US National Security Strategies: Trump Pushes Hard-Power Global Primacy, Overt Racism in Foreign Policy

The publication of Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) on December 4, if fully carried through by the current and future administrations of both parties (and that’s a big ‘if’) reads like an obituary for the post-1945 US-led liberal international order. That order was never genuinely liberal, truly international, or that orderly – especially in regard to the Third World. It was an American racialised-imperial project dressed in the language of universal values, multilateral institutions, and free markets. Forged by Anglo-American elites through philanthropic foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Bretton Woods bodies, underpinned by a military-industrial complex, it secured US primacy for the United States while perpetuating global hierarchies of race, wealth, and power.

Yet, even with their limitations, many of those international institutions enabled voice for the global majority and postcolonial states, a measure of accountability of the powerful to international tribunals and courts, established a framework for the rule of law in principle, forums for discussion and peaceful settlement of disputes. These institutions, however, attenuated they were in practice due to the interests of the great powers, were built on the graves of tens of millions killed in World War II in the struggle against fascism and genocide, and for democratic rights.

Today, Trump is not merely adjusting course; he appears to be dismantling the non-military-security institutional scaffolding, and putting overt racism at the heart of US foreign policy. Trump is radical in shifting the methodology of empire – the instruments by which US hegemony is to be maintained – almost completely away from peaceful diplomacy towards unfettered coercion. The goal of US global supremacy remains intact.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ internationalist crowd – sober as it usually is – appears to be in collective shock. This is less because they are deeply wedded to democratic accountability etc. They have been complicit in supporting the hollowing out of the international institutions over decades, especially as postcolonial states and the Global South emerged as more assertive in world politics and economy. The CFR’s preferred methodology of empire favours a mixture of soft, hard and smart power – the hangman and the priest. Trump is removing what’s left of American moral authority – the idealistic core of American exceptionalism. That approach built the American century.

Hence, CFR’s liberal internationalists call NSS2025 a “radical departure”. For them, the latest NSS wrongly proclaims a new Monroe-style doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, dismisses Europe, soft-pedals the China challenge, and treats Russia as a potential partner. Democracy promotion and human-rights conditionality – effective covers for US imperium – are abandoned outright. CFR experts claim the strategy codifies “isolationist” retrenchment, risks fracturing NATO, invites Russian and Chinese gains, and leaves the United States disengaged from critical regions and “threats” (Iran, North Korea, climate change, pandemics).

In the CFR’s view, the shift from the globally competitive 2017 NSS document to the inward-looking, transactional 2025 version marks a deliberate American retreat from “leadership” – hegemony – and promotes domination - threatening the liberal international order the Council built and has long sought to sustain.

MAGA-Trump schisms revealed in NSS2025

But NSS2025 also reveals an additional schism in the foreign policy establishment. There is an intramural scrimmage within the GOP and the Trump administration. The CFR positions remain powerful within the national security establishment, even now.

The new NSS was largely written to codify MAGA-Trumpism by Michael Anton, MAGA’s Machiavelli. The former Trump speechwriter, author of the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay, and briefly the 33rd Director of Policy Planning at the State Department had spent the first eight months of the second Trump term attempting to translate his long-standing critique of liberal internationalism into official policy. Yet the text that finally emerged was a battle-scarred compromise. The NSS therefore stands less as a triumph of Antonite nationalism than as documentary evidence of the continuing civil war inside Trump’s foreign policy apparatus.

The original Anton draft was reportedly even more radical. It contained an explicit proposal for a spheres-of-influence understanding with Moscow: Washington would accept a Russian zone of primary influence in the former Soviet space in exchange for Russian acquiescence to unchallenged American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. One passage, later removed, reportedly likened the continued American security guarantee to an ailing Europe suffering from “civilisational exhaustion and demographic collapse” to a healthy man volunteering to carry a dying patient on his back forever. The draft also framed NATO’s post-Cold War expansion as one of the principal strategic errors of the post-1991 era and suggested that the alliance’s European members had forfeited moral legitimacy through mass immigration and the erosion of national identity.

Also read: Trump’s 2025 NSS Maps an ‘America First’ Order, Taking Aim at Europe and Downgrading India’s Strategic Role

The most consequential intervention contra Anton came from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Reportedly, Bessent – the former Soros Fund macro investor who had become the administration’s point man on trade negotiations with Beijing – insisted on wholesale revisions to the China sections. Anton’s draft had branded the Chinese Communist Party an existential threat across every domain and called for the immediate on-shoring of all critical supply chains by 2030. Bessent, determined to preserve negotiating leverage in ongoing tariff-and-debt talks, forced the language to be softened to the bland formula that China remains the “pacing challenge” but that the United States seeks “managed competition and selective decoupling.” The final text still lists Beijing as an adversary but the confrontational edge is gone.

A parallel editing war was fought over Russia and Ukraine. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – both more conventionally hawkish on Moscow than Anton – successfully resisted any explicit endorsement of territorial concessions or formal spheres of influence. The published NSS retreats to the position that the conflict in Ukraine is primarily Europe’s problem, a formulation that enraged Brussels and Kyiv without crossing the red line of outright partition that Anton had favoured.

These compromises reveal the structural weakness of the pure “America First” faction. Despite the online enthusiasm of MAGA intellectuals, Anton never controlled the commanding heights of the national-security bureaucracy. His nine months at State were spent largely fending off attempts to marginalise the Policy Planning Staff and to filling key positions with figures more attuned to the president’s television habits than to grand-strategic debate.

But the racist and civilisational references peppered throughout NSS 2025 appear to enthuse and unify the various MAGA factions.

Racism as National Security Strategy

The 2025 National Security Strategy is shot through with an unveiled racial subtext that would have been unthinkable in any previous U.S. administration document. Migration across the southern border is no longer framed as an economic or humanitarian issue but as an existential “invasion” that “dilutes” and “erodes” American national character. Europe’s “civilisational decline” is explicitly tied to “uncontrolled mass migration” and collapsing native (White) birth rates – classic white-nationalist tropes repackaged as strategic analysis. The text mourns the loss of “homogeneous” societies that supposedly bred cohesion and strength, implying that racial and cultural mixing equals weakness, strife, and eventual collapse. The NSS explicitly aims at defence of the “Anglosphere” – the white English-speaking colonial settler states established by the British empire.

Latin American migrants are reduced to vectors of crime, drugs, and gang warfare, while Chinese investment in the hemisphere is condemned for exploiting “weak” (i.e., non-white) governance. The document’s nostalgia for a mythical, mono-ethnic America and its panic over demographic change echo the “great replacement” narrative once confined to the far-right fringe.

By elevating these ideas to the level of official national-security doctrine, the NSS normalises an openly racialised worldview: people of colour and certain other minorities threaten civilisation itself simply by existing and moving. This is not subtle dog-whistling; it is the whistle blown at full volume, with the full authority of the American state.

NSS, 2017, 2022, 2025

So, how do Trump’s 2017 and 2025 National Security Strategies compare with one another and with Joe Biden’s 2022 document? I identify significant continuities in American exceptionalism as a legitimation strategy for US power, highlight sharp changes in global posture, and locate all three within a transforming world order and a deepening domestic crisis of authority. What emerges is a tentative forecast for 2026 and beyond: possibilities of accelerated US (selective) retrenchment, a more fragmented international landscape and, ironically, the faint possibility of a more plural global future – if American elites can finally abandon their imperial illusions (don’t hold your breath).

But the latest NSS, significant though it clearly is, is a radical methodological shift towards more frequent but selective and limited militarism in the maintenance of US global primacy, not the latter’s abandonment. Its radicalism lies mainly in its methods rather than its ultimate goals.

Trump 2017: “America First” as masked continuity

The 2017 NSS, released one year into Trump’s first term, was presented as a radical break from Obama-era multilateralism. In reality, it retained the core architecture of US grand strategy. Organised around four pillars – protect the homeland, promote American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, and advance American influence – it explicitly named China and Russia as “revisionist powers” intent on shaping “a world antithetical to US values and interests”. Economic nationalism was foregrounded: withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, demands for bilateral trade deals, and “fair burden-sharing” in alliances. Yet the document still called for a rebuilt military capable of global power projection and retained the traditional language of American leadership in every region. “Principled realism” was the new slogan, but the underlying assumption remained that the United States must police the world to protect its own primacy.

Biden 2022: Liberal internationalism’s rearguard action

Biden’s October 2022 NSS was written in the shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It sought to reassert the moral and strategic centrality of the liberal order, in some instances more rhetorically than practically. China was labelled “the most consequential geopolitical challenge” and the only competitor “with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it”. Russia was an “immediate threat”. Climate change, pandemics, and food insecurity were elevated to core national-security concerns. The strategy promised “integrated deterrence”, massive domestic industrial investment (CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act), and the revitalisation of alliances – NATO, the Quad, AUKUS. Democracy versus autocracy became the organising binary. In practice, this looked like a desperate attempt to glue together a cracking order by doubling down on coalition-building and selective multilateralism while quietly accepting that the era of unquestioned US dominance was over.

Trump 2025: From global hegemon to hemispheric fortress

The 2025 document is only around 30 pages long – barely half the length of its predecessors – and its tone is unrecognisable. The language of great-power competition has almost vanished. The central preoccupation is now the US southern border, described as “the primary element of national security”: racism is the answer to this threat. A new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is proclaimed, asserting the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive US sphere where migration, cartels, and Chinese influence will be met, if necessary, with lethal military force.

Also read: Trump Administration’s New NSS Downplays India's Leadership Role Compared to Past Decade

Troops are to be redeployed from the Middle East and Europe to the Americas. Europe itself is (almost) dismissed as being in “civilisational decline” because of mass migration and collapsing birth rates; the United States will no longer subsidise its defence but will instead “cultivate resistance” to supranational EU institutions. Russia is repositioned as a potential partner for “strategic stability” and a negotiated end to the Ukraine war. China is no longer a systemic rival but a trading partner with whom “mutually advantageous” arrangements and “managed competition” are possible and necessary, provided Beijing accepts US red lines on Taiwan and the hemisphere.

Democracy promotion, human-rights conditionality, and nation-building are explicitly abandoned: the United States, it is claimed, will no longer seek to impose its social model on others. Foreign policy is reduced to a support function for domestic economic growth and border security. In the middle of all this hard talk, bizarrely, the Strategy extols the virtues of American “soft power” – the world’s greatest nation, most generous benefactor in history to the world. America’s soft power lies in proclaiming from the rooftops its “inherent greatness and decency”.

This is not a definition of soft power that is recognisable to anyone familiar with the term. Its author, Professor Joseph Nye, must be turning in his grave.

Continuities: The imperial DNA persists

Despite the rhetorical whiplash, certain constants bind all three documents:

• Military modernisation and the willingness to use force remain non-negotiable.
• China is the pacing challenge in every strategy, even when the tone shifts from confrontation to wary accommodation.
• Alliances are treated as instruments rather than ends in themselves – burden-sharing demands appear under Trump I, Biden, and Trump II alike.
• Each NSS links external strategy to domestic renewal, acknowledging that sustained global power requires a functioning industrial base and a minimally cohesive society at home.
• American exceptionalism survives intact: the United States is still presented as uniquely virtuous, even when it retreats from policing the world.

These continuities reveal the stubborn resilience of the national-security state created in 1947 and the enduring elite belief that US primacy – however defined – is indispensable to global order.

Changes: The retreat from universalism

The shifts, however, are methodologically and rhetorically radical. The 2017 strategy was hawkish and global; 2025 is hawkish and hemispheric, with coercive power extended globally through episodic/selective military strikes rather than long-term occupations. Biden’s brief liberal-internationalist restoration now looks like an aberration. The United States is moving from reluctant world policeman to regional sheriff concerned above all with its own neighbourhood and its own profits. Values-based foreign policy has been replaced by transactional deal-making.

The Global South, barely mentioned in 2025, is implicitly written off as an arena of secondary importance. The Africa section of the NSS relegates the fastest-growing continent to the very end of the document. Europe, it is lamented, is no longer a privileged partner but a declining continent to be restored by tough love, stepping up militarily, and rescued by the rise of the far right across the continent.

This is not isolationism; it is selective retrenchment combined with aggressive assertion of sphere-of-influence logic in the Americas – the very logic Washington has long denied to others, and a continuing global military strategy. Note that NATO, AUKUS, the Quad, and the security treaties with Japan and South Korea remain core to NSS 2025.

We are witnessing the codification of a deep trend: the full spectrum weaponisation of all aspects of the American imperium to extract as much value from the rest of the world as possible.

A changing world order and American attitudes

The three security strategies also mirror America’s evolving reaction to multipolarity. The 2017 NSS reflected anxiety about relative decline and a determination to push back. Biden’s 2022 document embodied a liberal elite’s hope that coalitions and rules could still restore primacy. The 2025 strategy accepts that the unipolar moment is gone and concludes that the costs of upholding the old order outweigh the benefits. “Permanent American [world] domination,” it declares, is “not in the US national interest” – a remarkable admission from the state that spent eight decades insisting the opposite.

This shift aligns, ironically, with long-standing grievances of the Global South: resentment of double standards, endless wars, and a “rules-based order” that seemed to mean rules for everyone except the United States. Trump is weaponising those grievances from within the citadel itself.

Domestic crisis of legitimacy

No external strategy can be understood in isolation from America’s internal decay. Neoliberal globalisation – the economic core of the liberal order – produced extreme inequality, deindustrialisation, and cultural alienation. Median real wages have barely grown since the 1970s while the billionaire class multiplied its wealth. The Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos, the 2008 financial crisis, and the mishandling of COVID-19 shattered trust in government among large sections of the population. Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories were symptoms, not causes, of this crisis.

The 2025 NSS responds by turning inward: borders, cartels, and “internal subversion” (bureaucrats, universities, media) are framed as greater threats than any foreign power. Executive defiance of courts, mass deportations, and loyalty purges in the national-security apparatus are eroding the rule of law and institutional neutrality that once underpinned American soft power. The United States is beginning to resemble the “illiberal democracies” it used to lecture.

What 2026 and beyond will look like in practice

The trajectory, if followed through, looks clear. Hemispheric militarisation risks new quagmires – Venezuela and Central America as Trump’s Vietnam? Alienating Europe could accelerate NATO’s hollowing-out and embolden Russia. A softer line on China may yield short-term trade gains but will almost certainly mean conceding technological and maritime dominance in Asia. At home, prolonged economic pain from tariffs and deportations, combined with institutional sabotage, could provoke serious unrest or a further lurch toward authoritarianism and repression. Racism is the preferred policy here: it works.

Yet retrenchment also opens space. A United States less fixated on global policing creates room for genuine multipolarity. BRICS, the African Union, ASEAN, and middle powers such as India, Brazil, and Indonesia could advance alternative institutions and norms. Climate cooperation, debt relief, and technology governance may proceed faster without Washington’s veto. As Amitav Acharya has shown in his recent book, the end of the American century need not mean automatic chaos; it can mean a more plural, perhaps less hypocritical world – if the rising powers’ (elites) learn the right lessons from the falling hegemon’s mistakes.

The liberal international order is dying, and Donald Trump is holding a pillow over its face. Whether what comes next is a fragmented jungle or a patchy but more equitable garden may depend less on Washington than on everyone else. For the first time in a century, the future is not necessarily America’s to write.

But any reports of the death of the American empire are probably premature.

Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil, its leading association for study of the United States. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.

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