What the 2025 National Security Strategy Means for Asia

Whether the document is a reliable guide to U.S. President Donald Trump’s future actions is unclear. But it is undeniably an important milestone in the evolution of the domestic debate about the United States’ relationship with the world—one that captures the worldview of the MAGA movement and reflects the changing American mood. For Asia, the document offers a revealing window into how the second Trump administration understands the Indo-Pacific, treats U.S. alliances, assesses China, and imagines U.S. leadership in an era of geopolitical competition.

In Washington, every new administration arrives with its own ideological coalition and inevitably produces a document verbalizing its ideas of U.S. national security policy. The latest version of the National Security Strategy (NSS), which was released by the Trump administration last week, is very much part of that tradition. More significant, however, is the way in which the document is a departure: If past strategy documents reflected minor variations on a broad post-World War II and post-Cold War foreign-policy consensus, this one marks a dramatic rupture from that consensus.

In Washington, every new administration arrives with its own ideological coalition and inevitably produces a document verbalizing its ideas of U.S. national security policy. The latest version of the National Security Strategy (NSS), which was released by the Trump administration last week, is very much part of that tradition. More significant, however, is the way in which the document is a departure: If past strategy documents reflected minor variations on a broad post-World War II and post-Cold War foreign-policy consensus, this one marks a dramatic rupture from th