Trump’s New National Security Strategy Goes Full ‘America First’

The one through line in the strategy—which at various points both promotes and rails against interventionism—is advancing Washington’s ambitions.

The Trump administration released its long-anticipated new national security strategy late Thursday night, laying out a vision that attempts to reconcile U.S. global dominance with a U.S. retreat from many aspects of its decades-long global role.

The Trump administration released its long-anticipated new national security strategy late Thursday night, laying out a vision that attempts to reconcile U.S. global dominance with a U.S. retreat from many aspects of its decades-long global role.

The one through line in the strategy—which at various points both promotes and rails against interventionism—is advancing Washington’s ambitions.

“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote in his introduction to the strategy, which he described as a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”

But the opening paragraphs of the strategy—which begins with a textbook definition of strategy as a “concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means”—also slam the American-led post-Cold War global order and foreground a clear departure from it.

“American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the document reads. “Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.”

Rhetoric echoing white nationalist ideas related to the G