US National Security Strategy 2025: The Shining City?

 

December 8^th. President Harry S. Truman once said that “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this [the Resolution] desk, it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.”  US National Security Strategy (NSS 25) is built on myth and President Donald J. Trump’s many prejudices about allies and others.  

Now, I am too old to get too excited about such documents even if US National Security Strategies are meant to be the distilled essence of an Administration’s grand strategy – the application of immense American means in pursuit of high strategic ends.  They are a bit like London buses – one waits for ages and then when one finally turns up it is going in the wrong direction. And yes, NSS 25 is meant to set the scene for the forthcoming National Defense Strategy which will matter to NATO.  It is not all bad, even if the US support for “our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe” could be more J.D. Vance than John F. Kennedy. 

 An America divided...

The biggest concern NSS 25 reveals is the enormous divide in US domestic politics and the virtual civil war taking place in the Washington Establishment over America in the world. Normally, US domestic politics only interests me in so much as American choices affect my country and NATO.  The more dependent Britain and other Europeans have become the more subject we are to America’s politics.  When the Americans sneeze and all that. What makes NSS 25 so radically different from past such efforts is the strangely parochial mix of politics and personality both implicit and explicit in the leadership of the world’s only global power.  

Is NSS 25 thus just a temporary phenomenon reflective of a radically capricious president.  Yes and no. America is changing fast and is no longer led by a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) cabal for which the ties with Europe were both cultural as well as geopolitical.  NSS 2025 thus marks something that has been building for a long time - a radical departure from post-war American internationalism built on a sense amongst many Americans that they can simply no longer afford other peoples’ problems.

Furthermore, having effectively stated that the US is no longer a European power NSS 25 then proposes a view of American power that Bismarck or Metternich would have recognised.  As much as NSS 25 does vision Viscount Lord Palmerston would have concurred for according to NSS 25 America no longer as either permanent friends or permanent enemies, just interests.  Really?

Another paradox of this very un-American strategy is the very real damage it does to the American strategic brand.  NSS 25 abandons any last remnant of the Shining City on the Hill by explicitly re-casting America as simply yet another power-obsessed ‘European-style’ bottom-feeder. In other words, NSS 25 is a very depressing document for those who have long believed in American the Idea because it trashes the inspirational American belief that if others prosper America prospers.

What should particularly concern Europeans is Trumps adherence to the balance of power? Let’s face it European efforts to built ‘stability’ by balancing power has not always ended well.  This is particularly the case given that it is now Europeans who like to cast themselves as a Shining City on the Hill, even if in fact ‘Europe’ is little more than a collection of weak villages on a bit of a bump in somebody else’s road. Perhaps one can only shine on a hill if one had no power and faces no threats? 

The myth of history

 It is the failed understanding of American history in NSS 25 which is most galling. It also reveals the extent to which Trumpian foreign and security policy is built on a kind of Hollywood history of America.  A history in which the Americans win everything without the help of anybody for the good of all, even those who lose.  Take for example the reference to the Monroe Doctrine. NSS 25 states, “After years of neglect the United States will reaffirm and assert the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere”.  Sorry, but that is not what the Monroe Doctrine did.  What eventually became known as the Monroe Doctrine followed a speech in December 1823 by then President James Monroe in which he effectively called for a new balance of power between the New World and the Old World, by which he meant Britain and the US. 

 In effect, Monroe was offering a deal to the British to build three new empires.  First, the Americans would promise not to interfere again in British North America.  In 1812, the Americans had tried to take advantage of Britain’s wars against Napoleon by trying to seize parts of what is today Canada. The British punished them by burning down the White House and Congress in 1814.  Contrary to American myth the government of Lord Liverpool in London had no ambitions to destroy the United States. 

 Second, the British agreed to let the Americans have a free hand in what is today Latin America. By 1823, the Spanish Empire of the Americas was crumbling and Monroe and his Administration wanted to exploit that.  Third, the British would leave the Americans to colonise what became eventually the United States and exploit newly independent states in what became Latin America.  In return, the British, safe in the knowledge that British North America no longer faced an American threat, could turn south and east. Between 1815 and 1890 Britain built the Second British Empire.  In other words, whilst all other European powers were recovering from a systemic war Monroe made America complicit in British imperialism by figuratively and literally having Britain’s grand strategic back.  

The new Atlanticism

 Old-fashioned Atlanticism is dead, long live the new Atlanticism! NSS 25 simply confirms in an extreme way what Europeans should already know – that the US domestic politics is driving Americans into a strange kind of isolationism whilst still obsessed with its fading exceptionalism. Trump is the embodiment of that. 

 NSS 25 is full of paradoxes but perhaps the most egregious paradox is the relegation of Europeans to the third rank of American interests after the Indo-Pacific and making money. If one looks at the ends, ways and means of NSS 25 the only way the Americans will ever realise their grand strategic goals is with the support of allies. That means America needs NATO.

The missing message of NSS 25? The Americans still need Europeans, as much as Europeans need Americans. And, with a relatively modest collective effort Europeans could show just how indispensable they are to the US?  Let’s get on with it!

 Just a thought.

 ulian Lindley-French