“America Alone” may be the simplest line in the White House’s new national security strategy, an unusual document released Friday that clearly articulates the administration’s broad foreign policy priorities.
In a 33-page wall of words and complaints that self-summarizes as “America First,” the United States has succeeded in rejecting its European allies in a racist sweep, admitting that the United States must share power with China and seek new allies in the Western Hemisphere, where Washington currently has few. Sometimes it’s funny enough, but the stakes never are.
“The days when the United States supported the entire world order like Atlas are over,” the paper declares at the beginning, but it is unclear whether this is a statement of past fact or a new policy. America’s place in this new world is also increasingly unclear. He is no longer at the top and is yelling at other upstart dogs.
“As the United States rejects its own unfortunate notion of world domination, we must prevent global…domination of others.” “The immense influence of larger, richer, and more powerful nations is a timeless truth in international relations.” The magazine says that China’s meteoric rise came at the expense of the United States (with little mention of the role that cheap goods played in improving American standards of living over the decades), but it can only be stopped, not stopped.
The White House sees potential for making friends closer to the Americas, but risks being disappointed. The “Trump Consequences” the document proclaims in response to the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s offer less a new idea for 2026 than an addendum to the age-old proposal that the United States should control its closest territories. Nor does it mention how few strong allies the United States, which pardoned the drug-addicted and corrupt former president of Honduras while threatening to blow up drug networks at will, actually has in the south.
Again, this strategy is based on weighty, serious rhetoric, but lacks ideas that match the moment. Particularly in the phrase “conflict remains the Middle East’s most vexing dynamic,” there is an occasional slight sense of relief, as if it narrowly beat out hot weather for the top spot. But the reductive metaphor that comes a few sentences later, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a thorny situation,” is a reminder of how thousands of lives are being swayed by this unstable, negative mindset at the helm of the world’s military powers.
It’s like an enhanced, academic translation of President Donald Trump’s long monologue from the Oval Office. There’s a moment that borrows from the prejudices and grievances often associated with the dark corners of X.com, before the whole effort comes to a somewhat abrupt end after 210 words suggesting that Africa’s resources are all that’s worth.
But the paper’s most disturbing thoughts are confined to America’s favorite bête noire: Europe. A two-page echo of Vice President J.D. Vance’s corrosive speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, in which he accused, without evidence, European allies of stifling free speech and democracy and paralyzing their economies with overregulation. The report claims that the majority of Europeans are denied democratic expression of their desire for peace with Russia. This is a reductive view of the continent, keen to avoid another conflagration and seeing the Russian threat manifest as sabotage across the capital.
This strategy borrows from those on Europe’s fringes who have embraced the racist “Great Alternative” theory, which claims Europe is facing “the eradication of civilization.”
“It is quite possible that within a few decades at the latest, a majority of a given NATO member state will be non-European.” In other words, Europe will cease to be white and thus become an enemy if the alliance with the United States “will no longer be recognized within 20 years” and will not necessarily be “strong enough to remain a reliable ally.” Furthermore, it suggests a remedy to “foster resistance to Europe’s current trajectory among European countries”, that is, consent to overt intervention.
Not surprisingly, Russia has been spared similar criticism, with the relationship seen as worthy of “strategic stability.” As is well known, the United States is positioned not as a NATO ally to Europe, but as a mediator “to reduce the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.” The book accuses “European officials who sit in unstable minority governments and have unrealistic expectations of war” where people’s aspirations for peace are trampled by censorship and suppression of democracy (a false premise).
The next criticism, that Europe is a military power afraid to defend itself, shows a lack of self-awareness. “This lack of confidence is most evident in Europe’s relations with Russia,” the paper said, ignoring Trump’s red-carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose economy is smaller than Italy’s and still has a weaker military.
What are your priorities? “The prompt cessation of hostilities in Ukraine,” the re-establishment of “strategic stability” with Russia, and the “survival of Ukraine as a viable state.” The path to this persistent and elusive Trump goal is not mentioned, but the words “survivable” and “viable” do not suggest that anyone will be kind to Kiev going forward. Putin even receives an undeniable gift when they call for “ending the perception of NATO as a permanently expanding alliance and preventing the reality.” There are currently few strong candidates, but the point is not to spell it out.
This document is a very serious, yet extremely unscrupulous document that describes President Trump’s policies as “realistic rather than ‘realistic,’ pragmatic rather than ‘realistic,’ principled rather than ‘idealistic,’ muscular rather than ‘hawkish,’ and restrained rather than ‘dovish.'”
As befits this era of culture wars, the White House appears to be adjectivizing some ideas and taking up angry red Sharpies, reveling in a word salad promoting the rollback and dismissal of decades-old values and their allies.
