Foreign Affairs - What Trump’s National Security Strategy Gets Right Despite the Bombastic Rhetoric, America Isn’t Retreating - Rebeccah Heinrichs - December 15, 2025

 Foreign Affairs 

What Trump’s National Security Strategy Gets Right

Despite the Bombastic Rhetoric, America Isn’t Retreating

Rebeccah Heinrichs

December 15, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump at a roundtable in Washington, D.C., December 2025

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

REBECCAH HEINRICHS is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Keystone Defense Initiative at the Hudson Institute. She served as a commissioner on the most recent bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy is, in many ways, unlike any in U.S. history. Most strategy documents of this kind articulate the threats that the United States’ adversaries pose to Washington and its allies, and they explain how officials can respond to these challenges. But this one seems kinder to the United States’ foes than to its friends. It rebukes Europe in an astonishingly blunt fashion, arguing that some of the continent’s domestic policies are damaging democracy and risking “civilizational erasure.” It says remarkably little, by contrast, about the threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. As a result, the response to the NSS among Washington’s traditional foreign policy elite has been overwhelmingly angry—and panicked.

But anxious analysts should take a breath. Dig a little deeper, and the new document, almost certainly written by many hands, is more complex than it appears at first glance. In fact, it reflects more continuity with the last several strategies than its most attention-grabbing passages suggest. The strategy does not call for the United States to abandon Europe or its other traditional allies. It does not open the door to Chinese expansionism. And it does not indicate that Washington is preparing to withdraw from much of the world. Quite the contrary: it suggests that the United States still has globe-spanning shared interests with its historical allies, and that the country is planning to expand its geographical interests.

U.S. allies, in particular, should focus on the dimensions of the strategy that pertain to vital American interests. The document, for example, makes clear that Washington can and should increase military collaboration with its partners. The strategy also suggests that officials can boost and adapt Washington’s extended nuclear deterrent. And it provides reasons for strengthening allied conventional defenses and maintaining the United States’ forward military deployments. Washington’s friends and partners should use the new strategy as a reason to keep doing much of what they already are doing or plan to do—but with a renewed sense of urgency.

HALF BAD

The new strategy may not be the catastrophe that its critics suggest. But there’s no whitewashing its flaws. For starters, it pointedly neglects to name and describe the primary threat that the United States and its allies face: the authoritarian bloc of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Trump’s 2017 national security strategy made it clear that “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests” and described “the dictatorships of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran” as “determined to destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people.” But even though this bloc of states has expanded its military capabilities and heightened its collaboration in the intervening years, the 2025 strategy does not describe them or the risk that they pose to American security. One of the countries, North Korea, isn’t even mentioned.

Instead, the document trains most of its ire on Europe. The continent’s governments, it declares, are eroding free speech, strangling economic growth, and letting in unvetted foreigners who do not assimilate. These claims are largely accurate, but putting them in the report only offers ammunition to Washington and Europe’s common adversaries—and makes it harder for Europe to address the problems. Many politicians in Europe strongly agree with Trump’s criticisms and have been fighting hard to get their countries to change course. But as one European diplomat told me, the strategy’s harsh condemnations could harm such politicians’ electoral fortunes. Instead of publicly rebuking Europe, the Trump administration would have been better off raising these concerns in private, as one does when dealing with struggling friends.

The strategy is also incoherent when it discusses Trump’s preferred political movements inside Europe. It seems set on bolstering what the document calls “those European forces that openly embrace their national character and history”—a not-so-veiled reference to far-right parties such as the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, Reform UK, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). But these parties advocate for polices at odds with other Trump goals, such as European rearmament, even if they agree with some Republicans on cultural matters. If the AfD had its way, Germany would close its borders to migrants, but it would remain defenseless against rising revanchist powers. Worst of all, the AfD supports the appeasement of Russia. Many members of the AfD even align with Russia, advocating for resumption of trade, opposing efforts to end Germany’s dependence on Russian oil, and are hostile to NATO.

Unfortunately, Trump seeks a “reset” with Russia that echoes the failed one attempted by the progressive President Barack Obama in 2009. He has focused on creating incentives for Russia to end its war against Ukraine rather than on increasing pressure and bolstering deterrence. The document calls for stabilizing ties with Russia and declares that Washington “finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war” in Ukraine. It then says that “a large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes.” But this argument is incorrect. When Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and were in office, Europe was far more divided on how to treat Moscow than it is now, and it was far less supportive of investing in hard power to deter Russian aggression. Today, Europeans are broadly supportive of rearming and taking on a bigger share of NATO’s defense. They view Russia as a clear and acute threat and agree that they must stop Russian aggression through military strength and by ending their dependence on Russian energy.

If U.S. officials are really interested in the views of unrepresented citizens, they should instead look at their own. According to the December 2025 Reagan National Defense Survey, a majority of Americans from both political parties support Ukraine over Russia. The number who support sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine has climbed from 55 percent to 64 percent since last year. Support for NATO has also surged to 68 percent from 62 percent.

STICKING AROUND

But criticism of Europe and skepticism toward Ukraine are only two parts of the new strategy. Elsewhere, the document is much more in keeping with earlier articulations of American foreign policy. Despite loud calls from the American far right to abandon commitments abroad, for example, the new document rightly asserts that U.S. interests span the planet. According to the document, Washington’s “core” interests are in the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and “all crucial sea lanes.” The so-called pivot to Asia pushed by Obama and the current Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby remains elusive. In fact, the United States is not only maintaining Asia, Europe, and the Middle East as regions of core interest but also adding the Americas, which U.S. officials spent decades neglecting. This is not the strategy of a retrenching United States.

The strategy makes it especially clear that the United States won’t cede ground to China—a fact that should come as a relief to many observers. In the run-up to the document’s publication, NBC News reported that White House aides were worried that Chinese leader Xi Jinping might persuade Trump to formally declare that Washington “opposes” Taiwanese independence. But the document maintains Washington’s long-standing policy of keeping its commitment to the island ambiguous, stating that the United States “does not support unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.” Before the document came out, analysts also worried that Washington would pull back from the Quad, the U.S. led-security framework featuring Australia, India, and Japan. Yet the new strategy reaffirms Washington’s commitment to the group and to a free and open Indo-Pacific in general. Meanwhile, just days after the document was released, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with security officials in Australia and the United Kingdom to bolster the three countries’ commitment to their AUKUS pact. In doing so, he dealt a setback to so-called restrainers in the United States who want to abandon AUKUS, through which Washington plans to supply nuclear submarines to Australia.

And despite the critiques of some current European governments, the new strategy makes it emphatically clear that the United States wants Europe to be strong. The document lauds the commitments from NATO allies to boost defense spending, and it declares that “Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States.” It says that “transatlantic trade remains one of the pillars of the global economy and of American prosperity” and that “European sectors from manufacturing to technology to energy remain among the world’s most robust.” It notes that Europe “is home to cutting-edge scientific research and world-leading cultural institutions.” And it says that Washington cannot “afford to write Europe off,” because doing so “would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve.”

Allies should not simply hope for a more conciliatory American president.

For all its flaws, then, the new strategy does not set back U.S. efforts to deter authoritarian powers. It suggests that policymakers in the United States and allied countries should keep advancing their partnerships. They can seize on the strategy’s declarations, for instance, to promote traditional rearmament, pointing to the document’s praise for European defense commitments and its promise that the United States “stands ready” to convene and support those efforts.

The strategy also provides space for nuclear rearmament by calling for Washington to restore strategic nuclear stability with Moscow. American officials appear to be doing just that. Shortly after the release of the strategy, Hegseth said in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum that nuclear deterrence is the “foundation of our national defense” and reiterated the department’s commitment to modernizing its nuclear arsenal. Hegseth also acknowledged that the United States faces “two other major nuclear armed powers.” This statement is important and necessary because it demonstrates that Washington will continue its role in maintaining the global nuclear peace even as Beijing and Moscow invest heavily in nuclear weapons to undergird their imperialistic aims.

Congress, meanwhile, is pushing to maintain Washington’s forward troop deployments. Its just-released National Defense Authorization Act features provisions limiting troop reductions in Europe and South Korea. (The inclusion of the latter country is important and helps make up for the fact that North Korea receives no mention in the strategy document.) The House and Senate leadership understand how foolish it would be to withdraw American forces from allied countries while Russia refuses to agree to a cease-fire with Ukraine and is conducting hybrid operations in Europe, and as other authoritarian states meddle in their U.S.-aligned neighbors. Congress should ensure that Americans understand the nature and the scope of this authoritarian menace, too. Representatives should, for instance, explain to their constituents that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are a bloc, and that this bloc is confrontational and capable of inflicting substantial damage on the United States, American interests, and Washington’s partners.

Allies should not simply hope for a more conciliatory American president and hold off on making difficult but overdue decisions. They should get busy making themselves stronger—and therefore more valuable to the United States in the fight to stave off authoritarianism. As Trump’s new strategy makes clear, the U.S. government expects its allies to take on more of the military burden in defense of our shared interests. But despite its blunt criticisms of American partners, the new strategy does not write them off. And, ultimately, it reaffirms Washington’s many global commitments and the need for the United States to play a leading role in the world.

Topics & Regions: United States Europe Diplomacy Geopolitics Security U.S. Foreign Policy Donald Trump Administration U.S. Politics U.S.-Chinese