It's never a good sign when the United States' national security plan is praised by Russia as being “largely consistent with our vision.”
But that's the bizarro world we're living in, where Donald Trump and his administration continue to embolden our autocratic adversaries and alienate our democratic allies.
This is now official American policy, delivered in the form of the newly released National Security Strategy — a directional document issued by every administration to announce its strategic priorities and posture to the world.
Full of Trumpian bluster and contradictions, this document represents a complete break from the world America built with its allies in the wake of the Second World War. It is a red, white, and blue middle finger to the free world. In places, it even sounds like it was written by the Kremlin, framing our foreign policy approach to date as being the result of “elites [who] convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.”
This is a slander and a slur on the bipartisan liberal internationalism that is based on collective security agreements — among western democracies of all sizes — to act as a counterweight to autocratic aggression, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Literally no American administration — from Truman to Reagan to Obama — has believed that “permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.”
That is, however, a frequent Russian talking point, parroted by useful idiots on the far-right and far-left. The fact that the current Trump administration's 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine drew from Russian documents only highlights the reflexive dictator admiration of this president. It is now backed up by a material retreat from NATO allies, a Christmas gift long on Vladimir Putin's wish list.
This national security plan codifies that the Trump administration finds common cause with the axis of autocrats by advocating regional hegemony as a vision for the 21st century. This allows Trump to parade high-minded words like “sovereignty” and “peace” in ways that dovetail with Russia and China's preferred direction of the world.
In this vision, the United States leans into its role as the defender of the Western Hemisphere — which helps explain Trump's repeated, bleated interest in everything from annexing Greenland and Canada to retaking the Panama Canal, and of course the current threats to the hateful Maduro regime in Venezuela (more on that later).
The flipside to Trump's regional power grabs is an uneasy might-makes-right balance-of-power peace with the other regional hegemons China and Russia. China gets to dominate Asia, with Taiwan a tempting target on Chinese president-for-life Xi's to-do list. Russia gets eastern Ukraine and a weakened NATO, dovetailing perfectly with the musings of JD Vance's right-wing Svengali Curtis Yarvin, whose stated foreign policy vision for Europe is to “give Russia a free hand on the continent.”
Dictators throughout history have claimed the pursuit of peace is their only aim. But the peace they advocate is always peace at the point of a bayonet, one that requires surrender under threat of invasion and annihilation. It is a vision of “peace” captured by the great Mel Brooks in his film To Be Or Not To Bewhen Brooks, playing Hitler in an onstage satire, protests that all he wants is peace: “A little piece of Poland/A little piece of France/A little piece of Portugal/and Austria perchance…”
In the recent past, the far left was stereotypically most susceptible to these appeasing visions of peace. But now we see the rise of what might be called “code pink conservatives” who embrace an isolationist view of the world that doesn't really give a damn what happens past our shores, as Vance infamously proclaimed regarding the fate of Ukraine. This is naïve in the extreme — especially if you believe in peace through strength.
The contradictions are everywhere. As Washington Post columnist Max Boot points out: “The [National Security Strategy] says 'we must continue to improve commercial (and other) relations with India' even while US-India relations have been wrecked by Trump's 50 percent tariffs. The NSS also vows 'to maintain the United States' unrivaled 'soft power,'' even as the administration eviscerates actual instruments of soft power, such as Voice of America and the US Agency for International Development.”
In the days after the National Security Strategy was released, Trump added to the whiplash by approving the sale of critical Nvidia AI chips to China, undercutting the tough talk about ensuring American leadership in the AI arms race. And those delusional Trump supporters who convinced themselves that The Donald was a dove, are twisting themselves in knots trying to understand his increasing calls for regime change in Venezuela — without any evident plan for securing the socialist failed state, which only increases the chances of compounding disaster in that already hijacked, once-prosperous nation.
It is true that America needs to remember that we are a republic, not an empire. But if we really want to secure peace we need to keep in mind the lessons of history and strengthen ties between democratic republics —both military and economic — to act as a determined counterweight to the rising autocratic alliance. There is no real security in the ostrich-like isolationist impulse to ignore aggression or empower attackers via appeasement. As the NATO secretary general starkly warned this week, “Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe — and we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great grandparents endured.”
