“This document is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom in the world.” This is what President Donald Trump proclaims in a short letter to “My fellow Americans” introducing the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” or, as it is commonly known in Washington, the NSS.
Statutorily mandated and released in November, President Trumps 2025 NSS pleased Trump world. The short 29-page document angered Europeans. And it drew observers on the right and left who – along with Trumps 2017 NSS, written under the supervision of then-National Security Adviser HR McMaster – view the Chinese Communist Party as the greatest and most comprehensive threat to US national security.
Trumps 2025 NSS prides itself on exemplifying the strategic thinking’s core virtues: “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist, realistic without being ‘realist, principled without being’ idealistic, muscular without being ‘hawkish, and restrained without being ‘dovish.'” In parts, the document shows the excellent qualities it claims as its own. In other parts, however, the NSS shows impracticality, naïveté, and ideological blindness. Traditional conservative priorities, shrewd observations, and appropriate policy changes are combined in the NSS with fanciful claims, glaring omissions, and leaps of logic. The document gives voice to the various moral impulses and priorities of contending personalities and camps in Trump’s world without reconciling or even acknowledging the internal tensions. the 2025 NSS reflects the foreign policy of the Trump administration.
The NSSs opening observations about Americas mistakes about itself and other nations popularize recent US foreign policy and hinder the NSSs reshaping of American diplomacy. Echoing hard-left and post-liberal detractors of the United States, the NSS makes the scathing charge that “After the end of the Cold War, the American foreign policy elite convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in our country’s best interests.“Previous administrations may have gone overboard in their enthusiasm for free trade, a rules-based international order, and the promotion of freedom and democracy abroad. But to portray such enthusiasm as a quest for world domination tarnishes America and plays into the hands of the enemies of freedom at home and abroad from America’s trading partners. It ignores the advantages that America derives from an international order that favors freedom and democracy, although less under the power of international organizations with anti-American agendas and more dependent on friends and partners of the United States who share the responsibility.educational exchanges, and the bully pulpit to assist peoples and nations seeking greater freedom and democracy.
The NSS aims to reflect President Trump’s reorientation of US foreign policy around “the continued the survival and security of the United States as an independent and sovereign republic whose government secures the natural, God-given rights of its citizens and prioritizes their welfare and interests. the nations industrial base, the energy sector, and science and technology expertise and entrepreneurship America must also define the national interest concretely, respect the nation state as “the fundamental political unit,” pursue peace through strength, and preserve favorable balances of power around the world. cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible.“
The NSS undercuts its sober statement of priorities with a flamboyant exaggeration of the presidents’ diplomatic achievements. According to the NSS, President Trump “negotiated peace between Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the DRC and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and ended the war in Gaza with all living hostages returned to their families.” But in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan only the Trump administration communicated a substantial peace agreement; meanwhile many of the creditworthy ceasefires are barely holding. Claiming full credit for major diplomatic breakthroughs where only partial credit is due erodes the very soft power and spiritual and cultural strength that the NSS emphasizes are crucial to American national security.
The Trump NSS elaborates key national interests across five geopolitical regions. Reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the NSS promises “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” by ensuring reasonably good governance there that helps combat mass migration, cartels, other transnational criminal organizations, and hostile foreign actions. In Asia, the United States will build alliances and strengthen foreign partnerships to correct trade imbalances and inequalities, especially with China, and deter war in the Indo-Pacific while maintaining America’s long-standing strategic ambiguity about Beijing’s determination to seize Taiwan. Despite its well-known aversion to nation-building, the Trump administration seeks to foster “European greatness” by reversing European “economic decline” and, more ambitiously, avoiding “civilizational decay” that comes from European policies that reduce freedom and encourage mass migration to the region of groups that refuse to assimilate. in the Middle East, the Trump administration will secure oil and gas reserves, encourage the influx of international investment, and help friends and partners to deradicalize their populations without demanding democratic reform from the autocracies of the regions. In its last three paragraphs, dedicated to a continent that hosts more than 1.5 billion people, the NSS limits itself to reprimanding the United States for promoting a “liberal ideology” in Africa and promised instead to concentrate on reducing the conflict there and strengthening trade and commerce.
The NSS draws attention to much that is vital. It also reduces or omits much that is vital.
For example:
Despite the administrations reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine, the NSS does little to clarify the US position toward several top-priority transnational threats, starting with high-powered adversary hypersonic missiles; nuclear weapons; and aerospace, cyber and AI capabilities.
Contrary to the NSS suggestion that “today there is less to ‘conflict in the Middle East’ than the news might lead one to believe,” the region is still considerably more unstable than the news or the Trump administration acknowledges. Despite President Trumps attempted peace plan in Gaza, which called on Iran-backed Hamas to give up “its military, terror and offensive infrastructure, including mines and weapons production facilities,” Hamas has never agreed to disarm and insists it will not go. Iran-backed Hezbollah is rebuilding its military. And the Islamic Republic of Iran strives to replenish its stockpile of ballistic missiles and rebuild its nuclear program.
The NSS ignores the ideological dimensions of the China challenge. You would never know from the document that the Chinese Communist Party governs China, that a combination of Marxist-Leninist and Chinese-nationalist commitments shape the CCPs repressive one-party dictatorship at home and economic coercion and co-optation schemes abroad, and that the CCP aims to place Beijing at the center of a revised world order that favors authoritarian governance.
Although it emphasizes the civilization that America shares with Europe, the NSS diminishes human rights, a pillar of the precious heritage of the West. The closest the NSS comes to addressing the foreign policy implications of America’s foundation in inalienable rights is to assert that the natural rights invoked in the Declaration of Independence establish “a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations.” That’s half true. The Declaration indicates that nations that respect basic rights and fundamental freedoms deserve to organize the government as they see fit. At the same time, intervention comes in many forms and degrees as implied by the NSSs praise of soft power elsewhere, and “the Laws of Nature and Natures God” condemn “absolute despotism” as unjust and illegitimate. Accordingly, the teachings of the Declarations of natural rights also provide grounds for intervention, particularly when rulers who systematically violate the inalienable rights of their citizens threaten America’s core national interests.
And tThe NSS fails to connect the preservation of American soft power and the renewal of the spiritual and cultural health of the nations with the reform of American education. The most ba resilient foreign policy will be futile without an informed citizenry that gives it democratic legitimacy and informed and competent diplomats to execute it. But American K-12 education often leaves out the essentials of American history. Colleges and universities often neglect to require or even offer basic courses in American ideas and institutions while regularly including classes that appease the United States. And American policy analysts and diplomats lack knowledge of the history, language, and culture of the nation-states with which the United States must cooperate, compete, and sometimes do battle. Regarding these vital national security issues, the NSS says nothing.
For America to remain, as President Trump wants to ensure, “the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom in the world,” administration officials must keep in mind that bluster betrays weakness, political cohesion at home is indispensable to achieving US goals abroad, and America’s dedication to basic rights and fundamental freedoms must prevail in behavior of the nations.
Peter Berkowitz is a Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the US State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and can be followed at X @BerkowitzPeter. His new book is “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America.”