Around this time every year, the White House unveils a written National Security Strategy, or NSS, which is generally released with some fanfare. That’s not surprising. Given the international scrutiny the document receives and the amount of time and care that’s invested in the annual report, administrations tend to present their NSS with a degree of pride.
Late last week, however, Donald Trump’s White House quietly unveiled its new NNS, which generated immediate global attention — and alarm.
The good news is that the unusually brief document, which is available in its entirety online, is quite readable. While some official foreign policy and national security documents are often inaccessible and filled with jargon, Trump’s new NSS is easy to understand.
The bad news is that the vision sketched out in the document is dreadful. The president and his team envision a near future in which the United States will withdraw from its role as the leader of the free world, promote racial purity in Europe, abandon intensifying environmental crises and de-emphasize democracy abroad.
(It’s also needlessly propagandistic at times. As The Bulwark noted, “With 27 instances of Trump’s name in a mere 29 pages of text, it is a strategy document worthy of North Korea.”)
The same document largely ignores Russia, which helps to explain why the Kremlin was so pleased with it.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum characterized the new White House NSS as “a performative suicide,” adding that it’s “hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.” Applebaum concluded, “It will be worth following the reactions around the world.”
The morning after the document was released, Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, wrote via social media, “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.”
He didn’t explicitly mention Trump’s National Security Strategy by name, but given the context, he didn’t have to. Three days later, The Associated Press reported: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the Trump administration’s new national security strategy underscored the need for Europe to become ‘much more independent’ from the U.S. in terms of security policy. … Parts of the document were understandable, but ‘some of it is unacceptable for us from the European point of view,’ he told reporters in the western German city of Mainz. He added that the new U.S. document “confirms my assessment that we in Europe, and so also in Germany, must become much more independent from the U.S. in terms of security policy. This is not a surprise, but it has now been confirmed again. It has been documented.” Responding to the NSS’ promotion of Europe’s more nativist, far-right political parties, European Council president Antonio Costa also warned the U.S. this week against interfering in European affairs. Trump has spent the year offending, outraging and confusing many of our closest traditional allies, going back generations. If the Republican’s goal was to push those allies away and to encourage others to forge new alliances while leaving the U.S. behind, his efforts are right on track.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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