President Trump just released a new National Security Strategy (NSS), November 2025, making a significant shift from all previous NSSes. Like Trump’s negotiations for peace in Ukraine, his new NSS focuses more on economics and business deals than it does with supporting American values of freedom and democracy abroad. And it shamefully casts dispersion on our European allies.
I’ve been reading National Security Strategies (NSSes) since the mid 1990s as part of my duties as an Air Force planner and strategist. From the NSS is derived the National Military Strategy (NMS), which in turn provides guidance to combatant commanders to develop supporting plans. I’m disappointed in this latest effort, which forsakes the bedrocks of freedom and democracy upon which our nation was founded.
The just-replaced 2022 NSS framed US strategy around preserving a “free, open, secure, and prosperous world” through alliances, shared democratic values, and cooperation on transnational problems.” In contrast, the 2025 NSS centers economic power and sovereignty as the primary areas of strategic competition.
The new NSS emphasizes economics in overtly strategic terms: it even labels a section “Economics: The Ultimate Stakes,” and then treats unfair trade, supply-chain dependency, intellectual property theft, and even fentanyl precursors as national-security areas of emphasis. The NSS explains that economic competition with China and related commercial vulnerabilities are among “the greatest economic battlegrounds of the coming decades,” and lists the kinds of harms the United States must treat as security problems — “unfair trading practices; job destruction and deindustrialization; grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage; threats against our supply chains…; exports of fentanyl precursors…; propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion.” This clearly puts economic levers and economic risk mitigation at the center of strategic thinking.
In a breathtaking break from all previous NSSes, Russia and North Korea are not even mentioned as threats to our national security, and the threat from China is mostly couched in economic terms.
A particularly striking passage concerns Europe. Rather than the usual pledge to deepen the transatlantic partnership, the 2025 NSS characterizes Europe in a way that implies decline and loss of self-confidence — and proposes that the US. should help restore Europe’s internal posture. The text says the US. “goal should be to help Europe correct its trajectory.” It later seems to throw support to the hard right parties of Europe — characterized by extreme nationalism, xenophobia, and support for Russia – by characterizing them as “patriotic European parties…giving cause for great optimism.” Based on his previous comments, seems like JD Vance’s fingerprints are all over this section.
Past NSSes did not mention the current president by name (I used an AI assist to check), except on the title page. Against this tradition, but in keeping with the cult of Trump, our dear leader Donald is mentioned five times in the main text of this new NSS, of course in bragging terms of his greatness.
This document portends an America that is more transactional, heartless, and isolated. The American beacon of freedom and democracy continues to wane under President Trump, and the free world is all the more unsafe.
Good luck everybody.
Waipahu Bob 