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President Donald Trump’s new national security strategy will serve U.S. interests poorly. The strategy is far too deferential to Russia, unnecessarily hostile to America’s oldest allies in Europe, in contradiction with recent U.S. actions in the Pacific, and indirectly beneficial to China.
Let’s start with Europe.
It’s true, there are real challenges in the U.S.-European relationship. Recent improvements notwithstanding, the Europeans continue to spend far too little on defense. It is inexcusable that it took Trump’s return to office for Germany, France, and the United Kingdom to follow Poland and the Baltic states in truly ramping up defense spending. The Europeans also outrageously treat American technology companies as piggy banks. And the Trump administration is correct, European governments do not adequately respect the free speech of their citizens.
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Still, Trump’s new strategy embraces an emotive hostility toward Europe that is both unseemly and unproductive for American interests. Trump may want to jolt Europe into a more constructive partnership, but this strategy is far more likely to degrade the trans-Atlantic alliance to Chinese and Russian benefit.
The strategy has a distinctly disingenuous quality when it comes to European relations with Russia. It absurdly exaggerates the importance of European civil society issues in relation to U.S. national security priorities. It also pretends to know more about European democracy than the Europeans who actually elected the governments that represent them. The strategy rightly claims that “large European majority wants peace” in Ukraine, for example, but falsely claims that this “desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of [European] governments’ subversion of democratic processes.” The reality is that while many European populations do want peace, they want a just peace, not a wholesale surrender of Ukraine that simply whets Putin’s appetite for future territorial gains.
On the flip side, the strategy offers no rejoinders for Russia over its grotesque aggression against Ukraine, Moscow’s close engagement with Beijing against U.S. global influence and interests, and continuing Russian intelligence service sabotage, most recently targeting a civilian rail line in Poland, against our European NATO allies. Instead, it repeatedly references the legitimate interest in prioritizing “strategic stability” with Russia while ignoring Russia’s practiced disregard for strategic stability.
Trump must explain how his strategy for American greatness is served by this deference to Russia. Russia has repeatedly shown its utter contempt for the United States under Trump. It has done so by literally spitting in the face of, excreting on the apartment floors of, and doing far worse to American diplomats in Moscow and globally. It has done so by using mercenaries under the control of its military intelligence service to attempt to kill American soldiers in Syria. It has done so by helping China learn how to better hunt American submarines. It has done so by launching the bloodiest land war in Europe since World War II. It has done so by building new nuclear weapons systems in blatant breach of treaty obligations. Russia has also insulted Trump personally. Russian President Vladimir Putin perceives Trump as a foolish pretender to the throne, a point Putin underlines with Shakespearean gall.
To be clear, Russia is an ideologically devoted adversary of the U.S. But Trump’s preference for Russia over Europe is also nonsensical from his favored perspective: that of economic dealing.
Russia’s GDP was $2.17 trillion in 2024. That same year, the combined GDP of the European Union and the U.K. was 11 times greater at $23.54 trillion. U.S. exports to the EU and U.K. amounted to $450 billion in 2024. U.S. exports to Russia in 2021, the year before sanctions were imposed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, stood at $6.4 billion. Even imagining a wholesale removal of sanctions on Russia in the aftermath of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, Russia offers utterly woeful economic export or investment potential as contrasted with Europe. American businesspersons dealing with Russia would also face that very Russian risk of finding themselves suffering unexplained heart attacks or falling out of high windows or inadvertently drinking radioactive cups of tea or simply finding bullets enter their heads and those of their families.
Trump is playing a dangerous game. His excessive animus toward Europe and deluded ambitions for relations with Russia will only drive the Europeans closer into China’s orbit. Absent reliability on the U.S. as a partner, the Europeans will see little reason not to jump at Chinese President Xi Jinping’s offer of massive investments in return for their political obedience. French President Emmanuel Macron epitomizes this dynamic, using a recent state visit to China to sign new high-tech cooperation agreements. Expect other Europeans to follow suit, increasingly rejecting American calls for support in confronting Chinese espionage and Xi’s imperial ambitions in the Pacific.
Indeed, this strategy is utterly hypocritical when it comes to China’s challenge in the Pacific.
It recognizes that sustaining “a free and open Indo-Pacific” requires bolstered military power and alliance efforts to deter any Chinese attack on Taiwan and prevent China from exercising unilateral control over the South China Sea. As the strategy puts it, “Strong measures must be developed along with the deterrence necessary to keep those lanes open, free of ‘tolls,’ and not subject to arbitrary closure by one country.” It rightly adds that “America’s diplomatic efforts should focus on pressing [Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines] to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression. This will interlink maritime security issues along the First Island Chain while reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.” And facing China, the strategy notes that America must focus on “winning the economic and technological competition over the long term.”
The problem is that Trump has recently and significantly undercut all of these well-stated ambitions. The president has just allowed Nvidia to sell its highly advanced H200 semiconductor chips to China, a move that will improve China’s ability to catch up in the artificial intelligence race and bolster its weapons systems to more easily kill Americans in any future war.
Then there’s Trump’s treatment of the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.
Since entering office in late October, Takaichi has moved quickly to boost defense spending, reinforce her support for the U.S. alliance, and help to bolster deterrence against a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In response to comments Takaichi made on Taiwan, however, a senior Chinese diplomat threatened to behead Takaichi, and Beijing introduced punitive economic measures against Tokyo. Trump should have offered his support for Takaichi to reciprocate her support of his national security strategy.
Instead, the president threw Takaichi under the bus. Following a phone call with Xi in which the Chinese leader lambasted Takaichi’s Taiwan comments, Trump promptly told Takaichi to shut up about the issue. Trump did so because he doesn’t like to think about the big picture and because it served his short-term interest in keeping Xi happy. But the result is the same, one obvious for all America’s allies and adversaries to see: Trump betrayed a key allied leader for doing exactly what his strategy asked of her.
The president has a praiseworthy tendency to change course when actions require it. If he wants to retain America’s global power and the benefits of its unparalleled alliance structure, he needs to do so expediently here.
His current actions are a boon to American foes and a bomb against American alliances.
