I needed several days to absorb the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, to re-read it, to listen to reactions, to compare it to the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published in 2017. My conclusion, published in the Atlantic (gift link here), is that it isn’t really a strategy document at all:

It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

For those who aren’t familiar with these kinds documents, a National Security Strategy is designed to guide America’s large, powerful and talented security apparatus: the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the counter-intelligence agents of the FBI. It’s supposed to set priorities, to help formulate policy even at the lowest level of government. In this iteration, so dramatically different from the 2017 version, Trump’s national security ideologues are clearly directing America’s security institutions not to worry about any of our opponents:

A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.

Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either. The new document makes only a vague allusion to a Chinese economic presence in Latin America and to a Chinese threat to Taiwan. When discussing this latter possibility, the authors drop their swaggering language about American power and slip into bureaucratese: “The United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

Other rivals and other potential sources of conflict get no mention at all. North Korea has disappeared. Iran is described as “greatly weakened.” Islamist terrorism is no longer worth mentioning. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still “thorny,” but thanks to President Donald Trump, “progress toward a more permanent peace has been made.” Hamas will soon fade away. The American troops who are still fighting in Somalia and Syria—and in some cases dying—are ignored, as if they didn’t exist at all.

The document identifies only one real problem for the United States. The enemy is not a country, but a set of ideas:

It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy. This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.

This is a watershed: America’s closest allies and trading partners in Europe are now redefined as civilizational enemies. Elsewhere in the world, it seems we are not interested in anyone else’s domestic politics (“we seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change”). Only in Europe is it now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.

My guess is that the goal is even more far-reaching. The Trump administration wants a weak, divided Europe, one that is easy for our tech companies to dominate, maybe easy for Russia to conquer. We don’t know how this will work in practice. Will American diplomats now overtly support European far-right parties, and other organizations that seek to undermine European democracy? Will American spies conduct covert operations intended to destroy the European Union? Regardless of what actual policies emerge, it is clear that Europeans, if they want to maintain their sovereignty, will have to stick together. This is a turning point in European history comparable to 1945 or 1989: Either Europe begins to speak with a single voice in the world, or the nations of Europe will fall under the influence of others.

But this is also a moment of great danger for the United States. If we cannot identify the countries that actually wish to harm us, then we will be surprised when they do.

Read the whole article

Others Respond

I appreciated Clare Berlinski’s response to my Atlantic article, published on Substack Notes:

In The New York Times, Anton Troianovski also points out that for the first time the document treats profit as a strategic objective:

President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy…Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.

Profit has replaced security. But profit for whom? Friends of the president? Read more here (gift link).

Though the NSS has landed like a bomb in Europe, an earlier draft was even more antagonistic toward Europeans. As Meghann Myers reports for Defense One, that draft sought to “Make Europe Great Again” by working to pull Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Austria away from the European Union—a goal its drafters share with Vladimir Putin. That draft also apparently proposed replacing the G7 with the Core 5: the US, Russia, China, India, and Japan. The implication is that the US would ally with the same countries that are trying to undermine us, to steal our data, to hack our infrastructure. Read more here.

Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

December 5

• FBI Director Kash Patel and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, have been using FBI agents assigned to Wilkins’s security detail as personal chauffeurs—ordering them, over their objections, to drive her inebriated friends home on multiple occasions.

December 6

• Trump pardoned sports executive Tim Leiweke—who was under investigation by the Department of Justice for rigging the bid for a $375 million basketball arena later built for the University of Texas—after he was asked to by Republican former Rep. Trey Gowdy over a round of golf.

December 7

• In an apparent admission of an attempted quid pro quo, Trump criticized Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar for not switching parties to protect the GOP’s narrow House majority after receiving a pardon.

December 8

• The Department of Transportation waived the remaining $11 million of Southwest Airlines’ $140 million Biden-era fine stemming from its 2022 holiday service meltdown.
• Trump signed two mortgages in the early 1990s for Palm Beach properties that he claimed were his primary residences, despite never living in either—mirroring the same allegation the Justice Department is using to prosecute the president’s political opponents.

December 9

• Paramount Skydance—which is led by the son of Trump ally Larry Ellison—launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, partially financed by Jared Kushner’s investment firm Affinity Partners, Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds, and the Abu Dhabi–owned L’imad Holding Co.

December 10

• Trump’s intervention in the proposed Netflix–Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition has impeded the ability of the Department of Justice’s antitrust chief to conduct an independent review of the deal.
• Trump launched his long-discussed Gold Card visa, allowing wealthy foreign nationals to obtain legal status—and eventually US citizenship—for a $1 million fee.

Also, do check out the Wall Street Journal’s catalogue of Trump pardons, which was released too late for me to include in last week’s discussion, available here (gift link). The Financial Times has published a similar investigation, entitled Inside the Industrial-Scale Pardon Machine,

Greetings from Athens

I had half a day free here, so I visited the Benaki Museum. Set up by a Greek art collector in the 1930s, it covers the whole range of Greek history, from prehistory to the present. I loved the gallery dedicated to the Greek independence movement, as well as some of the very earliest pottery, decorated with abstract designs that seem almost contemporary.

Some of my favorite things below, including golden laurel wreath, an 18th century interior, and a funeral urn with a couple bidding one another goodbye

Buy Autocracy Inc for Christmas