Review of World Affairs

Trump’s Misguided National Security Strategy

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy released recently is by turns incoherent, ahistorical, and specious – according to two very experienced practitioners of US foreign policy.

Steven Simon, who held senior positions in the State Department and the National Security Council (NSC); and Jonathan Stevenson, who served in the NSC are scathing in their assessment of the National Security Strategy (NSS) in an opinion piece in The New York Times (NYT, Dec. 11).

They write that even Republican members of Congress seem to be getting unnerved about U.S. government-ordered strikes in the Caribbean that are “an illegal, immoral and distinctly unstrategic use of a superlative military.”

However, the administration casts the strikes as a legitimate exercise of “the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” and one of any number of “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels.”

[Monroe Doctrine: US foreign policy declaration by President James Monroe in 1823 warning European powers against further colonization in the New World and against intervention in the governments of American hemisphere].

The NSS document focuses the United States’ attention squarely on the Western Hemisphere.

It subjects strategically crucial regions and allies to relegation and, in the case of Europe, outright subversion.

It denigrates the European Union (EU) “and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty,” while implicitly contemplating Europe’s right-wing nativist parties as instruments for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.”

This in indeed a very backward stance.

These comments effectively codify US Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last February.

As the United States systematically eviscerates its constitutional order and international standing, it presumes to tell Europe that it risks “civilizational erasure”!

“This exposes an America morally and politically devouring itself while its true antagonists, like Russia, watch astonished by their good fortune” (Simon/Stevenson).

Furthermore, the US strategy looks like the Janus face [two faced, insincere] of a fraying domestic constitutional order, providing geopolitical cover for domestic authoritarian rule and corporate aggrandizement.

Simon and Stevenson note that National Security documents have tended to concentrate on external threats, from the Soviet Union to transnational jihadhist terrorism to China.

They insist there is no reason the current US strategy should break with this tradition.

After all, the salient risks to American interests do not lie within the United States or its longitudes!

They write that China has 600 nuclear warheads, an aggressive nuclear expansion and modernization programme, little interest in arms control, a blue-water navy, a vast industrial baseand hostile designs on Taiwan, a U.S. partner that depends on American support for its defence, yet the new strategy is rather quiet on China.

Iran has enough fissile material squirreled away to produce up to 10 ten nuclear warheads and is regarded as enough of a strategic threat to justify an American air campaign involving advanced conventional weapons.

The Islamic State, an implacably violent Islamist movement based in the Middle East, inspires attacks on American and U.S. allies.

Russia has invaded a European neighbour, killed at least 75,000 civilians and soldiers, sent armed drones and combat aircraft into the airspace of NATO allies, and overtly threatened the security of others.

The Trump administration justifies its proposed trillion-dollar defence budget by citing these threats from longstanding adversaries, and the newly released   National Security Strategy pays lip service to them according to Simon/Stevenson.

But its call for “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our hemisphere” betrays a deeper strategic miscalculation, draining resources from areas that remain strategically vital to advance its pursuit of Latin American criminal gangs and phantom antifa groups [left-wing anti-fascist and anti-racist movement].

The U.S. military’s Northern and Southern Commands, which cover the Western Hemisphere, are customarily lightly endowed, but with the build-up of U.S. forces in the Caribbean , are now absorbing assets normally allocated to the Indo-Pacific Command, European Command and Central Command, which are responsible for more challenging regions.

Most significantly, on the pretexts of protecting the country against “cultural subversion” and exercising “full control over our borders”, the NSS weaves together domestic and international America First agendas and unites North and South America as a geopolitical unit.

This restructuring as profound strategic effects, write Simon/Stevenson.

First, it contracts the United States defensive perimeter to the coastlines of only these two continents, far from the reaches of the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East that have defined it since the 1950s.

Second, it removes boundaries and limits on the president’s use of the military.

In deploying the military for domestic law-enforcement purposes in cities such as Chicago, Trump is already erasing trhe sovereignty of states and cities within the United States.

With the Naional Security Strategy, he is now removing national sovereign boundaries outside the United States, too.

The new strategy establishes an essentially undifferentiated hemispheric homeland – namely, North and South America – in which the president is free to act unilaterally.

Anything he perceives as misbehaviour within that space becomes an actionable national security problem, even though the region remains stable.

This is the real Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (Simon/Stevenson).

The writers postulate that one possible benefit of a shrunken security perimeter and diminished projection of power could be greater restraint.

The United States traditional forward defence has afforded it strategic depth and swift crisis response, but it has mismanaged these advantages with rash interventions, particularly the 2003 Iraq war.

In any case, the dangers of this new insular strategy are vastly greater.

When the NSS prescribes “the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” in the Western Hemisphere, it is referring to the pre-emptive military effort already underway against drug cartels, without serious reference to borders.

The most conspicuous move in that war is the use of U.S. forces to kill alleged drug traffickers, mischaracterized as “terrorists” and posing no immediate threat to Americans, on board Venezuelan boats in international waters.

The Trump administration is enlisting soldiers and sailors in potential war crimes and looking to legitimize extrajudicial killings.

The U.S. military itself is not likely to rescue the constitutional order.

The Defence Secretary and the Pentagon are purging officers they deem as ideologically incompatible with their priorities.

When Admiral Alvin Holsey, as commander of Southern Command, privately voiced concerns about the legality of strikes on so-called ‘drug boats’ and appeared to hesitate in preparing plans for retaking the Panama Canal, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted on his resignation.

While the United States’ geopolitical reorientation toward the Western Hemisphere has been contested within the Pentagon, the new NSS appears calculated to end this particular debate.  

In Portland, Oregon in 2025, there were significant protests against Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations until a federal judge blocked the deployment of National Guards personnel.

The US adversaries will surely have taken keen notice of the Trump administration’s bloated talk of this as though it were Stalingrad.

They will have also taken note of Trump’s castigation and distancing from American allies.

They will also see enhanced opportunities to stoke internecine tensions in the United States – as Russia has been doing for at least a decade – and thereby intensify the administration’s blinkered gaze on domestic enemies and enrich the pretexts for targeting them.

The Trump administration might then repay the favour by keeping its vow to undermine the political integrity of the European Union and NATO.

Simon/Stevenson write despite the administration’s gas-lighting, the Caribbean is not a war zone.

[ gas-lighting: an insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation of someone into questioning their own sanity, memory or power of reasoning].

Their assessment is grim: “Should domestic military operations turn lethal, if military targeting of suspected criminals become permanent practice, or if the Trump administration undertake coercive regime change in Venezuela, the United States prestige and leverage will decline further .  .  .

“The country will be left with diminished national security as well as a shattered constitutional order .  .  .

“It might even face “civilizational erasure”.

Europe is facing ‘civilizational erasure’

The Trump administration said that Europe is facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” and pledged that the US will support like-minded “patriotic” parties to prevent a future in which “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” [meaning non-White].

Without naming them directly, the document says the US should support European political parties which fight against migration and promote nationalism.

Johann Wadephul, the foreign minister of Germany responded to the document by saying that the countries of Europe “don’t believe that we need to get advice from any country or party.”

The US was Germany’s most important ally in NATO, but that “questions like freedom of expression, freedom of opinion and how we organize our liberal society here in the Federal Republic of Germany are not part of that” (NYT).

The writer can be reached at:

shashimalla125@gmail.com