On most days, the words “Donald Trump” and “strategy” don’t fit in the same sentence. Combined, they’re an oxymoron in the truest sense. After all, strategy denotes a well-thought-out plan with concrete goals, realistic ways of achieving those goals and a set of principles that serve as an anchor as the president goes about the job. Trump, however, is the personification of an anti-strategy president whose version of a well-crafted policymaking process is writing a long screed on his Truth Social media platform.
Even so, every president needs to publish a national security strategy during their term. Trump did so in his first term, and that document stressed great power competition at every opportunity. President Joe Biden committed his own strategy to paper, citing China as an aspiring global hegemon that the United States needed to cooperate with when possible and contain when needed. Trump’s second-term strategy, published last week, goes beyond that relatively uncontroversial theme by stressing U.S. sovereignty and power above all other considerations.
There are some items in Trump’s national security strategy that are positive and frankly refreshing. It ditches the rules-based order pablum we often hear from U.S. politicians ad nauseam, a construct that elevates universal values and suggests that international politics are governed by a set of hard-and-fast laws, rules and conventions. But the world doesn’t work like that; power and interests, not the United Nations charter, govern how states behave. And the United States, a country that wrote the rules after World War II, isn’t exactly shy about abandoning those rules when it suits our agenda. If you don’t believe me, just look at the 2003 war in Iraq, which wasn’t authorized by the U.N. Security Council, or Washington’s support for some nasty autocrats who are deemed strategically important (rightly or wrongly). At least we’re no longer pretending a rules-based order exists.
Moreover, Trump’s overall goals in the strategy are quite conventional. In the Western Hemisphere, the Trump administration seeks to make the lives of cartels, drug traffickers and human smugglers miserable; preserve its superior position in the region relative to other non-hemispheric powers such as China and Russia; and ensure strategic locations such as the Panama Canal are secure. In Europe, U.S. officials are pressing the issue of burden sharing and incentivizing Washington’s European allies to take more responsibility for their own security. In East Asia, the United States hopes to maintain a stable balance of power with China, whose own military capability is exceedingly more impressive than it was a decade earlier. And in the Middle East, striking peace agreements is the primary objective. It’s hard to see why anyone would have an issue with any of this.
Author
More on Western Hemisphere
Events on Grand strategy
