The Trump Administration released its National Security Strategy last week. “Strategy” is not a concept easily associated with a regime led by a petulant would-be autocrat, given to duplicity and grift. Trump proclaims drug traders a national security threat, then pardons the corrupt Honduran president jailed for making millions shipping drugs into this country. He embraces Arab emirates after pocketing their investment in his hotels and crypto scams. He anoints himself the President of Peace while bombing Iran, Yemen, and Somalia and fishing boats in the Caribbean, aiding and abetting Israel’s genocidal horrors in Gaza, putting troops at risk in Iraq and Syria, and pursuing terrorists in some 80 countries. So it goes.

Yet it is worth parsing the document for what it reveals about Trump’s and therefore his administration’s priorities. The new National Security Strategy is chock-full of Trump’s quirks, fixations, and derangements. Characteristically, at its center is a big con that will only accelerate this country’s continued decline.

The document opens by proclaiming a long-overdue break with the failed policies of the last decades. It denounces “American foreign policy elites” who “convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” It declares the end of America’s unipolar illusions, and the endless wars entailed in trying to police the world. The Trump administration, we are assured, will be all about America First.

The document dials back the consuming focus on Great Power rivalries of the Biden administration. It sensibly calls for settlement of the Ukraine war and “strategic stability” with Russia. It wisely declares that NATO should not be a “perpetually expanding alliance,” while calling on the Europeans to take on more of the burden of defending themselves.

The document highlights economic competition with China, emphasizing balanced trade and “reciprocity,” rather than military confrontation. It suggests that the US will reduce its military involvement in the Middle East, and wind down the war on terror. It declares a carefully hedged “predisposition to non-interventionism,” while promising to end to efforts to spread democracy abroad:  The US will no longer be “imposing…democratic or other social change” on other nations.

The Big Con: “America First” Around the World

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April 2026 Issue

Don’t fall for the con. Just as Joe Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” was discarded for policing the world, the document’s outline of regional policies reveals that for Trump, America First is simply a cover for a continued commitment to global dominance—this time on the cheap. 

The administration gives new emphasis on the Western Hemisphere to “restore American preeminence.” This requires a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine denying competitors (read China) the ability to position forces or “control vital assets” in our Hemisphere, “pushing out foreign companies that build infrastructure (read China) while demanding “sole source contracts for our companies.” The US will bolster its military presence to address urgent threats (e.g., bombing fishing boats that might be carrying drugs), and use “various means” to discourage collaboration with other competitors (read Venezuela). The pox of gunboat diplomacy, regime change, and economic coercion continues.

In Asia, the administration will ramp up the economic competition with China, while restoring “a favorable conventional military balance” to deter conflict over Taiwan, patrol the South China Sea, “and deny aggression in the “First Island Chain.” This requires our allies to spend far more but also “greater military investment from ourselves.”

In Europe, NATO will not continually expand, but the US will build up the nations of central, eastern and southern Europe with “weapon sales and political collaboration.” With energy independence, the Middle East is no longer a priority, but the US will ensure that the energy supplies don’t fall into enemy hands and that Israel remains secure, continue to police the Strait of Hormuz, and ensure that terror not endanger American interests. Africa gets scant mention—these are Trump’s “shit hole” countries after all—but we will invest in “harnessing Africa’s abundant natural resources” while remaining “wary” of resurgent Islamic terrorist activity. 

These global commitments require that the US maintain the “world’s most powerful military,” its most “robust nuclear deterrent,” and, unmentioned, its empire of 700 some military bases in 80 plus countries. Trump, like Biden and Obama and Bush before him, promises not to continue endless wars even as he commits to a policing of the globe that ensures them. America First turns out to be the same old poison in a new bottle.

The Perverted and the Despicable

Even more costly than the big con are the administration’s perverted priorities. “First and foremost,” the document promises, “we want to protect this country, its people…and its way of life from any “threat to our nation.”

For Trump, the greatest threats are apparently immigrants and drugs—both of which get elevated attention. Utterly dismissed is the polycrisis that now assails the American people—the concurrent assaults from catastrophic climate change, global pandemics like Covid, and debilitating inequality, as well as the danger of an increasingly unstable nuclear arms race.

In each case, the Trump administration seems hell-bent on increasing our vulnerability. In 2024, the US suffered 27 billion-dollar climate-related disasters totaling an estimated $182.7 billion. Trump has actively worked to undermine global efforts to address the growing crisis, while crippling our nation’s capacity to assess it or even to begin to build greater resilience against the growing calamities. Pandemics go unmentioned, even as the administration dismembers our public health capacity and withdraws participation and funds from the World Health Organization, essential in identifying and rallying response to the spread of deadly viruses. Despite a risible pledge to be “pro American worker,” the administration’s economic policies—beginning with tax cuts for the wealthy—has only added to an already obscene inequality. The impending expiration of the last nuclear arms control agreement is ignored, even as Trump touts his delusional “Golden Dome” missile defense system, which will waste billions and lead China and Russia to expand their nuclear arsenals. 

And perversely, the administration continues to undermine the very institutions that helped make America great—the rule of law, scientific excellence, openness to foreigners and new ideas, international law and institutions that largely served American interests.

The despicable is the administration’s avid propagation of white nationalist racism, which is perversely at the heart of its political project. The administration celebrates America not as a nation of immigrants dedicated to an idea but as a nation of blood and soil that must admit only the deserving (e.g., white Afrikaners). At home, the strategy document risibly asserts that eliminating equal-employment opportunity (“rooting out” diversity, equity and inclusion, the tarred DEI programs) signals the return of competence. 

Bizarrely, it paints Europe (and NATO) as threatened by the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” because of migration policies that might lead it to be “majority non-European,” as well the “regulatory suffocation” of the European Union and other transnational institutions. Therefore, the US will intervene in European domestic affairs—“cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” aiding far-right parties, or what it calls “patriotic European parties.” Trump will make the rise of white nationalist parties a strategic focus of his global policy.

And of course, in what has become characteristic of the Trump administration, the document is riddled with lies and contradictions.

It proclaims that the US will seek good relations with nations without imposing on them “social change that differs widely from their traditions,” not counting Europe and Venezuela for starters.

It risibly calls for “re-instilling a culture of competence” even as Trump has assembled a cabinet of clowns, while firing many of the experienced across the government and imposing political loyalty tests on employees. 

It proclaims unleashing energy production a “strategic priority” even as Trump dismantles support for the least expensive and most vital sources—solar and wind energy and energy efficiency, surrendering the markets of the future to the Chinese and others.

It celebrates our “unmatched soft power” even as Trump dismantles AID, the Voice of America and other agencies central to that power, while alienating allies and developing nations.

It lauds investment in emerging technologies and basic science, even as Trump slashes science and technology investment across the government, and an astounding three in four scientists in our country—both native and foreign-born—say they have considered or are considering emigration. 

The Reckoning

What’s clear is that Trump’s America First policy isn’t a break with the failed imperial pretensions of the last decades. Rather it supplements them with a new emphasis on this hemisphere and on subverting Western European democracies. The commitments from the South China Sea to the Red Sea to the “Gulf of America” remain the same, the only difference is that Trump promises to get the allies to bear more of the burden so we can sustain dominance on the cheap. 

Yet, while our global pretensions continue, our capacity declines. As Charles Freeman, a former assistant secretary of defense, summarizes:

Ego-driven petulance is no substitute for strategy. Protection rackets and cronyism are no substitute for diplomacy. Intemperate insults do not promote partnership.… It is generally considered wise to divide, not unite one’s adversaries. We have done the opposite.

By brandishing its lawlessness, treating international institutions with contempt, and undermining the very elements that made America great, Trump’s National Security Strategy promises only to accelerate our decline.