Trump’s Betting

This new US National Security Strategy is not, in any meaningful sense, a strategy.

- Stephen Holmes

A strategy connects means to achievable ends. What President Donald Trump’s White House published last week is something else: a 33-page confession that this administration does not believe in the future - and therefore sees no point in investing in it.Trump’s NSS oscillates wildly between triumphalism and declinist anxiety. America is the greatest nation in history; America is being invaded. We are winning; we are losing it all. This is not simply incoherence: It is the cognitive signature of a movement that experiences demographic and cultural change as existential catastrophe.

The NSS announces sweeping objectives without specifying resourees, timelines, or mechanisms. Calling it “shortsighted” suggests that a long game is being neglected. But there is no long game. A movement convinced that its world is ending does not plan for the next generation. It smashes and grabs.

The grabbiness is explicit. “All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts,” the NSS instructs. “Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.” Diplomacy has been formally converted into a business development operation.

The National Security Council is tasked with identifying “strategic locations and resources” in the Western Hemisphere for exploitation. Le Monde calls it what it is: prédation économique - economic predation.

The Council on Foreign Relations observes that great-power competition has vanished as an organizing principle in this NSS, replaced by economics as “the ultimate stakes.” The document is more polemic than strategy, Council members say, and non-Americans would be wise to discount it as a genuine statement of intent.