Power without purpose

Trump's National Security Strategy identifies real problems, but ignores what made America power legitimate

My take on the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy is below. I hope you will join me and

Barbara Starr

TODAY at 11am ET/8a PT to discuss the NSS, developments on Venezuela and controversy over Pete Hegseth’s leadership. If you caught our last conversation, you know Barbara’s analysis is informed, sharp and essential. If you have a question for our conversation, please put it in the comments!

The most telling moment about the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy came not from Washington, but from Moscow. Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov welcomed the strategy as “largely consistent with our vision,” calling it “a positive step.” When the Kremlin is praising your foreign policy document, you might want to ask yourself what you’ve just given away.

The document signals a fundamental reorientation of American power and, in some ways, an abandonment of what has traditionally made our power legitimate. Not because it will be carefully followed (it won’t be), but because of what it reveals about how this administration views America’s role in the world.

Before we get to that, it’s worth understanding what this document actually is - and isn’t. Read Niall Ferguson who notes these strategies are largely the product of bureaucratic compromise and identifies all the cooks in the kitchen here - including J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller. What you shouldn’t attempt to discern is a single voice or even evidence that Trump himself has read it. “If the president himself has read it,” Ferguson writes, “I’d be flabbergasted.”

This matters because the document is less a coherent strategy than a stew of competing ideologies—Nixon’s realism, Reagan’s “peace through strength,” even Joe Nye’s “soft power.” There’s no overarching philosophy, just the preferences of whoever had the pen last. Trump may not believe, or even fully understand, much of what’s in here. But it still reveals how the people running American foreign policy see the world. And that vision should concern anyone who believes American influence has rested on something more than raw power.

Let’s start with what the strategy gets right, because there’s more merit here than critics want to acknowledge. Europe genuinely does need to spend more on defense. American presidents of both parties have been saying this for decades, and it’s been true for decades. The strategy correctly notes that Continental Europe’s share of global GDP has plummeted from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today, hamstrung by regulations that “undermine creativity and industriousness.” When it points out that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” it’s stating an obvious truth: wealthy, sophisticated allies must assume more responsibility for their own security. President Trump’s jawboning of NATO allies, even if distasteful in tone, has brought some progress in this regard.

The critique of China policy is also largely fair. Engagement didn’t work. The strategy’s assessment is tough but accurate: “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ This did not happen.” Yes, policymakers had to try and should continue to do so. But China has never reciprocated American goodwill, and pretending otherwise now would be foolish.

The Western Hemisphere focus is long overdue. Latin America has been shamefully neglected, leaving space for China, Russia, and criminal networks to expand their influence. The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine - asserting that the U.S. will not tolerate hostile powers controlling strategic assets in the hemisphere—addresses a genuine vulnerability. Venezuela’s transformation from prosperous democracy to narco-state under Maduro deserves attention, and the strategy correctly identifies that as chronic wrongdoing demanding response—even if, like much of Trump’s foreign policy, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

The emphasis on economic competitiveness and industrial base matters enormously. Rebuilding manufacturing capacity, securing critical supply chains, ensuring American technological leadership in AI, biotech, and quantum computing - these aren’t nationalist fantasies. They’re strategic imperatives. Even the call for closer government-private sector collaboration and making ambassadors champions for American business isn’t unreasonable. Every other major power does this. Why shouldn’t we?

These are legitimate priorities based on genuine strategic challenges. The problem isn’t that the strategy identifies real problems - it’s what it abandons in trying to solve them. Because acknowledging hard truths about European free-riding, Chinese mercantilism, or American overextension doesn’t require abandoning everything that made American leadership distinctive. It doesn’t require stripping American power of any moral dimension beyond naked self-interest.

Yet that’s exactly what this strategy does.

The document explicitly rejects what it calls “utopian idealism” in favor of “hard-nosed realism.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, unveiling this vision at the Reagan Defense Forum, declared: “Out with idealistic utopianism. In with hard-nosed realism.” The U.S. should not be “distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building,” he said. “We will instead put our nation’s practical, concrete interests first.”

But what Hegseth announced wasn’t realism - it was something else entirely: a foreign policy stripped of any pretense that how governments treat their own people matters to the United States.

The democracy agenda, as many have observed, is over. The strategy explicitly states America will no longer focus on “spreading liberal ideology” in Africa. Regarding Middle East monarchies, it promises to drop “America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations - especially the Gulf monarchies - into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without.”

Translation: despots get no pressure from us, as long as we can do business together. If the Millennial idea of “you do you” were a foreign policy doctrine, this is it. Torture your dissidents, imprison your opponents, crush your civil society - as long as you’re open to American business and not actively threatening U.S. territory, we’re good.

This represents a sharp break from what every American administration since World War II has at least paid lip service to: that America has interests beyond narrow economic and security concerns, that democratic values and human rights aren’t just nice slogans but core elements of what distinguishes us from authoritarian powers.

What really should alarm America’s allies is the strategy’s implicit embrace of spheres of influence. The document doesn’t mince words: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” One could read this as an endorsement of a world carved into zones of great power dominance - America in the Western Hemisphere, Russia in its “near abroad,” China in Asia.

The strategy’s treatment of Russia makes this explicit. Moscow is not called an adversary. The goal is to “reestablish strategic stability with Russia” and prevent “the perception, and prevent the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” The document calls for “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia.”

Notice what’s missing: any mention of Ukrainian sovereignty, territorial integrity, or the principle that borders shouldn’t be changed by force. The strategy blames European officials for holding “unrealistic expectations for the war” but doesn’t ask whether Putin’s expectations—annexing Ukrainian territory through force - should be accommodated.

This is precisely what Moscow has demanded for two decades. It validates Russia’s worldview that great powers should dominate their regions and that NATO expansion (sovereign nations choosing their own security arrangements) was provocation rather than response to Russian aggression.

Meanwhile, Europe gets lectured about facing “civilizational erasure” due to “migration policies that are transforming the continent,” with the document questioning whether “certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” This language echoes the talking points of far-right parties across Europe - parties like Germany’s AfD, which German intelligence classifies as extremist. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said the language “places itself to the right of the extreme right.”

What does all this add up to? A foreign policy based purely on transactional interests—trade deals, border security, keeping wars away from American shores—stripped of any broader vision of what kind of world America wants to help build. In its place is a world “in which U.S. actions are determined more by what is of direct benefit to the U.S. economy, individual American businesses, and the security of the homeland.”

This might sound hardheaded and practical. It’s also profoundly shortsighted. American power has never rested solely on military might or economic strength. It has rested on the perception that America, for all its flaws and hypocrisies, stood for something beyond narrow self-interest. That soft power - the appeal of American values, the legitimacy of American leadership, the idea that we were building a freer world - magnified our hard power immensely.

Reagan spoke at his first inauguration about America as a “shining city on a hill” - a beacon that inspired people worldwide. That vision wasn’t just rhetoric. It was strategic. It made America’s power legitimate. It gave people reason to align with us beyond narrow calculation. It meant something when we opposed Soviet expansionism, when we stood for principles larger than quarterly profits and border security.

Strip that away, and what are we? Just another great power among other great powers, pursuing narrow interests, making deals with despots, carving the world into spheres of influence and abandoning principles when they prove inconvenient. In other words: behaving exactly like China and Russia, but with better weapons and a bigger economy.

Why should allies trust us? Why should partners align with us? The strategy has no answer because it doesn’t acknowledge these questions matter.

Russia and China have spent decades arguing that American talk about democracy and human rights is hypocritical cover for pursuing interests just like everyone else. This strategy validates their cynicism.

Putin calls it “largely consistent with our vision” because it is his vision we have adopted - even if Trump himself never read the document that enshrines it.