More on the 2025 National Security StrategyGreat-power realism, MAGA internationalism, and the contradictions at the heart of Trump’s worldview
STEVE PALLEYNOV 2025
Last episode, we walked through the opening logic of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy: its populist tone, its rejection of post–Cold War overextension, and its attempt to reframe U.S. grand strategy around sovereignty, restraint, and balance-of-power politics. This week, having actually read the full document, we go deeper—and the picture gets stranger.
At its best, the strategy gestures toward something serious. It rejects global primacy, emphasizes great-power competition over moral crusades, and repeatedly insists that American power should be concentrated, not diffused. Those are not fringe ideas. They echo long-standing realist critiques of U.S. foreign policy since the 1990s, and in places—especially on China—the document sounds more pragmatic than Trump’s first-term strategy.
But layered on top of that realism is something else entirely: an illiberal ideological project that sits uneasily with the document’s stated goals. Again and again, the strategy claims to oppose interference in other nations’ domestic affairs—while simultaneously endorsing the active reshaping of allied democracies along MAGA lines. The contradiction is not subtle.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Europe section. On the surface, the strategy calls for familiar things: more European defense spending, an end to the war in Ukraine, and a stable long-term relationship with Russia. Reasonable people can debate all of that. But then the text veers sharply into civilizational language—warning that Europe is losing its identity, condemning migration, and pledging to “cultivate resistance” to Europe’s current political trajectory from within. That is not realism. It is ideological intervention, and it amounts to an explicit endorsement of nationalist, illiberal movements across the continent.
Asia, by contrast, is treated with surprising restraint. China is framed less as an existential enemy than as a durable competitor with whom the United States must find a workable equilibrium. The document emphasizes deterrence over confrontation, economic competition over military escalation, and alliance burden-sharing over unilateral dominance. There are few details and many unanswered questions—but the tone reflects a grudging recognition that China is here to stay, and that coexistence, however tense, may be unavoidable.
The Western Hemisphere reveals the same tension in a different form. The so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine blends traditional hemispheric priorities—migration control, drug trafficking, regional stability—with blunt economic coercion and performative dominance. In practice, tariffs and pressure campaigns against countries like Brazil and Canada risk alienating precisely the partners the strategy claims to “enlist and expand.” What reads as strategic focus often looks, in execution, like punitive instinct.
Elsewhere, the gaps are telling. Africa is reduced to a footnote: no aid, minimal engagement, vague concern about terrorism. The Middle East is treated as a problem the United States would prefer to stop thinking about—an attitude every recent administration has shared, with mixed results. Energy policy dismisses climate change outright while doubling down on fossil fuels, even as technological competition in renewables accelerates abroad.
Taken together, the 2025 National Security Strategy is not incoherent—but it is internally conflicted. It combines classical balance-of-power thinking with a populist, nationalist ideology that actively undermines its own realist premises. Realism traditionally seeks to drain ideology from foreign policy. This document replaces one ideology with another.
The result is a strategy that wants restraint without reciprocity, sovereignty without pluralism, and stability without tolerance. Whether that combination can produce durable order—or simply new forms of backlash—remains the open question at the heart of Trump’s vision for America’s role in the world.
