​Notional security: On the U.S.’s National Security Strategy Politics & News

The U.S. has released its first National Security Strategy (NSS) under the Trump second term, a document described as a road map to “ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come”. Washington has identified five top foreign policy priorities. These include the notion that the era of mass migration has ended, that core rights and liberties including the freedom of speech and religion need to be protected more than ever before, that the “days of the U.S. propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”, that the White House sees it as imperative to double down on shepherding peace deals across the world as a means to solidify U.S. influence abroad, and that economic security will be accorded highest importance in foreign policy. For the last pillar of national security, especially, the thrust of concerted foreign policy actions for the remainder of the second Trump administration will entail efforts towards achieving balanced trade, securing access to critical supply chains and materials, reindustrialisation of the U.S. economy, boosting American defence infrastructure, energy dominance, and supporting Wall Street to leverage the “dynamic free market system and our leadership in digital finance and innovation” worldwide.

While the grandiose terms of U.S. foreign policy priorities are unsurprising in their broad emphasis, other than, perhaps, the unrelenting subtext of eternal, unquestioned American exceptionalism, it is the broadside against European allies that is most troubling for the risk that it poses to regional stability across the continent. The NSS not only takes a patronising tone on Europe facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” owing to its purported economic decline, but it also faults Germany and EU countries with “unstable minority governments” whose policy actions do not apparently match their stated desire for peace in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Little wonder that Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul retorted that in the context of Germany, he did not believe that “questions of freedom of expression or the organisation of our free societies” belonged in the U.S. NSS and that his country did not need “outside advice”. While the NSS is a signpost to guide U.S. diplomats towards a united vision for Washington-defined foreign policy goals, its latest version has set the cat among pigeons so far as anxieties around NATO’s strength are concerned. If, as the NSS says, the U.S. intends to push a “burden-sharing network” to force all its allies to assume responsibility for stability in their regions, it might end up bolstering the sense of impunity with which autocrats worldwide flout territorial and human rights norms in their quest for power.