The United States faces two very different security challenges. The first is a challenge to the country’s status in the world: China is trying to elbow the United States aside in Asia, using a combination of military, economic, and cyber techniques; while Russia’s revanchist efforts in Eastern Europe and elsewhere seek to diminish U.S. influence, despite the fact that Russia is now substantially weaker than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War years. Russian President Vladimir Putin is far more willing than his predecessors to take chances in what he sees as his war against the West. Both the Russian and Chinese governments recognize that, by its existence as a free society, the United States is an inherent threat to their ability to rule. The other security challenge comes from an unstable Middle East and increasingly aggressive Islamic terrorists. The Middle East still supplies much of the world’s oil, and even a United States self-sufficient in energy is affected by the global oil market.
Against this background, in December 2017, President Donald Trump issued his first national security strategy, “America First.” The annual document, required by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, has been widely described as principled realism despite its title. The conflict between name and substance places the new policy firmly in the center of the United States’ historical struggle to reconcile its national interest in maintaining a stable international environment with its ideology promoting human rights and democracy.
At the end of the Cold War, the United States was the world’s undisputed superpower, and it seemed as if the crash of the Soviet Union foretold a world where free-market economics and intellectual freedom would prevail everywhere. The United States believed it could divert military spending to social, national, and global ends. The U.S. economy was so strong that leaders believed they could take economic risks, through free trade agreements, for instance, in the hope that ensuring prosperity abroad would also ensure peace in places like the Middle East.
The national security strategy recognizes both China and Russia as rivals—as opponents. Both the Chinese and Russian governments consider U.S. ideology a significant danger, which brings them together despite the real possibility that China might seek to detach much of Siberia from Russia. The document explicitly recognizes the Islamic terrorist threat to the West. In contrast to past U.S. thinking, this strategy does not suggest that economic growth in the Islamic world will solve the problem.
The central message of the new strategic document is that this time of wishful thinking has ended. To protect itself and its friends, the United States must look much more to its own military and economic strength. Too much has been given up for purposes that only made sense when the United State enjoyed uncontested supremacy. “America First” demands reforms of military procurement, in which complex rules frequently imposed for social or political purposes have made some acquisitions too expensive. There are estimates that place the cost of such regulations at a quarter or more of the cost of weapons. Procurement also is too slow. The nation’s main rivals find it difficult to change course once they begin projects—a problem that too often hampers the U.S. military and that must improve.
Unlike previous administrations’ national security strategies, the Trump administration’s makes U.S. economic strength central to security. It argues that to maintain that strength, the United States must negotiate terms of international trade in a far more tough-minded way. Disastrous manufacturing job losses caused in part by the structure of trade with China may have been a decisive factor in the election in many states. It can be argued that arrangements with China amount to a failed bet that U.S. manufacturing job losses would be offset by others created as China opened its markets. Chinese policy instead emphasized opening foreign markets, the U.S. market especially, without reciprocity. The implication of the administration’s choice of “America First” is that past presidents have focused too much on world politics and liberal trade and too little on the welfare of Americans.
The strategy document does not avoid the question of U.S. principles. The United States stands for societies that give preference to the rights of individuals rather than the state. “America First” argues that U.S. success demonstrates that this is the right way for countries to organize themselves. The Unites States will support allies who espouse our ideology and will stand with people who seek freedom. At the same time, there is much less of the Wilsonian ideal that the primary purpose of the United States is to spread liberation—to make the world “safe for democracy” by ceasing to tolerate authoritarian and totalitarian governments. As recent U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan show, U.S.-style democracy cannot simply be imposed. The document therefore justifies continuing operations in Afghanistan as a means of denying terrorists safe haven, rather than as a crusade to uproot cruel and grossly undemocratic elements of a traditional society.
The pragmatism of the document suggests that the country must understand that there are limits to how far the United States can advance its principles without exhausting its means. During the Cold War, the government sometimes found itself supporting odious dictatorships because they offered vital strategic advantages in the ongoing conflict with the Soviets. Today, the nation again must accept that the United States will support even undemocratic friends, such as Egypt, if realism demands it.
Realism also means the United States will cooperate with its rivals when useful or necessary—for example, when coordinating with Russia in airstrikes on ISIS in Syria or working with China regarding North Korea’s nuclear threat. Ideological purity would make any such cooperation obnoxious, but the document’s urging of pragmatism counsels collaboration, albeit cautiously. Putin badly wants to weaken the West and sees his arrangements in Iran and Syria as a way of attacking it; he may be thinking tactically, however. U.S. goals align, for now, with limited cooperation with one adversary, Russia, as a means of weakening another, Islamism.
In dealing with North Korea, the key to success is clearly China. Some critics have argued that by labeling China a rival the new strategy does not help secure cooperation. It would be absurd, however, for the document not to do so—the Chinese government makes no secret of its desire to replace the United States as the regional and perhaps global leader. How the strategy describes China is much less important than finding common reasons to stabilize Korea. There is certainly reason to suppose that the Chinese government regards the North Korean regime as dangerous to China.
“America First” omits discussion of a major U.S. advantage today, compared to during the Cold War. The West no longer faces an enemy espousing a hostile but attractive ideology, communism. The greatest Cold War threat was not so much a Soviet invasion of Europe but subversion of the West. China does not appear to pose any such threat. It is unlikely that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” will inspire non-Chinese people living in Asia, for example. They may be forced to accept Chinese dominance of East Asia at some point, but that is a different risk compared with the belief in an international socialist brotherhood that many Westerners held during the Cold War.
The omission of climate change from the strategy can be read as a belief that the international situation is of much more immediate risk to the United States. Climate change is a global fact but is not a security issue in the same way as a North Korean threat to incinerate U.S. cities or the Islamist goal of uniting Muslims to destroy the West. The administration’s view is that equating climate change with the threats from ISIS, Russia, or China is a luxury the United States no longer can enjoy.
Overall, the description of principled pragmatism is more informative than the actual 68-page national security strategy. To a considerable degree, the 2016 election was about whether the United States was comfortably ahead of other powers in the world or was declining because of poor or vain policy choices over the preceding decades. President Trump won the election in part by arguing that the United States was declining, and that he would reverse the downward slope. His first formal national security strategy seeks to change at least the perception of decline while limiting the use of power to goals that realistically can be achieved.