National Security Strategy (United States)

Based on Wikipedia: National Security Strategy (United States)

The Document That Tells the World What America Fears

Every few years, the President of the United States publishes a document that reveals something extraordinary: what keeps America's leaders awake at night. The National Security Strategy isn't just bureaucratic paperwork. It's a statement of intent to the world—a declaration of who America considers its friends, its rivals, and its existential threats.

The document published in December 2025 broke with nearly every convention of the past three decades. It barely mentioned Russia as a concern. It reframed China almost entirely through the lens of trade disputes rather than military competition. And in a striking departure, it devoted its harshest criticism not to authoritarian adversaries, but to America's closest democratic allies in Europe.

To understand why this matters, we need to understand what these strategies are, how they work, and how dramatically the latest one diverges from everything that came before.

A Document Born from Congressional Frustration

The National Security Strategy exists because of a law called the Goldwater-Nichols Act, passed in 1986. Congress wanted something simple but previously elusive: a common starting point for discussions about national security. Before this law, the executive branch and Congress often talked past each other, using different frameworks, different assumptions, and different priorities.

The law required the President to periodically submit a document explaining the administration's view of the world and how it planned to protect American interests. The intent was practical: you can't have a productive debate about military budgets or foreign policy if the two branches of government can't even agree on what threats exist.

But here's the thing the law's authors understood perfectly well: this document was never meant to be a neutral assessment. It was designed to be political.

Five Purposes, All Political

Scholars who study these strategies have identified five purposes they serve, and none of them are purely analytical.

First, they communicate the President's strategic vision to Congress to justify budget requests. Want more money for the Navy? The strategy better explain why sea power matters.

Second, they signal to foreign governments—especially those not important enough to get summit meetings—where they stand with America.

Third, they speak to domestic political audiences. Supporters want to see their priorities acknowledged. Fence-sitters want to see something coherent they can rally behind.

Fourth, they force different agencies within the executive branch to get on the same page. The State Department and the Pentagon often have competing visions of the world. Writing the strategy forces them to hammer out their differences.

Fifth, they advance the President's overall agenda, both in substance and messaging.

This means that reading a National Security Strategy as if it were a graduate school paper on international relations misses the point entirely. These are political documents, written to achieve political ends.

The Cold War Ends, New Threats Emerge

For decades during the Cold War, American strategy was straightforward: contain the Soviet Union and deter nuclear war. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, strategists faced a disorienting question: What now?

The strategy published in August 1991 offers a fascinating window into this transition. For the first time, it officially identified environmental concerns as national security issues. This wasn't tree-hugging sentiment—it was recognition that environmental degradation could destabilize regions, create refugee flows, and trigger conflicts.

But the most consequential strategy of the post-Cold War era came in September 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

The Bush Doctrine: Pre-emptive War

The 2002 National Security Strategy introduced something genuinely new and deeply controversial: the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Traditional deterrence—the Cold War approach—relied on convincing adversaries that attacking America would bring devastating retaliation. You might destroy us, but we'll destroy you too. Mutual assured destruction.

This logic breaks down with terrorist groups. Al-Qaeda didn't have a homeland to threaten with destruction. Its members welcomed martyrdom. Traditional deterrence couldn't work.

So the Bush administration articulated a different approach: America reserved the right to strike first, before a threat materialized, if it believed an attack was coming. This was pre-emption—acting before the enemy can act.

The intellectual origins of this approach traced back to a 1992 Department of Defense paper called "Defense Policy Guidance," prepared by Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. These same thinkers would later serve in the George W. Bush administration and help implement their earlier ideas.

The 2002 strategy also did something unexpected: it classified AIDS—the disease caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus—as a threat to national security. The devastating effects of the epidemic, particularly in Africa, were destabilizing entire regions, killing military-age populations, and creating governance crises. Disease as a security threat wasn't intuitive, but it was prescient.

The 2006 Update: Wartime Strategy

By 2006, the Bush administration was deep into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The updated strategy reflected this reality, describing itself as "a wartime national security strategy required by the grave challenge we face—the rise of terrorism fueled by an aggressive ideology of hatred and murder."

This version rested on two pillars: promoting freedom, justice, and human dignity, and leading a growing community of democracies. The Bush administration believed—perhaps naively, in retrospect—that spreading democracy would drain the swamps where terrorism bred.

The 2006 document also expanded its discussion of environmental threats, noting that environmental destruction could exacerbate terrorism and might warrant "full exercise of national power, including traditional security instruments." In other words, climate change and environmental degradation weren't just policy concerns—they might require military responses.

Obama's Pivot: Engagement Over Pre-emption

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he inherited two grinding wars, a global financial crisis, and an approach to national security that many felt had overreached. His 2010 National Security Strategy, which United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice called a "dramatic departure," reflected this changed moment.

The strategy advocated increased engagement with Russia, China, and India. It elevated nuclear non-proliferation and climate change to top-tier priorities. Perhaps most notably, it made an explicit connection between American security and American economic health—a recession-era acknowledgment that an impoverished America couldn't project power abroad.

The drafters made a deliberate choice to remove language like "Islamic radicalism" from the document, instead speaking of terrorism in general terms. This wasn't mere political correctness—it reflected a strategic judgment that framing the conflict in religious terms alienated potential Muslim allies and played into Al-Qaeda's narrative of civilizational war.

Counterinsurgency and Hearts and Minds

The 2010 strategy also reflected hard lessons learned in Afghanistan. Defeating the Taliban, it argued, required more than military force. It required interagency cooperation—meaning the State Department, the Agency for International Development, and the Pentagon all working together—and extensive communication with Muslim populations both in Afghanistan and worldwide.

This approach drew on counterinsurgency doctrine, which holds that winning wars against insurgents requires winning the trust of local populations. You can't shoot your way to victory. You have to build legitimate institutions, establish trusted governments, and convince civilians that their interests align with yours rather than with the insurgents.

"The most effective long-term measure for conflict and resolution," the strategy stated, "is the promotion of democracy and economic development."

2015: Climate Change as Existential Threat

Obama's second National Security Strategy, published in February 2015, went further in identifying climate change as "an urgent and growing threat to our national security." This language reflected analyses that the Pentagon had been conducting since the 1990s: rising sea levels threatening naval bases, drought and crop failure driving migration and conflict, extreme weather straining military logistics.

The strategy laid out "a vision and strategy for advancing the nation's interests, universal values, and a rules-based international order through strong and sustainable American leadership." The phrase "rules-based international order" would become a recurring theme—and eventually a point of contention.

Trump's First Strategy: America First Takes Shape

Donald Trump's first National Security Strategy, published in December 2017, marked a significant shift. Its primary author, Nadia Schadlow, then deputy national security adviser, received praise from foreign policy experts across the political spectrum for the document's clarity and the thorough interagency process that produced it.

The strategy named China and Russia as "revisionist powers"—nations seeking to revise the existing international order in their favor. But it removed climate change as a national threat, a sharp break from Obama-era thinking.

More fundamentally, the document reframed how America should view the world. Previous strategies spoke of an "international community" or "community of nations"—language suggesting shared interests and cooperative problem-solving. The 2017 strategy characterized the world as a competitive arena where nations pursue their own interests, sometimes in zero-sum fashion.

Conservative analyst Brad Patty, writing for the Security Studies Group, captured the magnitude of the shift: "My guess is that members of the Foreign Policy elite will encounter these first pages as a kind of boilerplate, even trite. Notice, though, that those two pages lead directly to a third page that repudiates the whole living body of American foreign policy thought."

About a year after its publication, Schadlow would comment with understatement that the strategy had "achieved the state of mattering."

Biden Restores Orthodoxy

When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he moved quickly to signal continuity with pre-Trump approaches. His interim strategy, published in March 2021, recommitted the United States to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO—the alliance of European and North American democracies formed after World War II to counter Soviet power.

The interim document concluded with a striking call: "We must demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people. It will not happen by accident—we have to defend our democracy, strengthen it and renew it."

The full 2022 strategy, sent to Congress in October of that year, identified two strategic challenges: competition between major powers in the post-Cold War era, and transnational challenges like climate change and global health. China and Russia were singled out as "powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy."

The strategy organized around three priorities: investing in sources of national strength, mobilizing coalitions of nations for collective influence, and shaping the rules governing the 21st-century economy—technology, cybersecurity, trade.

December 2025: A Strategy Like No Other

And then came the document that prompted this essay. Published on December 4, 2025, Trump's second National Security Strategy departed from precedent in ways that stunned observers.

The document opened with a startling repudiation of post-Cold War consensus: "After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests."

It rejected promoting democracy abroad: "urging other countries to adopt democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories" was no longer American policy.

And it declared an end to American global leadership in stark terms: "The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over."

The Western Hemisphere as Priority One

The strategy called for reorienting American military efforts toward the Western Hemisphere—North, Central, and South America, plus the Caribbean. Here, it argued, the United States must be the preeminent power, controlling migration, stopping drug flows, and maintaining regional stability.

In an explicit invocation of 19th-century foreign policy, the document declared a "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. The original Monroe Doctrine, articulated in 1823, warned European powers against colonizing or interfering in the Americas. The Trump Corollary extended this, asserting that the United States would exercise political, economic, and military power throughout the hemisphere.

The strategy called for strengthening the Coast Guard and Navy specifically to "thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis."

China: Economic Competitor, Not Existential Threat

Perhaps most surprising was the document's treatment of China. The 2022 Biden strategy had identified China as the greatest challenge to American interests. The 2025 strategy reframed the relationship almost entirely in economic terms.

Gone was language about China's political system or human rights record—a staple of National Security Strategies for three decades. Instead, the document called for "rebalancing America's economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence."

But it also struck a notably conciliatory tone: "trade with China should be balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors" and the United States favored "maintaining a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing."

On Taiwan—the self-governing island that China claims as its territory—the strategy stated that "deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority." It noted Taiwan's strategic location dividing Northeast and Southeast Asia into "two distinct theatres."

But the language on Taiwan's status shifted subtly. Previous administrations stated the United States "opposed" any unilateral change to the Taiwan Strait status quo. The 2025 document said the United States "does not support" such change—a formulation some analysts saw as marginally weaker.

The document called for Japan and South Korea to increase "burden sharing"—diplomatic language for spending more on their own defense. It identified control of the South China Sea by any competitor as a security challenge. And in a notable omission, it failed to mention North Korea at all—a country that previous strategies had treated as a nuclear-armed threat requiring urgent attention.

Russia: The Silence That Spoke Loudly

If the treatment of China surprised observers, the treatment of Russia stunned them. Previous strategies had identified Russia as a revisionist power threatening European stability. The 2025 document barely mentioned Russia and didn't characterize it as a threat at all.

On Ukraine, where Russia had been fighting a full-scale invasion since February 2022, the document stated that negotiating "an expeditious cessation of hostilities" was in America's core interest. But it criticized European allies for holding "unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition."

This was remarkable: a National Security Strategy criticizing allied democracies for suppressing opposition while saying nothing critical about Russia's invasion of a neighboring country.

Europe: From Ally to Problem

The document reserved its harshest language for Europe—America's closest allies since World War II. It warned of "civilizational erasure" and listed European problems: "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."

It praised "the growing influence of patriotic European parties" and stated that the United States should prioritize "cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations."

In a passage that European diplomats found alarming, the document speculated that "within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European," raising "an open question" about whether those countries would continue to view their alliance with the United States in the same way.

The strategy called for "ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance" and stated that Europe should "take primary responsibility for its own defense."

The Middle East: Mission Accomplished?

The document declared that the United States no longer needed to prioritize the Middle East. The historic reason for American involvement—energy supplies—had been diminished by diversification. America had become an energy exporter.

The strategy also called for ending what it characterized as "hectoring" of Middle Eastern allies, particularly the Gulf monarchies—oil-rich kingdoms like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that previous administrations had sometimes pressed on human rights issues.

What It All Means

National Security Strategies matter not because they're self-executing—they're not tactical documents that tell commanders where to deploy troops. They matter because they signal priorities, shape budgets, and tell the world where America stands.

The 2025 document signals a fundamental reorientation. It deprioritizes Europe and suggests America may be willing to let the continent chart its own course—or fail to do so. It reframes China as an economic competitor rather than a systemic rival. It barely acknowledges Russia as a concern. And it identifies the Western Hemisphere, migration, and drug trafficking as the central challenges requiring American military attention.

Whether this represents wisdom or folly will be debated for decades. Previous strategies assumed that American engagement in Europe and Asia prevented the great-power wars that devastated the 20th century. The 2025 strategy implicitly questions whether that engagement remains worth its costs.

For those who believe in the post-World War II order—alliances, institutions, rules-based international relations—the document reads as a repudiation of seventy years of bipartisan consensus. For those who believe America has overextended itself, bearing burdens that allies should carry while neglecting problems closer to home, it reads as overdue course correction.

Either way, no one who reads the 2025 National Security Strategy can doubt that American foreign policy has entered new territory. The old maps no longer apply.