Sometimes, what a troubled relationship needs more than anything else is honesty. That is what President Donald Trump‘s 2025 National Security Strategy would deliver to Europe. Despite what critics want you to believe, the document calls for active and engaged United States relations with the rest of the world, even though Trump’s priorities are different than those of past administrations. If anything, what should worry observers is not the strategy laid out in the document, but Trump’s ability to execute it.
It begins with a trenchant critique of American foreign policy since the end of World War II, saying correctly that “elites … placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.” The same people “allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people” and “lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”
