Image: Painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)
In the United States, the Goldwater-Nicols Act of 1986 requires that each new Administration produces a National Security Strategy (NSS) followed by a National Defense Strategy (NDS). The NSS is intended to communicate the Executive’s strategic vision to Congress, foreign constituencies, and domestic audiences; and to build a consensus on foreign and defence policy within the Executive branch. Trump’s forthcoming National Security Strategy (NSS) will be far from the traditional product.
Trump’s first NSS in 2017 was a relatively tepid prologue to what will be a far more forceful explication of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda. Trump’s NSS will likely document a fundamental shift in America’s approach to international policy from that of recent presidents. Although his UN General Assembly (UNGA) address on 23 September 2025 wasn’t a rehearsal of the NSS, it did point to the embrace of older forms of nativism and romantic nationalism. The nationalism and nativism, already present in 2017, will be less restrained this time around.
In 2017, the NSS asserted that “peace, security, and prosperity depend on strong, sovereign nations that respect their citizens at home and cooperate to advance peace abroad”. Not too far from President Biden’s view that America’s “alliances and partnerships around the world are our most important strategic asset and an indispensable element contributing to international peace and stability”. That language has disappeared.
The first Trump NSS said the Administration would “strengthen control of our borders and reform our immigration system”. At the UN, Trump ramped up the nativist rhetoric with ”Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before with different customs, religions, with different everything”. He told the gathered international leaders, “Your countries are going to hell”.
Biden boasted before the General Assembly in 2024 that “My country made the largest investment in climate, clean energy ever anywhere in history”. Trump, in the 2017 NSS, acknowledged that ”Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system”. Back then, Trump had already rejected the “anti-growth energy agenda”. However, the 2017 NSS still conceded that “the United States will remain a global leader in reducing traditional pollution, as well as greenhouse gases”.
The reversal we are seeing now is dramatic.
Trump declared at UNGA that “the high cost of so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet”. This, in Trump’s view, is “All in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax” – perpetrated, he maintains, by “The entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies”. This “must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate.”
Trump’s hostility towards the United Nations was more pronounced than in 2017. He told the General Assembly that “Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should — too often, it’s actually creating new problems for us to solve”. He highlighted in particular, “the number one political issue of our time: the crisis of uncontrolled migration. It’s uncontrolled. Your countries are being ruined”.
On return to the presidency, Trump has regularly exhibited much stronger positions on immigration and in relation to global warming related energy policies. But it is Trump’s approach to alliance management and strategic policy that will be most eagerly awaited.
Unlike Biden’s NSS, Trump obviously won’t see that “The Indo-Pacific is the epicentre of the climate crisis”, as he regards global warming as a hoax. However, the bigger strategic question is whether Trump will follow Biden and “reaffirm [America’s] iron-clad commitments to our Indo-Pacific treaty allies” and “continue to modernise these alliances”. In 2017, Trump adhered to a traditional line saying the “US allies are critical in responding to mutual threats … and preserving our mutual interests in the Indo-Pacific region”. Now Trump conceives of the international environment and the value of permanent alliances very differently.
Trump’s address to the General Assembly contained a number of pointers. NATO was the only alliance referenced, and then only in relation to how much the Europeans spend on defence, and not in the context of shared strategic objectives or mutual goals. The absence of any mention of the Indo-Pacific, a central concept in recent strategic documents, is informative. In 2024, Biden maintained that America was “going to continue to strengthen our network of alliances and partnerships across the Indo-Pacific”. This sense of America’s leadership in the region or reliance on alliances was totally absent from Trump’s UNGA address.
Trump has assertively put nation above all else. His address evoked an older, mystical version of the nation. He talked of “the leaders and legends, generals and giants, heroes and titans who won and built our beloved nations, all of our nations, with their own courage, strength, spirit, and skill”, of “soldiers and farmers and workers and warriors and explorers and patriots”, ancestors who “defended with pride, with sweat, with blood, with life, and with death”. Not quite the ‘sturm and drang” of the anti-rationalism reaction to the Enlightenment of Goethe and Schiller. Or the “blood and soil” cry of the extreme right. But with intimations of both.
His phrases ring with myth-laden nationalism and defensive nativism. The heroes and founders bravely “showed us the way”, and “gave everything for homelands”. They forged “national identities”, and charged today’s leaders with the “righteous task of protecting the nations”, and to “preserve their cultures, treasure, and traditions”. Echoes here of 19th century romantic nationalist myth-making. It is an appeal to the imagination and the emotions, not cognition. That a group shares a common ethnocultural foundation is not as important as believing that they do. Not an understanding of nations as modern, multicultural, contingent, and invented, but a revival of the belief that nations are ancient and natural.
Trump’s NSS won’t see America pursue multi-lateralism, alliance solidarity, or liberal internationalism and the rules-based order. His is a rallying cry for autarky and self interest. For all against all.
Copyright Mike Scrafton. This article may be reproduced under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence for non-commercial purposes, and providing that work is not altered, only redistributed, and the original author is credited. Please see the Cross-post and re-use policy for more information.