Why under Trump the US foreign strategy became a war plan against the future
The new US National Security Strategy of US President Donald Trump oscillates wildly between triumphalism and declinist anxiety.
America is the greatest nation in history; America is being invaded. We are winning; we are losing it all.
It is the cognitive signature of a movement that experiences demographic and cultural change as existential catastrophe.
The NSS announces sweeping objectives without specifying resources, timelines, or mechanisms. Calling it "short-sighted" suggests that a long game is being neglected. But there is no long game.
Read more about why the new US National Security Strategy is not a strategy in any meaningful sense in the column by Stephen Holmes of NYU School: Trump’s war on the future: key takeaways from the new US security strategy.
The author reminds readers that a strategy connects means to achievable ends. What President Donald Trump’s White House published last week is something else: a 33-page confession that this administration does not believe in the future – and therefore sees no point in investing in it.
"There is no long-term game. A movement convinced that its world is ending does not plan for the next generation. It smashes and grabs," Holmes writes.
The grabbiness, he emphasises, is explicit.
"All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts," the NSS instructs.
Diplomacy has been formally converted into a business development operation, the author notes.
According to Holmes, the disappearance of great-power rivalry as a framework is not an oversight.
"It reflects an administration that has quietly abandoned the project of shaping the international order because shaping that order requires believing in the future," he stresses.
He also notes that the NSS redirects rhetorical fire toward Europe.
According to Holmes, the strategy demands that Europeans assume "primary responsibility" for their own defense, while simultaneously announcing that the United States will "cultivate resistance" to Europe’s current political trends by supporting nationalist and populist parties in European Union countries.
"This is not alliance management. It is sabotage dressed as burden-sharing," he concludes.
The Cato Institute, no friend of liberal internationalism, identifies another contradiction: the tension between rhetoric rejecting "forever wars" and an underlying insistence that the US must remain global arbiter.
"An "America First veneer" overlays a de facto hegemonic project. The administration wants the benefits of primacy without its burdens – deference without commitment, access without relationships," the NYU professor warns.
The document blurs the line between external threats and internal political competition, treating diaspora communities and demographic change as security problems on par with hostile states. This is the "Great Replacement" theory translated into official dogma.
At the same time, Trump, according to the columnist, softness toward Russia and other adversaries. The NSS does not name Russia as a serious threat because this administration does not experience Russia as threatening what it values.
What remains when policy cannot deliver what a movement craves? Demolition. Alliances that took generations to build can be wrecked in months.
The goal is not merely to ignore real threats but to redefine the threat itself as demographic change – the very presence of people Trump calls "garbage." Why preserve alliances to manage the future if the future will not be white?