We're the baddies now. Our new Security Strategy shows it.
It's a gift to the Kremlin and a middle finger to our erstwhile allies.
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The Trump administration recently dropped its National Security Strategy and, like all things Trump, it’s equal parts nonsense and vitriol. It signals a self-defeating retreat from any sort of global leadership and the regime’s open promotion of white nationalism at home and abroad.
The document is extremely light on the “strategy” part, but is chock full of naked racism and Great Replacement rhetoric. If you fed a low-rent knockoff version of ChatGPT a diet of Trump Truth Social screeds and X posts from Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, this is what it would spit out.
It looks nothing like any previous version of the congressionally-required report, including the one from Trump’s first term. And it certainly doesn’t look like anything put out during Biden’s term, when the president vowed to “continue to defend democracy around the world, even as we continue to do the work at home to better live up to the idea of America enshrined in our founding documents.”
Delulu
The new strategy document, which is signed by Trump, is intended to be relatively staid and cover international goals and commitments, defense capabilities, and proposed uses of political, economic, and military power to achieve those goals. But when the only goal is brutal domination, and the administration has already shredded all our international obligation, you get … whatever this is.
The administration genuinely seems to believe it can pull back from the world stage yet somehow still tell the rest of the world what to do. And it has a very firm idea of what it wants Europe to do, which is “be as racist and xenophobic as Trump.”
No, really. According to the administration, here are the problems Europe faces:
The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
Also a problem? “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
Sorry, was that too subtle? How about this: “Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Sorry, was that still too subtle? “We want Europe to remain European.”
That is just bog-standard Great Replacement rhetoric, the white supremacist conspiracy that Jewish people have joined forces with liberal Western elites to replace white Americans and Europeans with non-white immigrants.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Vice President JD Vance is a big fan. In 2022, he went on Fox to warn of an “invasion” of immigrants and to proclaim that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
Did someone say “cratering birthrates”? Here’s Vance in 2019: “[T]he most important way to measure a healthy society is by whether a nation is having enough children to replace itself … Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.”
“Our people.”
Besides the demand that Europe keep itself white, it should also take “primary responsibility for its own defense,” stop seeing NATO as an expanding alliance, and be nicer to Russia.
You see, it’s Europe’s fault that America’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine aren’t working: “The Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”
Where Europe gets the Great Replacement treatment, Africa gets the straight-up colonizer version.
We should no longer have an “aid-focused relationship” with Africa, but instead a “trade- and investment-focused” one. What does investment look like? Well, pretty much like US companies going in and taking stuff:
An immediate area for US investment in Africa, with prospects for a good return on investment, include the energy sector and critical mineral development. Development of US-backed nuclear energy, liquid petroleum gas, and liquified natural gas technologies can generate profits for US businesses and help us in the competition for critical minerals and other resources.”
The gutting of aid to Africa is bad enough, but saying what the continent can have instead is American companies profiting from relentlessly extracting natural resources is next level.
You’ll note this in no way explains how any of this would benefit African nations. At least Europe was offered the hypothetical approval of Russia, a treasure worth more than gold (to Trump, at least).
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the administration that spending the last several months going scorched earth on the rest of the world might make other countries the tiniest bit disinclined to deal with us.
“Soft power suicide”
Part of how you know the administration doesn’t really understand what it has done is that, despite having pretty much axed all our soft power efforts, the NSS brags about how cool and great and “unrivaled” our soft power is. (It’s also “unmatched,” in case you were wondering.)
These things might have been true 12 months ago, but they no longer are. Trump has spent his second term killing off all of the things that allowed America to effectively exercise soft power, where non-military resources, a bedrock of international relations, are used to secure cooperation and loyalty.
The US Agency for International Development was demolished by DOGE. Trump is shuttering Voice of America offices and radio stations abroad, even in the face of a court order telling him not to. So we can’t dangle foreign aid as a way to induce countries to work with us, and we’ve abandoned any pretense of wanting to spread democracy abroad.
The administration’s efforts to shut international students out of American higher education are also a body blow to soft power. American universities have long been a place where talented students from other countries enroll and become enmeshed in American culture. Those students, whether they remain in the country or return home, help build a network of people who hold favorable views of America and share its core values.
Of course, it’s not just international students the administration has sought to bar from our shores. Getting visas to visit is much harder, and immigrating here is likely near-impossible unless you can pony up the $1 million for a Trump Gold Card. So, no more interplay between the United States and the rest of the world writ large, but all the room for the superrich.
It’s not an overreaction to call this “soft power suicide,” as Jamie Shea, a former NATO official, told the New York Times. Shea said that this would be “incomprehensible to future historians who will be dumbfounded in their attempts to explain why the global leader voluntarily wrecked one of its greatest national assets.”
And for all the administration’s scaremongering about the rapacious goals of China, our retreat from soft power has opened the door for it to ascend to a dominant global position. Gutting USAID means that China’s aid commitments are now the biggest in the world. The nonsense whirlwind of US tariffs makes China a more attractive and accessible trade partner. China even makes it easier to visit, with 30-day visa-free stays for people from over 70 countries.
Despite all that, the National Security Strategy is pretty sure we are still the coolest game in town:
What differentiates America from the rest of the world — our openness, transparency, trustworthiness, commitment to freedom and innovation, and free market capitalism will continue to make us the global partner of first choice.
Show your work, buddy. We’re not displaying openness, transparency, or trustworthiness. We aren’t showing a commitment to freedom. Innovation? Unless it’s dumping gobs of money into AI and defense spending, nope. Can a country that has functionally dismantled its entire public health research infrastructure really be said to be innovating?
Even the free market capitalism part isn’t all that true these days. Trump has instituted a strictly pay-for-play government whereby the people and companies with the most money and least morals are rewarded. Billionaire donors are indeed seeing their fortunes rise, but getting neat tips that possibly allow them to do a little light insider trading is not actually free market capitalism either.
It is, however, pretty much what oligarchies look like. A country designed to make the richest even richer, but only if those rich people play ball with our strongman leader. A country where nearly everyone else is locked out of upward mobility. A country where international relationships are useful only insofar as they line the pockets of the superrich.
Perhaps that’s why the only real praise for this National Security Strategy has come from Russia. As Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov explained, the document is “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision and Russia considers it “a positive step.”
Well, at least someone does.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
They are destroying the US. It is nothing short of treason = "giving aid and comfort to its enemies".
A friend told me that scientists are slowly leaving the US. Not in great droves. That would be hard, because getting jobs elsewhere is not easy. India was a destination she mentioned. A country that does business with both Russia and China, so whatever people are developing there she is implying that Russia and China will also benefit. Thus Trump is going down in history as creating the Fall of the US Empire.
As for European immigration. I am in Germany. I am an immigrant here as well as a citizen. My daughter is going to University here and we pay no tuition and a small fee for the semester which includes her semester transportation pass, and discounts to all sorts of businesses. We paid around 375€ for this past semester. Last year it was 299€. She is in a city where rent is higher, but the cost of living here is cheaper than in the US.
I just signed another petition on making the AfD illegal here in Germany. I feel like Germany is working its way towards that. AfD has definitely influenced immigration policy in Germany. However, the reality of immigration here is that 4-8% of the immigrants were refugees until 2022, when 1.3 mil plus Ukrainians came to Germany making refugees 25% of immigrants. Usually 50-60 percent of immigrants are from other EU countries, so that is about 25% from Non-EU countries who are not refugees, and a lot of them are foreign students who come here to study tuition free, and then will stay and contribute to the economy which needs workers not just in the intellectual fields, but also in the trades. That is where refugees come in handy because they can fill those gaps.
Trump's is not a formula to follow. By only letting in people wealthy enough to buy a golden visa, he is not getting the best and the brightest, but probably the most corrupt. The counries in the Americas that are not corrupt are going to need to make an alliance to stand up to Trump. Europe needs to stand up to Trump and Putin. Russia is small potatoes compared to the US or the EU, but Trump is making sure that the US is small potatoes too. I wrote this piece last November called " A Plan B for Catastrophe" and it still seems relevant.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/a-plan-b-for-catastrophe?r=f0qfn