The imperialist vision behind the new US National Security Strategy

It goes beyond transactionalism and sees a world in which smaller nations are told what to do by bigger powers, and the US sits at the apex of the entire structure.

- Jonathan Eyal Global Affairs Correspondent

Things that arrive in the dead of night, unexpected and unsolicited, seldom contain good news. That's exactly what happened with the United States' National Security Strategy (NSS) document, released online without fanfare during the evening of Dec 4, when most of the world was asleep, and most of Washington's decision-makers had already left their offices.

The NSS is relatively brief: a total of 29 pages, listing point-by-point how President Donald Trump's administration intends to shape the world according to its headline goal of “Make America Great Again”.

But what emerges from this document is a vision of a world divided between those countries Mr Trump deems useful and those he regards as expendable, a topsy-turvy universe in which the Europeans hitherto America's closest allies are now regarded as rivals, while Russia, the power that challenged the US for much of the previous century, is now viewed as a collaborator.

It is a world in which the US only grabs advantages but seldom gives much in return, one in which the US will be “safer, richer, freer, bigger, and more powerful than ever before” as Mr Trump puts it in his introduction to the NSS document often by making sure that other countries remain poorer, more vulnerable and have less agency in managing their own affairs.

The NSS declares in its introduction that “in everything we do, we are putting America First”. Gone are the days in which the US goes about “propping up the entire world order like Atlas”. Trouble is, the pursuit of this America-centric agenda upends the world as we know it. Nothing is now more certain than strategic uncertainty.

OLD ARGUMENTS?

A good case can be made that the NSS is neither very significant nor very original. The US President's disdain for many of America's allies, and particularly for the Europeans, is by now well known; he once dismissed the European Union as an organisation created to “s***w over the US”.