If the sea change in U.S. foreign policy since President Donald Trump returned to the White House this year hadn’t sufficiently shaken confidence in our national security, a new strategy declaration makes clear that the United States is no longer a reliable ally of the free world.
National Security Strategy 2025 excoriates Europe for bowing to “weak” regulations and global objectives like fighting climate change, aiding the world’s poorest and honoring treaty obligations to defend NATO allies under threat by Western civilization’s worst adversaries.
NSS 2025 forecasts an end to the “perpetually expanding alliance” of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that has bound Western democracies in a common defense pact since the first 12 nations joined in 1949. The vow to halt expansion of the 32-state alliance now effectively delivers the Kremlin’s decades-long attempts to sever the United States from its European allies, clearing the way for a new era of imperialist spheres of influence.
The pullback from NATO commitments of U.S. leaders since the end of World War II sends a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that territory they covet is up for grabs, that their respective desires to seize Ukraine and Taiwan are now achievable by virtue of their superior strength over their more vulnerable targets.
In the nearly two weeks that security analysts and policy wonks have been combing the 33-page NSS document, the one upside to this political bombshell has been to spur a serious scramble by Ukraine’s more faithful European allies to backfill the aid and weaponry being withheld by the Trump administration.
The strategy of NATO members has been to urge U.S. support to Kyiv to deny Russian conquest of Ukraine, noting that arms and aid to Kyiv is a small price to pay compared with the obligation to put U.S. boots on the ground of any NATO-member state under attack. The Europeans have been assuming the United States would live up to its treaty obligations if Russia were to invade a NATO country. The new NSS suggests the Trump administration might not.
Russia is surrounded by NATO-member states, many of them former vassals of the Soviet and Czarist Russian empires. Putin has made no secret of his desire to reclaim the hostage states liberated by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact alliance.
If Putin is rewarded with Ukrainian land and a ban on Kyiv ever joining NATO, he is likely to move on to re-annex one or all of the small Baltic states. NATO’s own military strategists calculate that the prosperous former trading states of the Hanseatic League—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—could be overrun by unimpeded Russian forces within 24 hours.
Trump’s willingness to cede the fate of Europe to Russia’s claimed sphere of influence resurrects concern about what he expects in return. It should be recalled that Trump boasted just a few months ago that he would like to retake the Panama Canal and annex Greenland and Canada.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned last week that Russia could attack an alliance member within five years. He pointed to Putin’s revved-up weapons and hardware production in the Kremlin’s obvious anticipation of continued fighting for the indefinite future. Putin’s military-industrial complex is now turning out 150 tanks and 550 armored vehicles every month. More than 40% of Russia’s national budget this year has been spent on the military and weapons to support current and future wars and occupations.
Trump’s NSS demotes the importance of collaborative relations with much of the world, stating that “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
Conversely, economic opportunities that would benefit the U.S. economy—AKA the American billionaire class—are recognized as worth pursuing regardless of the potential partners’ adversarial history and previous designation as a threat to U.S. national security.
Trump and the Project 2025 authors whose policies are fully embraced in the NSS redirects to Europe the scorn previously reserved for adversaries like Russia and China.
In the section on Promoting European Greatness, the document warns that Continental Europe’s share of global GDP has dropped from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today, “partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.”
Those forces withering the European treasuries, according to the NSS architects, are policies like DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), consumer and environmental protections and adherence to international treaty commitments signed by Trump predecessors in the White House.
More harrowing for Europe, Trump’s policymakers warn, is the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” an artful term warning against allowing nonwhite immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers into their countries because they will eventually outnumber the white people.
“It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the NSS states. As for U.S. policy on immigration, the document states that the current administration wants “a world in which migration is not merely “orderly” but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows and have full control over whom they do and do not admit.”
“New Trump doctrine identifies ‘weak’ Europe’s problem: Not enough racism,” The Guardian headlined its analysis of the NSS last week. The newspaper attributed the racial prism through which Trump views national security as “the confused fear of an ageing white man confronted with a changing world.”
The current occupant of the White House is not known for his grasp of history, which might explain his oversight of the fact that the United States was inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years before white European colonization and migrations began five centuries ago. The NSS authors’ racist objectives exude hypocrisy as well as white-supremacist intimidation.
Aside from the racial animus behind the stated focus of the Trump White House, analysts rebuke the ideological about-face on relations with Russia and China, both identified in Trump’s first-term NSS as the greatest threats to U.S. security.
“On China, the strategy marks a shift from the Pentagon’s longtime focus on rivalry, and though it isn’t exactly a surrender to Beijing, it looks unmistakably like a priority downgrade,” writes Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and distinguished professor of economics at City University of New York.
“As of now, China is clearly the world’s largest single economy. But the group of nations that constituted the ‘free world’ (as we knew it) is a much greater economic power than China. So by treating Europe and Canada as enemies rather than allies, Trump has destroyed any plausible capacity to stand up to China. In effect, Trump has chosen white supremacy over actual national greatness.”
Trump has become especially hostile to Europe, Krugman continued in his Substack commentary, “precisely because the Europeans are trying to hold on to the values MAGA is trying to destroy at home. MAGA doesn’t want a world of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to exist.”
Krugman also denounced the “tech bros,” the billionaires who hold enormous influence over the Trump administration, especially in deregulation of monopolies and social media proving harmful and addictive to young users.
“The broligarchs hate Europe because the Europeans are trying to impose sensible limits to protect their societies from the well-documented psychological and economic harms that are inflicted by an unrestrained Silicon Valley agenda,” Krugman warned.
Brookings Institution scholars also have weighed in with harsh criticism of the NSS for its reversal of long-held and shared commitment to the preservation of democracy in the world. The NSS 2025 “departs from the explicit focus on major power competition” shared by the first Trump administration NSS and that of President Joe Biden in 2021, the think tank’s scholars reported in an extensive analytical breakdown of the security document.
Both previous administrations framed China and Russia as desiring to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests,” writes Scott R. Anderson, Brookings fellow and general counsel and senior editor of Lawfare. “China was a long-term pacing challenge in the competition for global influence while Russia was an acute threat actively engaged in subversion and aggression.”
By contrast, the new NSS “does not expressly reference major power competition once. And it adopts a notably more conciliatory tone toward competitors, framing the challenge as ‘managing European relations with Russia’ and working to ‘rebalance America’s economic relationship with China,” Anderson writes.
Asli Aydintasbas, another Brookings scholar and senior associate fellow on the European Council on Foreign Relations, called the 2025 security doctrine “needlessly offensive” toward Europe and an “astonishingly transparent desire to normalize relations with Russia.”
The most disturbing reaction to Trump’s reorientation of U.S. foreign policy was likely that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose spokesman’s praise for the security blueprint triggered alarm bells throughout the democratic world.
“The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in welcoming Trump’s new NSS. He described the document’s pledge to end expansion of the NATO alliance “encouraging” and its departure from labeling Russia as an adversary another welcome change.
The new NSS contains not a word of criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, of Putin’s casual threats to use tactical nuclear weapons against the sovereign neighboring country he invaded nearly four years ago, or of the Kremlin’s refusal to extend the last U.S.-Russia nuclear weapons treaty, New START, that expires in less than two months.
“National Security Strategy speaks to three audiences: the U.S. government itself; allies and friends, and adversaries,” notes Henry Farrell, a Johns Hopkins political science professor. “The new strategy can’t be coherently implemented by the first, will alienate the second still further, and will open up opportunities to the third.”
Farrell wrote in his Substack post last week that “the people trying to turn America into an authoritarian, white supremacist state, who want us to forsake democratic ideals in favor of Volk, of blood and soil nationalism, want to see Europe go down the same path.”
The Trump administration declares the security policy a work in progress, alluding to its relative brevity for a document purporting to assure the United States’ status as the world’s richest and most powerful country.
“Not every country, region, issue or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy,” the NSS says in identifying the Western Hemisphere as its top priority and an updating of the Monroe Doctrine to maximize influence in Trump’s claim on half the planet. The 1823 edict of President James Monroe warned Europe not to colonize territory in the Americas, declaring the hemisphere and its surrounding waters as Washington’s sphere of interests to exploit. The new NSS adds a Trump corollary claiming authority to limit migration and halt the flow of drugs throughout the hemisphere.
The NSS also makes reference to the will of God in justifying U.S. aspirations to control and plunder its hemisphere on the premise of divine intervention on behalf of American Christians, leaving to the reader’s imagination what other ethnic or religious groups might be excluded from the benefits of collusion with a god not their own.
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