the transition to clean sustainable energy sources.

Left unaddressed, the follow-on effects of the global climate emergency will accelerate new tensions, as the refugee challenge intensifies and countries have to cope with mass deaths from excess heat, flooding, droughts, and storms.

The militaries of the world are not about to wake up, shed their weapons, and magically pursue the arts of peace. Yet it is worth asking what militarism does to address climate constructively. Sadly, the answer is, at the moment, nothing. Our grandchildren will be asking tough questions about who encouraged and who obstructed the great transition into sustainable energy and earth-regeneration.

In contrast to the Hegseth/Trump/establishment vision which could leads to mass death, imagine the militaries of the world gradually redirecting their resources, prowess, and logistical efficiency toward addressing the regeneration of Earth’s biosystems. It would be a very different conception of military strength—because authentic strength that leads to real security for all from now forward will be whatever contributes to the health of the whole planetary organism. We’re all in a leaky boat together, including the military.

Looking at the totality of world conflict, it may feel as if such a refocus would be a long time coming, if ever. The military brass sitting silently in Mr. Hegseth’s come-to-Jesus meeting are caught between a dying mission and what will become an inescapable new one. They know that the climate effects which are going to cause shortages, chaos, mass migrations and unwinnable wars are not a long time coming.  They’re here.

Winslow Myers, author with Libby Traubman of a recently publish book: One: One Earth, One Humanity, One Future, is a syndicated writer for Peacevoice, and serves on the Advisory Board f the War Prevention Institute

 

Common Sense

 

The term “common sense” is often evoked by President Trump, though his “common” sense can seem grotesquely solitary and unique, as for example when he cruelly shut down the USAID program, increasing disease, malnutrition and death for people in faraway places with desperate needs.

Or when he blamed the Washington plane crash on DEI initiatives. Even that eccentric assignment of blame already seems almost quaint a few weeks later as his “common sense” upends 80 years of NATO consensus and, in an inversion of truth worthy of Orwell, he blames Ukraine for causing Russian aggression. While Trump may not be a warmonger in the usual mold of a number of recent U.S. presidents, he admires dictators and shares their brutal, transactional temperament.

His autocratic instincts are running roughshod over core conceptions of American identity, including the difficult balance of three co-equal branches of government, equality under the law, protection of minorities, the free press, and leading the free world against totalitarianism. His administrative minions (or is he their minion?) want to abandon Jefferson’s noble ideal of freedom of religion in favor of (white) Christian nationalism.

The contemporary meaning of “common sense” could use some examination. What principles might become essential to maintaining and enlarging our shared sense of reality, not only within our borders but beyond them?

Get any group of ordinary people together anywhere in the world and they would exhibit agreement, a common sense, that nuclear war was not a good thing and arms control treaties are a useful preventative. At the same time the “common sense” of establishment strategists in the nuclear nations seems to be exactly the opposite—build more and more weapons until the system breaks down into the very war nobody wants and nobody can win.

Same with the other biggest challenge the planet faces together: two contending “common senses.” One common sense asserts that untrammeled markets, narrow self-interest and growth all lead to greater prosperity. Drill, baby! The other common (and scientifically proven) sense is that untrammeled, narrow self-interest and growth are withering the biosystems which are the only possible true source of our prosperity.

During the American revolution Thomas Paine, an Englishman, penned a fiery and popular pamphlet entitled “Common Sense,” making the case for American independence. The pamphlet accelerated our Revolution. As our foundations are being shaken, is there an opportunity for a worldwide “peoples’ common sense” to emerge? What would be its outlines? What would its leaders look like?

The late Alexei Navalny, in his superhuman defiance of tyranny, was a modern-day incarnation of Thomas Paine and a demanding but universal model of common sense. All he wanted for his beloved Russia was the very same things we are in danger of losing in America at the moment: free speech, a free press, uncorrupted free and fair elections. Another dimension of common sense Navalny exemplified was nonviolence. While he apparently wasn’t a doctrinal pacifist in the Gandhi mold, like Gandhi his absolute confidence in truth was his only sword. Harassed by a Kafka-esque system of petty prison regulations deliberately designed to drive him nuts, he remained cheerfully defiant unto death.

In our own common sense defiance of lies and baloney, we must add the inconvenient truth of the global climate emergency which the President and his administration so painfully and backwardly deny, much to the deep distress of broad swaths of the world.

The primary context of planetary common sense today is radical interdependence. Everything “nests” in that larger truth. If we should slip into nuclear war, and as the global environmental crisis becomes more acute, people everywhere will suffer. We find ourselves all in the same leaky boat. Neither militarism nor unrestrained capitalist growth can get us where we need to go. Indeed, world military forces, with the U.S. leading the pack, are the single greatest source of fossil fuel emissions.

But these realities also give us a new sense of shared fate and therefore common, shared self-interest—a new anti-militarist pro-environment common sense. The meaning of strength and security has fundamentally changed.

Many countries are a mixture of help and harm; that is simply the norm. We abhor the Chinese record on human rights, but the reality that they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and electric car batteries will benefit our health by cutting greenhouse gases.

Our strength and security now come not from numbers of weapons or gross national product but instead from what each nation can contribute to strengthen the total health of the biosphere. This insight might be drowning in a vast sludge of uncommon nonsense, but truth has a way of willing out—whether painfully or triumphantly.