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The Trump administration’s release of a new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) last month has provoked two basic lines of criticism. Some critics say the document lacks a unifying strategic vision and amounts to a transactional wish-list aimed at satisfying competing camps inside the administration; others say that it signifies a retreat from competition that implicitly accepts—and even encourages—rival powers to seek dominance in their regions.

These two criticisms roughly correspond to the prevailing tribes of U.S. foreign policy of the past 30 years. For the first group, which mainly consists of voices from the establishment left, the significance of the NSS lies in what they see as a tacit abandonment of U.S. support for the so-called rules-based international order. For the second camp, which is made up mainly of voices from the establishment right, its significance lies in a perceived abandonment of U.S. military preeminence in Europe and Asia, and a concomitant willingness to countenance accommodating stances vis-à-vis Russia and China.

The Trump administration’s release of a new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) last month has provoked two basic lines of criticism. Some critics say the document lacks a unifying strategic vision and amounts to a transactional wish-list aimed at satisfying competing camps inside the administration; others say that it signifies a retreat from competition that implicitly accepts—and even encourages—rival powers to seek dominance in their regions.

These two criticisms roughly correspond to the prevailing tribes of U.S. foreign policy of the past 30 years. For the first group, which mainly consists of voices from the establishment left, the significance of the NSS lies in what they see as a tacit abandonment of U.S. support for the so-called rules-based international order. For the second camp, which is made up mainly of voices from the establishment right, its significance lies in a perceived abandonment of U.S. military preeminence in Europe and Asia, and a concomitant willingness to countenance accommodating stances vis-à-vis Russia and China.

Both camps see the U.S. strike in Venezuela as validating their arguments. The common root in both criticisms is the perception that Trump’s foreign policy is not just a departure from the United States’ accustomed way of doing things abroad but also an abnegation of the discipline of grand strategy itself—whether in its institutional or military incarnation—in exchange for something else entirely: ideology, transactionalism, and short-term tactics.

But both critiques miss the mark. Trump’s strategic actions, and by extension the NSS, are in fact rooted in a clear and compelling logic firmly grounded in the discipline of grand strategy. Historically, that logic has been called consolidation: an attempt by a great power to proactively shore up its position in order to increase its disposable power over time. Consolidation means accepting near-term tradeoffs while working to renovate underlying structural factors so that the great power can transcend or mitigate those tradeoffs in the future. In other words, consolidation trades near-term risk for long-term gain.

Consolidation is an age-old strategy used by many of history’s most successful great powers to stabilize their positions at dangerous moments. It responds to a universal reality in life, business, and strategy: Overstretched systems tend to break. In the case of the United States, consolidation is a reasonable response to two paramount strategic problems—first, that the country presently lacks the military power to fight all of its opponents simultaneously, should it need to do so. And second, that its overall economic and technological power is slowly eroding vis-à-vis China, the most formidable........

© Foreign Policy