The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For

The newly published National Security Strategy is beautiful. What makes the document powerful isn’t the prose but the clarity. For the first time in decades, America has a strategy grounded not in theories, slogans, or airy talk of an “international community,” but in the...

In Newsweek last year, I argued that America had to shake off the primacist hangover of the post–Cold War with what I called foreign policy stoicism: humility, hierarchy, and a sober respect for the nation-state, oriented toward changing what can most easily be changed and prioritizing the most concrete threats. The think-tank world—even the conservative one—treats these arguments as eccentric, premature, or impolite. But the new NSS doesn’t merely acknowledge this logic; it snaps into place like a long-delayed correction. For those of us who have been making this case from the margins, the document feels revolutionary not because it echoes us, but because it drags the center of gravity toward reality.

Many commentators, desperate to shoehorn the document into familiar categories, have rushed to call it “realist” or “restrained.” But this entirely misses the point. America First, as presented here, is not realism in the graduate-seminar sense. It is realism in the statesman’s sense: clarity about ends, honesty about means, and an unapologetic commitment to the fortunes of the republic.

The NSS captures this in one of its most important lines: America First is “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist’, realistic without being ‘realist’, principled without being ‘idealistic’, muscular without being ‘hawkish’, and restrained without being ‘dovish’.” That is not merely a doctrinal statement; it is a moral one. The intellectual schools of foreign policy have their uses, but the real task of strategy is simpler and older: determine what is necessary for the survival and

In Newsweek last year …

You write for Newsweek, Juan?

… I argued that America had to shake off the primacist (sic) hangover of the post–Cold War with what I called foreign policy stoicism: humility, hierarchy, and a sober respect for the nation-state …

Oh boy. The USA was not ever “primacist”, whatever that means, and always respected the nation-state unlike our current imperialist enemies (and the Democrats and RINOs). And hierarchy is the opposite of the ideal of the US republic, since it implies top-down authoritarian government. If the US ended up as the only world superpower, it was a gift from God—which the Uniparty rapidly squandered by empowering our leftist and Islamist enemies abroad.

The NSS says that it puts "the interest of the USA above those of globalists or other countries."

Whether it's doing that in a rational manner is open to dispute.

For example, there's a curious lack of focus on both strategic goals and the means of achieving them.

The most impressive hallmark of Trump II's foreign policy is its almost completely ad hoc character. He just jumps from one crisis to another (the post Oct 7 wars in the ME, Ukraine, East Asia).

One common thread is that he expects the parties directly involved to work out a solution that doesn't impose a lot of costs on the US or formally increase US security commitments, although the latest reports on the Ukraine deal suggest that it will bind the US to some kind of Article 5-like guarantee.

An approach that puts the burdens on the parties directly involved is of course America First, but as we saw with Iran, it must ultimately be supported by US actions.

Ukraine seems to be the opposite: there doesn't seem to be any resolve to pressure Russia sufficiently to get Putin to modify his actions and the constant discussions of economic "deals" makes it look like Trump is being bribed to abandon Ukraine and, more importantly, is a category mistake when dealing with Russia. If "deals" were important to Putin, then the sanctions and loss of oil and gas revenue would have mollified his responses but so far have not. Trump and Witkoff measure every "deal" in dollars, but some things like national independence for the Ukrainians or Russia's perception of itself as the rightful dominator of the "lesser peoples" surrounding it are positional goods not material goods that are mutually exclusive. Dangling dollars might motivate Trump or Witkoff, but not ultimately Putin or Zelensky. This is why Trump's Ukraine "negotiations" have so far been a failure and are likely to remain so.

The NSS also doesn't seem to address East Asia much at all, and Chinese pressure there simply keeps increasing. The US is asleep at the switch as China renovates a former US airfield in Micronesia and effectively has no capacity to build warships at all and barely the capacity to produce submarines. Missile, drones, artillery tube and other defense industrial capacity are minimal with no known plan for improvement.

This is not addressed by the NSS, so in all likelihood the result will be the further isolation of the US, an armed forces falling to or below their capacities of 1940, to be followed at some point in the medium term by a sucker punch like 1941. But unlike then we will not have the capacity to recover.

To an outside observer it must appear that after the Cold War the US simply has no capacity to conduct foreign policy: we have simply lurched from one utopianism to another, from Bush's "liberal imperialism" to Blinken's "rules based international order" and Iran appeasement to Trump's "America First" ephemeral and transactional "peace" plans that can magically be achieved without clearcut victory by one side or another.

Go troll someone else.

You said "Is it really a good strategy when Putin approved of it?"

I said "Is it really a bad strategy when George Soros disapproves of it?"

Then you said "Congratulation on changing the subject and not speaking to the point of my comment, like the good Putin supporter you are."

The only one changing the subject and mindlessly trolling is you.

It's always humorous seeing you children accuse anybody you disagree with of being a "Putin supporter." Shouldn't you be calling them "Nazis" and "Hitler" too?

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