The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy is, in many ways, unlike any in U.S. history. Most strategy documents of this kind articulate the threats that the United States’ adversaries pose to Washington and its allies, and they explain how officials can respond to these challenges. But this one seems kinder to the United States’ foes than to its friends. It rebukes Europe in an astonishingly blunt fashion, arguing that some of the continent’s domestic policies are damaging democracy and risking “civilizational erasure.” It says remarkably little, by contrast, about the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. As a result, the response to the NSS among Washington’s traditional foreign policy elite has been overwhelmingly angry—and panicked.
But anxious analysts should take a breath. Dig a little deeper, and the new document, almost certainly written by many hands, is more complex than it appears at first glance. In fact, it reflects more continuity with the last several strategies than its most attention-grabbing passages suggest. The strategy does not call for the United States to abandon Europe or its other traditional allies. It does not open the door to Chinese expansionism. And it does not indicate that Washington is preparing to withdraw from much of the world. Quite the contrary: it suggests that the United States still has globe-spanning shared interests with its historical allies, and that the country is planning to expand its geographical interests.
U.S. allies, in particular, should focus on the dimensions of the strategy that pertain to vital American interests. The document, for example, makes clear that Washington can and should increase military collaboration with its partners. The strategy also suggests that officials can boost and adapt Washington’s extended nuclear deterrent. And it provides reasons for strengthening allied conventional defenses and maintaining the United States’ forward military deployments. Washington’s friends and partners should use the new strategy as a reason to keep doing much of what they already are doing or plan to do—but with a renewed sense of urgency.
HALF BAD
The new strategy may not be the catastrophe that its critics suggest. But there’s no whitewashing its flaws. For starters, it pointedly neglects to name and describe the primary threat that the United States and its allies face: the authoritarian bloc of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Trump’s 2017 national security strategy made it clear that “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests” and described “the dictatorships of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran” as “determined to destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people.” But even though this bloc of states has expanded its military capabilities and heightened its collaboration in the intervening years, the 2025 strategy does not describe them or the risk that they pose to American security. One of the countries, North Korea, isn’t even mentioned.