I read The 2025 National Security Strategy. It’s well worth a look. There’s nothing that surprising in the document if you’re familiar with Trump’s positions. However, as an official American foreign policy strategy document, it’s an obvious break from decades of old and failed post-Cold War policies. 

The document rejects the pursuit of global hegemony that dominated American elite thinking for decades and says that leaders sacrificed the nation’s industrial base and middle class while pursuing an impossible dream of worldwide dominance. The document also says that globalism hollowed out the foundations of American power and allowed allies to ride freely on American defense spending and entangled the nation in institutions that are hostile to sovereignty. For many Americans who have struggled economically, what’s getting rejected in the document should represent a welcome change for the future. 

The document’s economic vision centers on reindustrialization. It also directly declares that “the future belongs to makers.” The strategy elevates industrial and manufacturing strength to the highest priority. The country must control critical supply chains, generate energy independence, and revive a sustainable industrial defense base. These changes are massive and will take time. They require strategic use of tariffs, reshoring entire production lines, and ensuring the nation never depends on adversaries for critical products. Most of this rhetoric is typical Trump, but to see it articulated in an official national security document from a White House intent on implementing the strategy seems new. When has an American president set a strategy based on a future of makers? That’s simply not the language of the elites we’ve been living under for what seems like forever. As someone who grew up in the construction industry and who now regularly mixes with engineers and scientists of all types, I like the makers reference a lot.

The reference to makers expands to all workers as well: “American policy will be pro-worker, not merely pro-growth, and it will prioritize our own workers. We must rebuild an economy in which prosperity is broadly based and widely shared, not concentrated at the top or localized in certain industries or a few parts of our country.” So, it’s not just the broad economy that’s being highlighted here. The strategy gets right down to making workers part of the country’s national security policy. That’s the middle class. That’s individualism.

Also interesting is that the only Founding Father cited in the document is Alexander Hamilton, who was known as an early architect of American industrial policy and pushing manufacturing over agrarianism. He said in the nation’s earliest days that America must never depend on outside powers for components necessary to defense or economy. By invoking Hamilton alone, the strategy signals a clear paradigm shift back to Hamilton’s view of economic nationalism, protective tariffs, and government support for domestic industry as the foundation of national power.

The strategy articulates core principles including peace through strength, a predisposition to non-interventionism, flexible realism, primacy of nations over international institutions (those would be the NGOs, of course), and insistence on fairness in alliances and trade. Border security becomes “the primary element of national security,” with the document declaring emphatically that the era of mass migration is over. Trump’s “Hague Commitment” requires NATO allies to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, which most of those nations likely can’t afford given their social spending and likely won’t even attempt to fulfill. But we’ll see. 

Trump’s agenda to push NATO countries to contribute more to military spending also comes within the context that the United States is now intent on “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” That one sentence jumps right off the page in this document because the entire history of NATO has been based on never-ending expansion, which is one of the main points argued by Russia. Many people in the West have argued that NATO should have dissolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Trump is building momentum for the United States to exit NATO in a phased process?

Regionally, the strategy announces what it calls a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. This concept reasserts American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere through military readjustment, border security operations including lethal force against cartels, and commercial diplomacy to push out foreign competitors. In the Indo-Pacific, the focus is winning the economic future while deterring military conflict, rebalancing trade with China, and maintaining conventional military advantages particularly regarding Taiwan. Although this focus on the Western Hemisphere may seem new to most people, I can remember at least a decade ago similar discussions taking place in various geopolitical communities I follow. But back then the concern was an economic collapse of the American Empire much like the collapse of the old British Empire. Yet today, it seems like these moves aren’t forced from economic depression or a foreign enemy. The United States seems to be choosing to disengage from the globalist empire building strategies of the past. 

Europe gets a lot of criticism in the document and the media is covering this issue way more than anything else in the strategy. But again, the information isn’t necessarily new given Trump’s pervasive rhetoric on Europe for many years. But I guess just embedding it into the nation’s official strategy position seems jarring to countries in the European Union and their supporters in the United States. The document strongly warns of “civilizational erasure” through migration, censorship, collapsing birthrates, and loss of national identity. The document also says that Europe has lost significant market share of global GDP in recent years, dropping from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today. This trend down has been discussed for at least five years now so that’s not new either. However, to see it emphasized so heavily is surprising. The strategy calls for ending the Ukraine war to reestablish strategic stability with Russia, and it also encourages the growth of patriotic European parties seeking to restore civilizational self-confidence. 

The Middle East is downgraded from a previously dominant focus of the globalists to a partnership and investment region for business deals. With America again a net energy exporter and Iran weakened by recent attacks, the historic rationale for previous strategy positions in the region has receded. The strategy also supports expanding Trump’s Abraham Accords while avoiding forever wars. Given the region’s conflicts in recent years, it’ll be interesting to see if this new collaborative focus can be maintained. 

This document represents intentional triage, and the change is dramatic over previous administrative strategies. It elevates the Western Hemisphere and Indo-Pacific region, while at the same time it seems to reduce emphasis on Europe and the Middle East. It insists American policy must serve American interests first, that allies must contribute proportionally to defense spending, and that the era of America underwriting global order at the expense of its industrial base has ended. The strategy leverages Hamilton’s early economics, the Monroe Doctrine’s hemispheric focus, and Reagan’s peace through strength to reassert and restore traditional American principles previously abandoned in pursuit of globalist ambitions that weakened rather than strengthened American sovereignty.

It’s pure Trump. Can it be implemented? 

Here’s an excellent view of the strategy from financial analyst Brent Johnson: U.S. National Security Strategy & The United States of the Americas. Oh, and for kicks, check out the National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British People in a Dangerous World. What you’ll see is that the United States and the United Kingdom are now moving in totally opposite directions. Given the colorful history of the two countries, this current trend couldn’t be more fascinating.