Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy in Summary

USA – On Thursday night, the White House unveiled new Donald Trump‘s national security strategy aimed at reinforcing the “America First” doctrine, with a US foreign policy overhaul.

The 33-page document opens with a critique of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, contending that successive administrations – guided by what it describes as misguided elite assumptions – pursued unrealistic ambitions of global dominance.

According to the text, these policies overstretched American resources, enabled foreign dependence, weakened the nation’s industrial base, and subordinated US sovereignty to international institutions “driven by transnationalism or outright anti-Americanism.”

At the heart of the proposal is a vision of American national goals that includes the protection of US sovereignty, border control, economic competitiveness, secure infrastructure, a revitalized industrial base, global technological leadership, and what it describes as renewed “spiritual and cultural health.”

It calls for maintaining the world’s “most powerful” military and nuclear deterrent, as well as building advanced missile defenses, including a “Golden Dome” for the American homeland.

“American policy should focus on enlisting regional champions that can help create tolerable stability in the region, even beyond those partners’ borders. These nations would help us stop illegal and destabilizing migration, neutralize cartels, nearshore manufacturing, and develop local private economies, among other things,” it said, calling for a “readjustment” of the US military presence in the Western Hemisphere.

The plan outlines four major shifts:

• Redirecting military resources toward urgent Western Hemisphere threats and away from theaters deemed less critical to US national security
• Expanding Coast Guard and Navy operations to secure sea lanes, reduce migration flows, and combat human and drug trafficking
• Targeted deployments along the US border to dismantle cartel networks
• Establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations

“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity – a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” according to the document.

The European Problem

The document contends that while American policymakers have long focused on European military shortfalls and slow economic growth, the continent’s deeper problems involve declining birth rates, weakening national identities, migration pressures, and what it describes as overreaching transnational institutions such as the EU.

“Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies,” it said.

It also argued that “over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”

The proposed policy framework calls for several major US priorities in Europe, such as reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia, enabling Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations, opening European markets to US goods and services, and ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.

Relations with China

Turning to China, the document said the US “will rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.”

“Stopping regional conflicts before they spiral into global wars that drag down whole continents is worthy of the Commander-in-Chief’s attention, and a priority for this administration. A world on fire, where wars come to our shores, is bad for American interests.

“President Trump uses unconventional diplomacy, America’s military might, and economic leverage to surgically extinguish embers of division between nuclear-capable nations and violent wars caused by centuries-long hatred,” the document read.