I don’t want to live in the world outlined in President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, and neither do most Americans. Not that most Americans will take the time, as I just did, to read its 33 pages of eccentric, tariff- and war-oriented sabre-rattling.
So I will boil it down so that you don’t have to peruse it. The president and a handful of nativist advisors would like to replace 250 years of decently successful approaches to our relations with the other nations of the globe with a supposedly “realistic” shoulder-shrug that just gives up on our being an international leader in anything but the number of bombs we have. It rejects a worldview that recognized complexity — what could be more complex than 237 nations on a planet and the way they interact? — with a desire for a simplicity that apparently the president can understand and therefore desire.
He sees a world with three superpowers: Russia, dominating Europe; China, dominating Asia; and the United States, dominating the Western Hemisphere.
The Middle East is seen (not incorrectly) as indeed too complicated a square peg to fit into these round holes, and the strategy relegates Africa to an afterthought in a couple of paragraphs at its end, even though the continent will have a quarter of the world’s population by 2050.
And there’s a whole lot of gobbledegook in the language of the plan, hard to argue with as such without really saying anything, such as in the opening to its “The Strategy” section, labeled “Principles”: “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’”
The document — released months later than anticipated after internal wrangling between older foreign policy hands and newbie oddballs — is sickening in its obsequiousness toward the current president, who will be gone in three years, rather than focusing on coming decades.
Trump “and his team successfully marshaled America’s great strengths to correct course and begin ushering in a new golden age for our country” begins a section titled “President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Correction.”
To be fair to some aspects of the document, it properly attacks China’s despicable use of industrial sabotage and intellectual property rights theft, without necessarily laying out any new ways to combat those economic threats. And it stands by the long U.S. policy of support for Taiwan’s independent course.
What it almost entirely abandons is support for our longest-held strategic, cultural and intellectual alliances — those with the nations of Western Europe. As Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations writes, “The core problem of the European continent, according to the NSS, is a neglect of ‘Western’ values (understood as nationalist conservative values) and a ‘loss of national identities’ due to immigration and ‘cratering birthrates.’ The alleged result is economic stagnation, military weakness, and ‘civilizational erasure’ of Europe.”
The strategy on Europe aligns itself with those in the Trump White House who believe in the “Great Replacement Theory” in our country — fewer White folks — and says Europe faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” not a problem I noticed in the strong, ancient civilizations of Italy and Scotland last summer.
The worst part of the NSS attitude toward the continent is its bland noting that “many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat” and that “European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated” because of the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, without saying who might have started that insane conflict: Russia.
And while correctly saying that American diplomacy can be key to ending that war, nowhere does it say that the end result should include Ukraine not having to cede any of its territory to the aggressors. That’s simple surrender to the new czarists.
A positive note? The NSS does not include plans for the conquest of Canada, or of Greenland.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.