US' National Security Strategy 2025 raises more questions than it answers

National Security Strategy 2025 adds more questions, not answers

Every now and then, the United States (US) government is supposed to issue a document outlining its strategy for the maintenance of national security. Many countries do this — India is an outlier in that it has avoided the notion of public discussion of a white paper on defence or a comprehensive strategy for national security for some time.

 

The current US administration’s attempt at such a strategy — the National Security Strategy 2025, or NSS25, released last week — provides a glimpse into both the advantages and disadvantages of such documents. On the one hand, they can provide an enormous amount of clarity about the political purposes and shifts in intentions that underlie security strategy. It stands out from the low-level buzz of diplomatic and communiques and other official statements, which are better seen as responses to immediate provocations or specific high-level visits rather than as elements of a coherent geopolitical approach. But, on the other hand, it can cause a rupture in how a country’s past actions are seen, and colour its future choices. 

 

NSS25 is being seen as an unusually ideological instance of such documents. Perhaps that is partly because this US administration, like many other populist regimes, is fond of stressing how much it differs from predecessors and exaggerating the extent of any policy changes it might make. Certainly, this document tries to suggest that previous national security approaches from the US did not adequately prioritise the interests of “real Americans”.

 

Under the Trump administration, by contrast (it claims), foreign engagements will be in the service of clear domestic priorities. These include, but are not limited to, control of the opioid addiction epidemic, which is ravaging lower-middle-class white America; the reconstruction of American manufacturing; fewer non-white immigrants; and the rolling back of various social changes that accompanied the creation of a multi-ethnic cultural and academic elite.

 

These are variously implemented in NSS25. A defence of tariffs and economic coercion in support of US manufacturing is mounted in the document. Europe, as the source of many ideas disruptive of white supremacy in culture, is seen as an ideological rival rather than as an ally.

 

Then there is immigration control and the drug problem. For these to be addressed, the administration believes it needs to return to close control of the actions and choices of other countries in the Western Hemisphere. This is defined, by the document, as the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The latter, named for America’s fifth President and the last of its founding fathers to take office, was an attempt to keep what was then called the New World from being embroiled in the colonial misadventures and great power rivalries of the Old. This has been updated by NSS25 to explicitly include a claim to the resources, connectivity, and chokepoints in both American continents.

 

For the rest of the world, this is a disquieting return to an old theory about “spheres of influence”. India, alongside some other nations in Asia, will be both concerned about losing independent access to natural resources in Latin America as well as the implied possibility that the US will allow other powers to develop spheres of influence of their own.

 

Thus while NSS25 does allow for considerable clarity as to how US foreign policy will be formulated in the future — as another weapon in a domestic social, political and cultural civil war — it also means that Washington’s decisions will always be interpreted in this light. Countries in Europe or Africa may well conclude that their ties with the US do not reflect shared interests, but instead how those nations are perceived and mobilised within domestic cultural arguments in the US. They will, in turn, seek to influence that debate. America is incentivising greater foreign influence in its democracy.

 

Last week, the chipmaker Nvidia was granted permission to sell some of its frontline products to Chinese manufacturers. This might first be seen as purely transactional, especially since the US government gains revenue from the sale. But in the context of NSS25, it will be interpreted additionally as a sign that the US only prioritises tech competition with China in certain limited ways, and it does not see access to this technology as critical to the core domestic debates that the new national security positioning serves. Sometimes a strategy adds more questions, not answers.