This article was written shortly before the U.S.’s bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, overnight on January 3rd. But Selfa anticipates such actions in the context of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, examined below.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), released in late November 2025, is a remarkable document. By now, elements of the foreign policy establishment and more liberal and radical critics of U.S. policy have weighed in on it. Non-experts should read it too. The NSS distills the Trump Administration’s America First foreign policy in 39 digestible pages. It sends an, at times confused, but otherwise unmistakable, challenge (some might say “f*** you”) to the world. As always, the Trump Administration doesn’t do nuance.
Below are some key takeaways from a socialist reading of the NSS.
An ideological document. The NSS is a statement of Trumpist ideology more than a set of policies or proposals. In that regard, the NSS is like previous administrations’ NSS documents. In 2002, the George W Bush administration’s NSS saw all US policy through the lens of the “global war on terror.” The first Trump administration announced an era of “Great Power” rivalry. The Biden administration touted its support for a “rules-based international order.” In sum, NSS documents are rarely tomes that speak only to diplomats and military officials. They are administration “talking points memos.” This has a way of concealing the elements of continuity between them, while providing the current administration with political rationales. Trump II’s NSS boilerplate pledge to maintain global and regional power balances to “prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries” would be unremarkable in about any NSS published since the first in 1987.
In retrospect, it’s hard to see why any serious observer would take Bush Jr’s idea that combatting “terrorism” or “championing aspirations for human dignity” were organizing principles of U.S. foreign policy. Yet many did, while Bush led the U.S. into debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Likewise, it’s hard to square the Trump NSS’s multiple proclamations of “non-intervention” and opposition to “forever wars” with its aggressive assertions of the U. S’s right to throw its weight around, particularly in the Western hemisphere.
A throwback to America Under the Eagle. In its treatment of U.S. relations with other nations in North America, South America, and the Caribbean, it reads as a throwback to U.S.’s “gunboat diplomacy” of the 1800s and early 1900s. The administration announces what it calls a “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, clearly mimicking President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary. President James Monroe’s “doctrine” proclaimed U.S. support for a Western hemisphere free of European colonial domination. As Greg Grandin’s America, América points out, newly independent Latin American nations initially supported the Monroe Doctrine. But they soon discovered it to be a fig leaf for U.S. domination over Latin American affairs. Roosevelt’s “corollary” asserted a U.S. right to military intervention in sovereign nations for about any U.S.-determined reason. This produced decades’-long U.S. occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua, and El Salvador in the 20th century. The “Trump corollary” commits to a western hemisphere “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” “supports critical supply chains” and ensures “continued access to key strategic locations.”
In other words, Trump is telegraphing U.S. plans to use its military, political and economic clout to roll back China’s influence in the region, and to assure itself access to the region’s resources. The administration’s current (and illegal) blockade against oil-rich Venezuela, its threats to occupy Greenland and to seize back the Panamá Canal, and its recent intervention into the Argentinian election in support of his right-wing ally Milei, should be understood within this broader framework.
But behind the rhetorical bravado, the NSS’s focus on the Western Hemisphere is narrow and defensive. As Argentinian socialist Eduardo Lucita put it:
This new configuration comes in the context of the relative decline of US hegemony, and the rise of China which is contesting that hegemony in the strategic area of semiconductors. Considering this dynamic, it’s clear that the new strategy is a defensive strategy. A pre-requisite for the U.S.’s economic revival, internal stability and strategy against other powers is to reorganize its geopolitical priorities, retreating to the western hemisphere (which for them is the American continent), especially its “backyard,” Our América.
Despite the defensive nature of Trump’s plans for the Americas, the current campaign of murder on the high seas and saber-rattling against long-time U.S. ally Denmark to pressure it will give up Greenland, should be warnings that the U.S. will do a lot of damage along the way. Trump is currently cultivating a bloc of far-right governments in Latin America. But his ham-fisted interventionism could awaken the region’s popular resistance to U.S. domination.
Spheres of influence make a comeback. The NSS’s focus on U.S. hegemony in the Americas is of a piece with its conception of global politics as a competition and coexistence with other great powers’ spheres of influence. If Trump I’s (and Biden’s) NSSs saw the U.S. competing for influence with challengers such as China and Russia, Trump II’s signals a rough concord. Like the 1884-85 Berlin Conference where European powers divided up Africa between them, or the 1944 Moscow conference where the U.S./U.K. and the USSR divided Eastern and Central Europe between them, the current NSS recognizes a world where the “outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” So given that the strong will dominate the weak, the U.S. will take the Americas for itself, while leaving China and Russia to assert their own spheres of influence in Eurasia. That appears to be its attitude toward Russia’s war in Ukraine, as it seeks to settle the war in Russia’s favor. In the NSS’s section on the Americas, China makes a cameo appearance as the “non-Hemispheric competitor” that the Trump “corollary” is meant to repel. The NSS’s section on Asia is more pointed in its criticisms of China and “American elites,” who, the document says, enabled China’s rise. But it seeks to “rebalance” the U.S.’s trade relationship with China and to “prevent war in the Indo-Pacific.” The NSS repeats the standard U.S. policy against “unilateral change to the status quo” in Taiwan. It envisions a situation like today’s, where China remains the largest economic and military power in Asia, but in which the U.S. and its allies have a significant stake too.
Foreign policy as extension of domestic policy. The 19th century military strategist Clausewicz’s aphorism that “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” is certainly applicable to the Trumpist NSS. Core tenets of MAGA domestic politics: anti-immigration, white supremacy and economic nationalism, combine with “anti-globalism” to shape the NSS’s outlook on the world. This is most evident in the section on the Americas that pledges to ensure countries are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough” to “prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” This deliberate blurring of U.S. immigration policy with U.S. foreign policy exemplifies Trump’s so-far unsuccessful attempt to invoke the 18th century Alien Enemies Act in support of his mass deportation program.
When it turns its sights to Europe—the region to which it expresses the most hostility—it warns of “civilizational erasure” due primarily to “migration policies that are transforming the continent.” In essence, the NSS extends elements of the far-right “great replacement theory” to Europe and uses it as a yardstick to judge U.S. policy to its traditional allies. “We want Europe to remain European” (as the U.S. determines?) and “to regain its civilizational self-confidence.” To get there, Europe must stop trampling “on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.” While that sounds like a US affirmation of democracy, what it is really is a threat: the U.S. will only consider that Europe is “European enough” if it allows “the opposition” (a.k.a., far-right parties) to take power. Then “European greatness” will be restored. Finally, praise for Trump’s tariff policy is sprinkled throughout the NSS, along with paeans to U.S. “energy dominance” and reindustrialization, all brought to you by Trump II. The NSS also lashes Trump obsessions with “DEI” and opposition to “climate change” to national security.
An end to the American century. Ideologically and rhetorically, the newly released NSS represents a rejection of U.S. foreign policy as it has developed since the end of the Second World War. The U.S.-dominated post-war settlement, both during and after the Cold War, rested on U.S. military and economic predominance and a series of military alliances, the most important of which is (was?) the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The U.S. sponsored the creation of international bodies from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund to embed global political and economic relations in a predictable framework. These arrangements underpinned a dollar-dominated trading economy that upheld U.S. primacy. The NSS identifies many limitations and shortcomings of this system, while laying out a vision to blow it all up.
Perhaps we can commend this NSS’s writers for eschewing the moral hypocrisy of NSSs past. The Biden-Harris NSS extolled the “rules-based order” and pledged to press its partners to uphold democracy and human rights. Of course, those pledges didn’t apply to Israel and Gaza. NSSs past proclaimed the US the leader of the “Free World,” while it engineered coups and counterrevolutions that killed millions. The Trump II NSS is squirrely at points, but its main message comes through clearly: “The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well.” In passages where U.S. interests read as predatory of other nations’ resources, the NSS doesn’t go out of its way to camouflage its intentions. So, for opponents of US empire, there shouldn’t be much doubt about what we’re up against.
In the year since Trump took office a second time, the NSS’s rhetoric has been turned into reality in many ways. In its destruction of programs for US assistance to global health programs, its hostility to international students, scientists and travelers, and its installation of across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. trading partners, the Trump administration has immolated much U.S. “soft power,” developed over generations. Its continued saber-rattling against Denmark and sanctioning of European officials has driven its closest allies to seek alliances that exclude the U.S. Denmark has even classified the U.S. as a threat to its national security! The U.S. has cut spending on climate research and investment in alternative energy, while doubling down on fossil fuels.
While all of this may align with the Trump view of “America First,” it’s not clear whether these changes will produce the paybacks that the administration hopes. The U.S. may end up being “energy dominant” in fossil fuels, but China may just steal the march on the U.S. on the key technologies of the 21st century, from electric vehicles to energy production and storage.
To Alfred McCoy, the respected radical scholar of U.S. imperial history, the fruition of the vision embodied in Trump’s NSS, will, by the end of his term, result in a U.S. whose population is poorer, whose electric bills are higher, and whose workforce might be devastated due to artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the China will be on its way to be the global technological and economic leader, with US industry falling behind. A US withdrawn to the Western Hemisphere and losing out on scientific and technological breakthroughs will also make a dollar-dominated world economy less feasible.
It would be the ultimate irony if a Trump administration determined to “make America great again,” instead hastens its imperial decline.
Lance Selfa
Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).
