“This document is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.” So proclaims President Donald Trump in a short letter to “My fellow Americans” introducing the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” or, as commonly known in Washington, the NSS.

Statutorily mandated and released in November, President Trump’s 2025 NSS pleased Trump world. The brief 29-page document enraged Europeans. And it baffled observers on the right and left who – along with Trump’s 2017 NSS, written under the supervision of then-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster – regard the Chinese Communist Party as the greatest and most comprehensive threat to U.S. national security.

Trump’s 2025 NSS boasts of exemplifying strategic thinking’s major virtues: “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’” In parts, the document exhibits the excellent qualities it claims as its own. In other parts, however, the NSS displays impracticality, naïveté, and ideological blindness. Traditional conservative priorities, shrewd observations, and apt policy shifts commingle in the NSS with fanciful claims, glaring omissions, and jaw-dropping leaps of logic. The document gives voice to multifarious moral impulses and priorities characteristic of contending personalities and camps within Trump world without reconciling or even acknowledging the inner tensions. In this way, the 2025 NSS mirrors Trump-administration foreign policy.

The NSS’s opening observations concerning America’s errors about itself and other nations vulgarize recent U.S. foreign policy and skew the NSS’s reshaping of American diplomacy. Echoing hard-left and postliberal detractors of the United States, the NSS levels the scurrilous accusation that “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” Previous administrations may have gone overboard in their enthusiasm for free trade, a rules-based international order, and promoting freedom and democracy abroad. But to portray such enthusiasm as a quest for world domination smears America and plays into the hands of freedom’s enemies at home and abroad. It also obscures American prosperity’s dependence on free trade, albeit more effectively based on fair and reciprocal conduct from America’s trading partners. It ignores the advantages that America derives from an international order that favors freedom and democracy, although less in thrall to international organizations with anti-American agendas and more reliant on responsibility-sharing U.S. friends and partners. And it overlooks America’s interest in promoting freedom and democracy, provided that interest is pursued in a manner more consistent with American resources and capabilities and more focused on using........

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