BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 17. To what extent does the new U.S. National Security Strategy under Donald Trump reflect not a coherent reassessment of America’s global role, but rather an institutional breakdown in strategic planning—one that accelerates the erosion of the transatlantic security architecture and produces a de facto asymmetric rapprochement with Moscow alongside a growing estrangement from Europe?
Strategy as a Symptom, Not a Tool
Released in early December, the new U.S. National Security Strategy formally presents itself as the cornerstone document setting the priorities of American foreign and defense policy for the medium term. A closer reading, however, suggests something very different. Rather than the product of a disciplined interagency consensus, the text reads as a projection of a highly personalized, fragmented, and tactically driven worldview shaped by the instincts of the current administration TurkicWorld reports citing BakuNetwork.
Traditionally, the National Security Strategy has served three interlocking purposes. First, it established a hierarchy of threats and interests. Second, it aligned resources with objectives. Third, it signaled long-term intentions to allies and adversaries alike. From the Truman Doctrine through the Cold War and into the post-bipolar era, the NSS functioned as an anchor of institutional continuity, even amid intense domestic political upheaval.
The second Trump administration’s strategy breaks decisively with that lineage. It offers no coherent model of the international system, no theory of change, and no durable logic of prioritization. Instead, it fuses declarative isolationism with episodic interventionism, pairs sovereignty rhetoric with blunt political pressure on allies, denounces globalism while clinging to global ambitions unsupported by commensurate resources.
In that sense, the strategy is less an instrument for shaping the future than a symptom of a deeper transformation in American strategic thinking—one in which the planning horizon shrinks to short-term gains and institutional memory gives way to a personalized approach to world politics.
A Conceptual Rupture: Abandoning Liberal Internationalism Without a Replacement
The strategy’s central organizing principle is encapsulated in the familiar slogan “America First.” Yet unlike earlier periods in U.S. history when similar impulses were tempered by realist balancing (the Nixon–Kissinger era) or underwritten by structured economic expansion (the late twentieth century), today’s version offers no compensatory framework.
Post-1945 liberal internationalism rested on three pillars: institutionalized alliances, economic interdependence, and normative leadership. Dismantling that architecture without constructing a functional substitute does not yield strategic autonomy. It produces fragmentation of American influence.
Equally telling is what the document omits. The logic of great-power competition—explicit in the first Trump administration’s strategy and further developed under President Biden—has largely disappeared. At a moment when the international system has effectively shifted toward a multipolar configuration marked by hard-edged bloc competition, ignoring that reality amounts to a refusal to analyze the world as it actually exists.
The absence of systematic discussion of North Korea, of Iran in its regional context, and of Latin America beyond generic Western Hemisphere rhetoric points to a dramatic narrowing of strategic vision. This is not strategic minimalism; it is cognitive reductionism, where global complexity is replaced by a set of politically convenient narratives.
Blurring Domestic and Foreign Policy as a Strategic Defect
One of the most atypical features of the new strategy is its persistent conflation of domestic and foreign agendas. References to tax policy, public health, cultural identity, and historical memory are woven into a document ostensibly dedicated to external threats and international priorities.
Within the analytical framework of strategic studies, such conflation is usually interpreted either as a mobilizational doctrine in the face of an existential threat or as evidence of the absence of a coherent foreign-policy framework. In this case, it is clearly the latter.
When a National Security Strategy doubles as a domestic political manifesto, it loses its capacity to orient allies or deter adversaries. It also generates confusion within the bureaucracy itself, where agencies are left without clear guidance on resource allocation and priority-setting.
Historically, documents from NSC-68 to the Reagan-era strategies were marked by a high degree of conceptual discipline. Even during periods of fierce internal division, American strategic planning retained a measure of institutional autonomy. The current strategy signals the erosion of that autonomy.
Peace as Rhetoric and the Institutional Paradox
Particular attention should be paid to the strategy’s repeated emphasis on maintaining peace. In itself, the aspiration to reduce conflict is uncontroversial. In strategic analysis, however, intentions are meaningless without instruments.
Declaring peace as an objective while offering no mechanisms to secure it—especially amid ongoing wars—reduces the concept to a normative slogan. The paradox deepens when viewed alongside the dismantling of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the parallel downsizing of analytical and diplomatic structures devoted to preventive diplomacy. Peace is proclaimed as a goal even as the institutional infrastructure required to pursue it is taken apart.
From the standpoint of international relations theory, this reflects a retreat from a comprehensive understanding of security—one that integrates diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian tools—in favor of a narrowly transactional approach.
Europe and Russia: Asymmetry of Perception and Strategic Distortion
The strategy’s most acute contradictions emerge in its treatment of Europe and Russia. While formally acknowledging Russia’s war against Ukraine, the document simultaneously signals a readiness for what amounts to de facto accommodation of Moscow.
The Kremlin’s notably positive reaction to the strategy’s publication is itself revealing. It suggests that the signal was read in Moscow as a weakening of the American position. In the logic of deterrence, such an interpretation is already a strategic failure, as it undermines confidence in U.S. commitments.
Europe, meanwhile, is portrayed not as a security partner but as a problematic actor, its political and demographic dynamics filtered through a lens of cultural resentment. This stance stands in stark contrast to the professed principles of sovereign equality and non-interference that the strategy invokes elsewhere.
In effect, the United States is stepping back from its role as a systemic guarantor of European security without offering any institutional or strategic mechanism to fill the gap. The resulting vacuum will not remain empty. It will be filled either by Europe’s accelerated pursuit of autonomy or by the expanding influence of alternative centers of power.
Ukraine as a Stress Test of Strategic Credibility
The Ukrainian case is the single most important indicator of whether any U.S. National Security Strategy is viable under current conditions. The stated objective of achieving a rapid end to the fighting, without defining the parameters of a just and sustainable peace, points to a substitution of strategic analysis with a tactical desire to make the problem go away.
Historical experience—from the Korean War to the Balkan conflicts—demonstrates that prematurely freezing wars without addressing their structural causes merely postpones escalation. In Ukraine’s case, this approach would amount to institutionalizing Moscow’s revanchist logic and eroding the principle of the inviolability of borders, which the strategy itself formally claims to uphold.
Institutional Dismantling and the Loss of Strategic Coherence
One of the most underestimated yet fundamentally important features of the new National Security Strategy is its rupture with the institutional logic of the American state. In its classical understanding, the NSS is neither an opinion piece nor an ideological manifesto. It is a coordinating instrument meant to synchronize the work of the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence community, the Treasury, and trade agencies. Through it, the state develops a shared strategic language.
In the current version, that language is missing. The document identifies goals without aligning them with capabilities. It declares priorities without constructing a hierarchy of threats. It proclaims the need to defend against foreign interference while simultaneously dismantling the very institutions that for decades built American expertise in countering influence operations.
The dissolution of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the downsizing of intelligence units focused on analyzing malign foreign influence, and the rollback of related capacities within the FBI are not simply staffing decisions. They represent a systemic refusal to recognize hybrid threats as a category of national security. At a time when Russia, China, and other states treat the information domain as a space of permanent confrontation, this refusal amounts to unilateral disarmament in the non-kinetic dimension.
From the perspective of institutional theory, this is an erosion of the state’s strategic capacity. The United States retains military power, economic scale, and technological depth, but is losing the ability to integrate those resources into a coherent strategy.
Economic Sovereignty and the Logic of Self-Sabotage
In its economic chapter, the strategy advances positions that are formally sound but practically contradictory. Supply-chain security, reindustrialization, rebuilding the defense-industrial base, and reducing dependence on hostile states are rational objectives shared by much of the American establishment.
Yet achieving them requires a high degree of coordination with close trading partners and allies. Trade wars with Canada, pressure on European economies, and the demonstrative revision of agreements with North American partners undermine precisely the environment of trust needed for resilient production and logistics networks.
From a political economy standpoint, the strategy reproduces the classic dilemma of economic nationalism: efforts to maximize short-term gains through protectionism tend to erode aggregate competitiveness over the long term. For the United States, whose economy is deeply embedded in global flows of capital, technology, and labor, the costs are particularly acute.
Claims about reviving the defense-industrial base appear especially fragile against the backdrop of curtailed cooperation with European partners, who remain central players in joint programs in aviation, air and missile defense, cybersecurity, and space technologies. The strategy offers no clear answer as to which alliances and markets are supposed to compensate for this loss.
China as the Sole Structural Adversary
Against the document’s overall fragmentation, the section on China stands out for its relative analytical coherence. For the first time in decades, the strategy unambiguously acknowledges the failure of the long-standing paradigm of integrating China through trade and investment.
The identification of predatory trade practices, technological espionage, forced technology transfer, and the use of economic leverage for geopolitical ends reflects a consensus that has taken shape within the American expert community. China is portrayed not as a partner-competitor but as a systemic rival seeking to revise the international order.
Even here, however, the strategy stops at diagnosis and offers no comprehensive treatment. It lacks a clear conception of allies’ roles in containing China, fails to articulate a coherent Indo-Pacific strategy, and leaves undefined the parameters of technological and financial decoupling.
Without coordination with Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, any attempt to exert economic or technological pressure on Beijing will remain partial. In doing so, the strategy undercuts the most rational component of its own analysis.
Russia as a Revanchist Actor and Strategic Blindness
The most problematic element of the strategy remains its approach to Russia. While the document employs formally correct language in acknowledging Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, that recognition does not translate into a strategic line.
Russia is framed not as a long-term revisionist power undermining the foundations of European security, but as a problem to be politically managed. This framing ignores the empirical record of recent years, including Moscow’s systematic use of military force, hybrid instruments, energy coercion, and political subversion.
The reaction of Russian officials, who described the strategy as a positive signal, is a telling indicator. In strategic studies, an adversary’s perception of a document often matters more than its literal wording. In this case, perception suggests that Moscow views the NSS as a window of opportunity to consolidate its gains.
Particularly revealing is the notion of a possible U.S. role as mediator between Russia and Europe. This contradicts the basic logic of a conflict in which Russia itself is the source of the threat to European security. Attempts to symmetrize responsibility erode the principle of aggression as a core category of international law.
Europe: From Ally to Object of Pressure
The European dimension of the strategy reflects a qualitative shift in how the continent is perceived in Washington. Europe is treated neither as an autonomous strategic actor nor as an equal ally, but as a space of internal dysfunctions, demographic change, and political deviation.
Especially troubling is the endorsement of so-called patriotic forces in Europe, a stance that effectively converges with Moscow’s support for far-right and Euroskeptic movements. From the standpoint of the transatlantic security architecture, this undermines the internal resilience mechanisms of U.S. allies.
Calls for European societies to resist the political course of their own governments resemble a form of interference that directly contradicts the proclaimed principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. The result is a paradoxical position: the United States condemns foreign influence on its own domestic politics while legitimizing similar practices toward its allies.
Scenario Analysis: Three Possible Trajectories
If the strategy is treated as a factor shaping the behavior of other actors, three basic scenarios emerge.
The first scenario involves the gradual strategic autonomization of Europe. The weakening of American security guarantees and political pressure from Washington would push the EU and individual European states to expand their own defense capabilities, institutionalize military planning, and reduce dependence on the United States. NATO would formally persist, but its functional role would diminish.
The second scenario points toward fragmentation of the European space. Support for radical political forces, the absence of clear American commitments, and continued Russian pressure could deepen internal divisions within the EU and weaken collective capacity to respond to threats.
The third scenario envisions a partial revision of U.S. strategy under the impact of external crises. Historically, American foreign policy has often adjusted in response to events that proved impossible to ignore. The price of such correction, however, has typically been far higher than the cost of preventive strategic planning.
Conclusions and Strategic Recommendations
The new U.S. National Security Strategy does not qualify as a strategy in the classical sense. It reflects an institutional crisis of strategic thinking, the personalization of foreign policy, and a retreat from systematic analysis of the international environment.
The rapprochement with Moscow is not formal but functional. It manifests itself in weakened deterrence, the relativization of responsibility, and the erosion of allied trust. The rupture with Europe, in turn, is not an articulated objective but a byproduct of a transactional approach to alliances that treats commitments as negotiable rather than structural.
For the United States, the central strategic risk lies in the loss of an influence architecture built over decades—one that amplified American power far beyond its raw capabilities. For Europe, this moment represents a point of clarity, demanding an accelerated transition from dependence to responsibility. For the international system as a whole, the strategy signals a shift toward a more fragmented, less predictable, and more conflict-prone order.
The core conclusion is straightforward: abandoning a global role without articulating an alternative model does not result in a controlled reduction of commitments. It merely redistributes risks in a more volatile and ultimately more dangerous form.
