The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy dropped on December 4. The NSS is mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols Act (1986) that requires each administration to produce a public statement of its goals and strategies.
A criticism of these efforts is that they end up being watered-down consensus documents that say little and try to cover every foreign policy base. However, they can also reveal key assumptions and changes in strategic direction. They are authoritative expressions of the President and his senior staff; when I was in government I saw them used to justify decisions and win interagency debates.
According to press reports, the lead author of this NSS was Michael Anton. Anton was head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff until September, when he resigned, apparently upset at being passed over for a top job at the NSC. While there are many fingerprints on this kind of document, Anton’s are the most visible.
Anton is an intellectual who embodies the nationalist and nativist side of the MAGA movement, along with Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Russell Vought and JD Vance. He became famous in 2016 for his (initially anonymous) essay “The Flight 93 Election”, where he argued that electing Donald Trump was an existential necessity comparable to the decision by airline passengers on 9/11 to storm the cockpit of the hijacked jet over Pennsylvania. After Trump was defeated in 2020, he was notorious for entertaining the idea of a ‘red Caesar’, a dictator who would do the necessary work of restoring order to a corrupted society. His home port is the Claremont Institute, a right-wing thinktank that also harbors John Eastman, the recently pardoned legal architect of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2000 election.
The 2025 NSS reflects many of the positions held by Anton and his wing of the MAGA movement. For them the starting point of all policy, including foreign policy, is that the United States is on the precipice of societal collapse, due to an insidious leftism that seeks to weaken our traditions and values through immigration, DEI, globalization, free trade, environmentalism and the like. The section of the NSS titled ‘What We Want Overall’ climaxes with a call for “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age.” Our culture and heritage are under attack from within, and our foreign policy must be structured accordingly.
To win this fight, Anton and other neo-nationalists argue it is appropriate for nations to nakedly pursue their own interests with little regard for any broader global order or the type of regime in other nations—‘America First.’ Supporting democracy abroad is a mistake; in fact, the word ‘democracy’ hardly appears in the entire NSS. It astonishingly argues that our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, teaches that every nation’s distinct way of life should be respected; a sharp break with traditional American interpretations that say the rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are universal and always worthy of support.
The NSS criticizes American interventionism, but with telling exceptions. One is Europe. Europe is described as declining and in danger of ‘civilizational erasure,’ due largely to immigration. Here the NSS echoes the criticism of Europe made by Vice-President Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February, who chastised European leaders for supposedly suppressing populism (see “The Dangerous Strategic Logic of Expanding the MAGAverse”). The NSS calls for the US to help Europe ‘correct its current trajectory’ by supporting ‘patriotic European parties’ and movements.
Behind this approach we can detect the ‘civilizationist’ view, highly influential in Moscow (and Beijing) via the mystic/philosopher Alexander Dugin, that the best of all possible worlds is one where distinct nations with different cultures and values protect and enhance these differences. Diversity is a weakness. It is dangerous to mix peoples via immigration, or weaken sovereignty via multinational institutions, or meddle abroad by trying to expand democracy. Europeans are exhorted to fight the ‘loss of national identities and self-confidence.’
This view of Europe translates into US policy on Ukraine, which centers on a peace settlement and restoring ‘strategic stability’ with Russia. The NSS claims Europeans ‘want peace’ but are being blocked by European elites who are engaged in ‘subversion of democratic processes’. The US is therefore defending genuine democracy in Europe by pushing for a peace settlement over the head of Ukraine and against the wishes of Europe’s elected leaders.
While there is little discussion of Russia, it is easy to draw conclusions. Russia is an example of a nation that, unlike Europe—and the US—is unabashedly nationalistic and proud of its history. It apologizes for nothing in its pursuit of security and territory. It spurns immigrants and asks its people to bear more children for the motherland. (The NSS calls for Americans to have “growing numbers of strong traditional families that raise healthy children.”) Russia is a model for the West.
While past administrations have put forward win-win strategies that aim for an interdependent global system, the world of the NSS is decidedly zero-sum. There is no discussion of transnational issues—terrorism, non-proliferation, global warming, pandemics—that might require global cooperation, even with adversaries. The portrayal of China is entirely as a threat and a competitor.
In contrast to longstanding US policy, the NSS embraces a world divided into spheres of influence dominated by major powers: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” The NSS makes our domain clear: “The United States must be preeminent in the Western hemisphere.” It describes in detail a ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine— the US must dominate our hemisphere militarily and economically, and prevent any other power from making inroads in the region.
While not explicitly granting China and Russia their own similar spheres, this is the conclusion America’s allies can appropriately draw. You are on your own.
The Trump NSS attempts to draw a close to the era of American multilateralism and openness to the world that made the United States the strongest, wealthiest, and most respected nation on earth. It makes selfishness a virtue and willfully ignores the long-term consequences for global stability, the American economy, and the well-being of the planet. And it attempts to rewrite our national story by downplaying our Enlightenment origins and our commitments to universal principles and science-based progress, in favor of a worldview embraced by Moscow and Beijing that provides an intellectual justification for a new Caesar.
All this in the name of defending America against a wildly distorted version of modern liberalism. Rather than ‘America First’ its real slogan should be ‘Un-American.’