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.
