On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration published its (NSS). Below, Brookings scholars reflect on the document’s implications for U.S. foreign policy.
Scott R. Anderson
The disappearance of major power competition as a US foreign policy priority
The current Trump administration’s new national security strategy departs from the explicit focus on major power competition shared by its two predecessors. The first Trump and Biden administrations both framed China and Russia’s desire to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” as a leading foreign policy concern. China was a long-term “pacing challenge” in the competition for global influence, while Russia was an “acute threat” actively engaged in “subversion and aggression.”
By contrast, the new NSS does not expressly reference major power competition once. And it adopts a notably more conciliatory tone toward competitors, framing the challenge as “managing European relations with Russia” and working to “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China.” Meanwhile, it frames “the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations” as “a timeless truth of international relations,” which in turn leads the United States to “reject the ill-fated concept of global domination” in favor of “global and regional balances of power.” The implication is that the United States is less intent on strategic competition and more open to spheres of influence. This may be why—aside from an odd obsession with Europe’s “civilizational self-confidence”—the new NSS overwhelmingly focuses on the Western Hemisphere, trade, immigration, and other issues close to home.
On key issues like Taiwan and NATO, the NSS signals more short-term continuity than not. Moreover, a simple rhetorical shift may be a welcome corrective for those who fear that overemphasizing strategic competition risks unnecessary escalation. But the worldview underlying the new NSS appears to be quite a departure from what has guided U.S. foreign policy for the past decade. That may in turn portend more substantial changes down the road.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş
What would a counter-National Security Strategy look like?
There is a lot to digest in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy—from its needlessly offensive tone toward Europe to its astonishingly transparent desire to normalize relations with Russia. But instead of obsessing over this document, it is worth imagining what a post-Trump NSS might look like.
The world—and the intellectual climate—in which the Biden administration crafted the previous strategy document no longer exists.
Today, Washington has far less confidence in the assumptions that underpinned U.S. foreign policy for decades: the indisputable benefits of alliances, the virtues of globalization, and America’s role as an organizing power. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine have unfolded in ways that defied U.S. desires and weakened U.S. standing. Across the political spectrum, there is a mutiny against elites.
China is not losing the economic competition with the United States, and Washington’s efforts to build a “small yard with a big fence”—or impose strict export controls—appear to have backfired.
So, what would a future administration’s list of national security priorities look like? And how different—or similar—would it be from Trump’s?
Setting aside the current NSS’s far-right lecturing and animosity toward European allies, some of its elements stem from structural shifts that will outlast Trump. Any future “counter-NSS” would need to grapple with a geopolitical and domestic landscape defined by insecurity, rather than restore an earlier idea of American supremacy. It would need to acknowledge that U.S. leverage is limited and increasingly transactional; that great-power rivalry is intertwined with economic interdependence; and that the old architecture of American leadership has weakened, even among partners. It would need to address the question of immigration.
A future NSS—perhaps even under a Democratic administration—would likely retain some Trump-era themes: burden-shifting, criticism of global institutions, a narrower definition of U.S. interests, and the centrality of economic interests. It would likely be more familiar in tone, less confrontational toward Europe, and more reassuring to allies—perhaps casting alliances more as equal partnerships.
But it is hard to imagine returning to the Biden-era framing of U.S. leadership, the “democracy vs. autocracy” dichotomy, or to an ideological confrontation with China and Russia. American power would undoubtedly remain consequential, but it would have to be exercised with greater caution, economic realism, and a clearer sense of limits.
Pavel K. Baev
Russia is absolved but diminished
The European section of the unorthodox U.S. National Security Strategy 2025 must make for mostly enjoyable reading in Moscow. Russia’s responsibility for the aggression against Ukraine is omitted; instead, the Europeans are criticized for sabotaging the peace process. What must be disappointing for the Kremlin is that Russia’s role is reduced to waging the war, because of which “many Europeans” regard it as an “existential threat.” Russia’s ambition to be treated as a global power on par with the United States is frustrated, and the power factor underpinning this ambition—the strategic nuclear arsenal—is not mentioned at all.
During this autumn, President Vladimir Putin has put much effort into focusing the Russia-U.S. dialogue on matters of strategic stability, starting with the offer to extend the limitations set by the New START treaty for a year. The idea fell flat in Washington and only made an odd entry into the White House’s “28-point plan” with the proposition to “extend the validity” of the long-expired START I treaty. Putin still tried to harvest dividends from Russia’s massive investments into modernizing its strategic forces and announced tests of a nuclear-propelled cruise missile and an underwater vehicle. Trump responded with the order to resume nuclear testing, but when that misunderstanding was cleared, the NSS’s only reference to the importance of arms control is the assertion that Europe has “significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.” Putin will read this assumption as an invitation to push the nuclear brinksmanship even harder.
Vanda Felbab-Brown
A ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine
The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy reorients the United States toward the Western Hemisphere and reiterates the Monroe Doctrine and a “Trump Corollary” to it, essentially asserting a neo-imperialist presence in the region. Yet this conceptualization of U.S. interests and role—and a refusal to be apologetic for any past U.S. behavior—has long fed deep resentments against the United States and hampered its policies.
The strategy identifies three threats in the Western Hemisphere: migration, drugs and crime, and China. The Trump administration explicitly defines all migration, including much of it legal, as undesirable, seeing Latin America’s role as preventing the flows of any migrants into the United States. Although the NSS decries forever wars, its insistence that the United States can deploy the U.S. military for conducting strikes against “cartels” (not just criminal groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations) anywhere in the hemisphere (and eventually perhaps beyond it), unleashes a potentially true forever war. The assertion that the U.S. military can strike other countries also contradicts the strategy’s embrace of the sovereignty of nations.
The NSS strongly emphasizes the need to counter the multifaceted elements of China’s presence in the Western Hemisphere, such as pushing it out of Latin American ports and other critical infrastructure and limiting its economic engagement with the region. There is only limited recognition in the strategy that Latin American countries have a say.
And pointedly, the document ignores Canada, long a vital U.S. ally, even though the document elsewhere praises U.S. historic ties with Great Britain and Ireland. Along with Mexico, Canada is only mentioned as a place to limit trade with China.
Daniel S. Hamilton
A major transatlantic divide
Having helped craft several such documents in the past, I am acutely aware that they offer little operational guidance to foreign policy practitioners. They are less strategies than barometers of countervailing pressures within a particular administration. They are often cut-and-paste jobs; when different agencies fight to preserve their favored words, coherence goes out the window. They are also typically unmoored from any budgetary realities.
The 2025 National Security Strategy is but the latest example of these truths, despite its claim to be different. Bureaucratic infighting delayed its release for months. Priorities are not matched with resources. And the administration has eviscerated the foreign policy and national security machinery necessary to implement its approach. No foreign policy practitioner, starting with the president, is going to consult this document before taking a particular action.
These documents have value not because they present “strategy,” but because they offer observers some insight into how a particular administration wants to position itself with the public. Here, the new document is helpful, because it highlights where Trumpian ideology threatens to subvert U.S. national interests. “Mass migration” is deemed to be the major external threat to the United States—more than China, Russia, or terrorism. And the document’s often antiseptic prose veers off a cliff when it comes to Europe, which it claims is facing “civilizational erasure.” The document makes clear that the major transatlantic divide these days is not between the United States and Europe; it is between transatlantic liberals and transatlantic illiberals.
Kari Heerman
Economic policy discipline is the foundation of American strength
The 2025 National Security Strategy rightly asserts that “strength is the best deterrent,” and elevates economic vitality as central to that strength. But it underestimates how dynamic—and how fragile—America’s innovative economy, strong financial system, technological edge, and the soft power they generate truly are. That blind spot puts the broader strategy at risk.
America’s strengths are not permanent. They are the product of our ingenuity and policy discipline, and they can be degraded by our own decisions as easily as by external pressures like mercantilist overcapacity or security commitments. The greater danger comes from within: assuming today’s economic leverage will last indefinitely and overusing tools whose effectiveness depends on restraint.
Tariffs are a case in point. They play a role in strategic economic policy, but they can also strain alliances, undermine the dollar’s global reserve-currency status and the deep, liquid capital markets that underpin American financial strength, and raise the cost of doing business in an era where innovation is globally mobile. When the United States overplays its economic hand, other states adapt—building alternative supply chains, payment systems, and political alignments—that reduce their dependence on us, and with it, America’s long-term leverage. As the international order shifts, that leverage must remain durable over decades, not spent down for short-term gains.
If the United States expects these advantages to deliver the strategic outcomes the NSS envisions, it must recognize they are not guaranteed. Discipline in economic policy is not weakness; it is the foundation of American strength.
Mara Karlin
A full-scale repudiation of America’s approach to the world
The Trump administration deserves credit for issuing a national security strategy that honestly reflects its priorities. Unlike Trump’s first NSS in 2017, which masqueraded as a traditional approach to national security and foreign policy—and therefore was discordant with the administration’s actual policies and actions—the 2025 version makes crystal clear how the White House views the world.
The Western Hemisphere is the priority region and, in line with that, immigration is elevated to the major national security concern. The threat posed by China is viewed almost entirely through an economic lens; the most formidable state military threat to the United States since the end of the Cold War is barely mentioned. While there is some traditional language on Europe’s need to invest militarily and to stem overregulation, the real story is how the NSS targets Europe for allegedly losing its identity, another opportunity to highlight what is perceived as the threat posed by immigration. More broadly, America’s allies and partners—representing a network unparalleled by any other major power in world history—are seen as a net burden and judged wholly on how much money they spend on defense. Given these priorities, the U.S. military will focus largely on the Western Hemisphere, play a small role in Asia, and is mainly addressed in economic terms.
Having worked on the 2014 and 2022 National Security Strategies, I’ve found that these documents are often useful in outlining an administration’s theory of the case and, unlike national defense strategies, struggle to give resource guidance to departments or agencies. While its substance is noteworthy—a full-scale repudiation of America’s approach to the international community over the last 80 years or so—its inability to shape budgets is less so. In this way, the 2025 NSS is no exception.
Patricia M. Kim
A familiar Asia policy, an unfamiliar America
The 2025 NSS is a striking departure from past documents, less in its substance on Asia than in how its regional commitments sit within a markedly different global vision. The Indo-Pacific does not emerge as a focal point until nearly halfway through the document. Yet when it does, the language is largely familiar. The strategy commits the United States to “win the economic future, prevent military conflict,” and to compete vigorously in the region. It opposes unilateral changes to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, supports freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, endorses the Quad, and commits to working with allies and partners in the Global South. On China, it calls for rebalancing an unfair economic relationship toward a mutually advantageous one. Taken on their own, these positions largely track with the bipartisan mainstream of U.S. Indo-Pacific policy.
Notably, China is never named directly in the discussion of the Western Hemisphere, but there is little doubt that Beijing is the intended target when the document refers to “non-Hemispheric competitors” to be pushed out of the region. How this demand will be balanced against the stated priority of trade negotiations remains an open question.
What is unsettling is what surrounds this continuity. The document features Trump with unusual prominence, underscoring how much U.S. foreign policy now hinges on one mercurial leader. It elevates the Western Hemisphere as the dominant geographic priority and calls for a global military posture aligned to that objective—an orientation that sits uneasily with commitments to deter conflict and shape outcomes in the Indo-Pacific. The strategy advances a conception of alliances that explicitly calls for “burden-shifting,” not just “burden-sharing” with little acknowledgment of the core bargain that has long sustained U.S. alliances: credible American security guarantees in exchange for alignment.
The document’s harsh treatment of European allies will not go unnoticed in Asia. Nor will the assertion that international order ultimately rests on the rule of the “larger, richer, stronger”—a framing that appears to place Washington, Moscow, and Beijing within an exclusive tier of dominant powers and signals to others that their strategic agency is constrained.
A familiar Asia strategy now sits alongside a far more unsettling redefinition of U.S. global leadership.
Lynn Kuok
Neglecting international order and law threatens ‘America First’
The 2025 National Security Strategy differs from its predecessors not in placing America first, but in its narrower conception of what contributes to American national interests. It drops the premium the 2022 National Security Strategy placed on “international order” and the “rules-based international order” as the foundation for global—including U.S.—peace and prosperity. “International law,” an integral part of the rules-based international order, does not appear in the NSS, nor are there reassurances of U.S. “respect for international law.”
This omission has strategic consequences. Washington’s ability to rally allies and partners rests in part on its ability to frame its positions and actions as a defense of international law, rather than naked geopolitical rivalry. Nowhere is this clearer—or more consequential—than in the Indo-Pacific, where many states prefer disputes to be articulated in terms of international law rather than a choice between the United States and China.
Although NSS 2025 might suggest a deprioritization of the Indo-Pacific, it also highlights why such a shift would be untenable. It acknowledges that the region will remain among the “key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds” and that “to thrive at home, we must successfully compete there.” It recognizes that rebalancing the U.S.-China economic relationship must involve “robust and ongoing focus on deterrence,” including preventing conflict over Taiwan and keeping the South China Sea open and free.
What the strategy omits is that the Indo-Pacific is also important because the “rules of the road,” particularly those governing passage and freedoms of the seas, are being hotly contested there. Failing to shape these rules undermines U.S. national interests.
In conclusion, the failure to pay proper heed to the rules-based international order or to international law undermines the foundations of American power and ultimately weakens, rather than strengthens, “America First.”
Michael E. O’Hanlon
What the Trump NSS gets right
Predictably, there were several things that I did not like about the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, such as the treatment of immigration, the excoriation of Europe over the sense that it has somehow lost its traditional character and culture, and the occasional bombast and boasting.
But I liked a number of other things, perhaps more than expected:
- The writing style and pithiness of the document.
- The absence of any territorial claim to Greenland (or Canada).
- A “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that was not all wrong about wanting to weaken China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere.
- The endorsement of peacemaking around the world, even if Trump exaggerates his role in ending many conflicts.
- The careful choice of words about Taiwan.
- The goal of restoring strategic stability with Russia, someday.
- The general emphasis on greater allied military burden-sharing.
- The underscoring of the importance of American technological, industrial, and military prowess (even if I disagree with much of Trump’s sweeping use of tariffs).
Moreover, the document’s rhetorical shift toward a greater security emphasis on the Western Hemisphere does not foreshadow, as best I can tell, any major weakening or compromising of America’s commitment to allies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Stephanie K. Pell
Resilience demands protecting America’s communication networks
The 2025 National Security Strategy asserts that the Trump administration wants “a resilient national infrastructure that can … thwart foreign threats, and prevent or mitigate any events that might harm the American people or disrupt the American economy.” Protecting America’s communications networks from threat actors is certainly one element of maintaining a resilient national infrastructure. The 2024 Salt Typhoon intrusion, where China penetrated multiple U.S. telecommunications companies, is an all too recent example of the persistent vulnerabilities and threats plaguing U.S. networks.
The NSS highlights the need for ongoing relationships with the private sector for help in maintaining “surveillance of persistent threats to U.S. networks, including critical infrastructure,” which in turn facilitates “real-time discovery, attribution, and response (i.e., network defense and offensive cyber operations).” The strategy asserts that improving such capabilities “will also require considerable deregulation.” It is no surprise that a Trump administration strategy would generally lean upon industry partnerships and deregulation to facilitate its objectives. But scrutiny of the details of these relationships and the specific deregulatory actions sought is needed—particularly because the Trump administration has already taken a host of actions that undermine America’s cybersecurity posture. A new cyber strategy from the Trump administration, where such details may materialize, is said to be forthcoming. Stay tuned.
Steven Pifer
The Kremlin has reason to celebrate
When it comes to Russia, Trump’s new national security strategy amounts to a striking repudiation of … Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy.
The 2017 strategy noted the return of great power competition. It characterized Russia as a “revisionist” power that sought “to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” and “to weaken U.S. influence in the world.” Since then, Russia has launched the largest war that Europe has seen since 1945, conducted hybrid attacks against American allies, violated the New START treaty, loudly rattled its nuclear saber, and developed exotic new strategic nuclear weapons to strike America.
Yet, the president’s new strategy for Europe barely recognizes the challenges that Russia poses for the United States and U.S. interests. It calls for efforts to “reestablish … strategic stability with Russia” but focuses on “civilization erasure,” suggesting that the biggest threat confronting America in Europe is the European Union and its supposedly anti-democratic policies that could make the continent “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Moscow will find much to like in the document’s Europe section and indeed has welcomed the strategy as “largely consistent” with the Kremlin’s vision. The strategy takes at best a neutral stance between America’s traditional allies in Europe and Moscow, for example, saying that “managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement.” The Kremlin will celebrate the call for an end to NATO enlargement as well as the strong hint of a weakening of the U.S. commitment to Europe’s defense. The strategy’s priority of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” will be read as Washington’s intention to back the far-right, populist, “patriotic” parties that Moscow hopes will undermine European governments, who increasingly show determination to stand up to Russian aggression.
It is not hard to imagine Vladimir Putin’s pleasure.
Landry Signé
US-Africa ties amid China’s rise
The new U.S. national security strategy’s focus on economic engagement and critical minerals in U.S. engagement with Africa is a well-judged and necessary shift. While U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) flows in Africa briefly surged to $5.28 billion in 2023, surpassing China ($3.37 billion) for the first time in more than a decade, U.S. FDI flows became negative at –$2.0 billion in 2024 as China maintained a positive flow of $3.4 billion. Since 2009, China has outpaced the United States as Africa’s biggest trade partner, and its $296 billion in trade with the continent in 2024 was more than double the United States’ $104.9 billion.
This year, global trade wars have led to a surge of Chinese exports to Africa as Beijing redirects from global markets. At the same time, Africa’s trade surplus with the United States eroded from April to July this year to its lowest level since 2020. This reality and the strategy’s prioritization of critical minerals reinforce why trade and investment should be at the strategy’s center. The United States is completely import-dependent for 12 critical minerals and over 50% dependent for 28 others, while Africa holds 30% of global reserves.
Yet while the strategy’s economic pivot aligns with African priorities for deeper partnerships and greater private-sector engagement, the current approach, focused primarily on extractives, cannot achieve the administration’s own goals without a more comprehensive framework. To be truly effective at generating U.S. investment opportunities and outperforming global competitors, the United States would benefit from adopting a more comprehensive strategy, as I have outlined in the 4P framework, aligning prosperity, power, peace, and principles.
Melanie W. Sisson
Can Americans have more by doing less?
The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy arrived in Washington the way bankruptcy arrived for Ernest Hemingway’s Mike Campbell: “Gradually, and then suddenly.” Although the drafting of the NSS itself managed to evade the foreign policy establishment’s prying eyes, its implementation has been underway and unhidden for many months.
The NSS is nonetheless being received with dismay and confusion. Dismay at its treatment of European allies, most especially its aspersions that they have broken faith with the two continents’ shared cultural and “spiritual” heritage. And confusion that it does not focus first and foremost on great power competition.
Neither feature of the strategy, however, is surprising. In foreign policy, “America First” is about nothing if not the belief that the post-World War II international order, in which the United States went to great lengths to maintain a close transatlantic relationship and to compete militarily with rival powers, has been bad for America. That it has caused the United States to do too much, for too long, in too many places, and that serving U.S. interests means pivoting to America: freeing it from unfair terms of trade imposed by multilateral institutions; protecting and defending itself; demonstrating America’s military sophistication without committing itself to long-term objectives; and otherwise leaving the politics of other regions to other regions.
The NSS is therefore less an announcement than an explanation. And in that, it is very effective: clear, consumable, and confident in its vision of an America that can have more by doing less.
Constanze Stelzenmüller
The language of tyranny
Just before the publication of the 2025 National Security Strategy, transatlantic relations had briefly achieved—at least from a European point of view—a queasy equilibrium. Faced with a year-long barrage of criticism (some of it legitimate) from the Trump administration on security, trade, and the state of their own democracies, Europeans had promised to increase defense spending, buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine, build up their own defense industries, and lay the groundwork for shifting the burden of their defense to Europe. They had forsworn the use of countermeasures against U.S. tariffs, and they had cajoled and flattered, glossing over the disdain and antipathy they encountered. In short, they hoped they were buying not just arms but time and, in due course, respect.
The NSS’s chapter on Europe makes it clear that these calculations were misplaced. The Trump administration’s policy toward America’s partners on the other side of the Atlantic is ideological rather than transactional; revisionist rather than restrained. The document points to the “patriotic European parties”—a reference to the hard right as represented by France’s National Rally, the United Kingdom’s Reform party, and the Alternative for Germany—as America’s real allies in Europe. Its stated goal of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” amounts to a policy of constitutional regime change. Over the weekend, a barrage of hostile social media posts, including by senior U.S. diplomats, threatened the breakup of the transatlantic military alliance if the European Union continued to “pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”
To state a truth that should be self-evident: that is no way to speak to allies. An earlier age would have recognized it as the language of tyranny.
Caitlin Talmadge
Foreign policy incoherence on full display
Nothing is substantively surprising in this document—the ethno-nationalism, militarism, xenophobia, transactionalism, and mercantilism are all totally familiar to anyone who has been awake since 2016. Still, the document’s admirable clarity and concision on these themes bring the hypocrisy and internal contradictions of the administration’s worldview into sharp relief.
The strategy touts Trump as “The President of Peace,” even as he has ordered illegal and unnecessary military operations against civilian drug traffickers in the Caribbean. It warns against the dangers of “fruitless ‘nation-building’ wars,” even as the president toys with launching a regime change campaign in Venezuela. And the document repeatedly harps on the importance of sovereignty, even as the administration seems eager to reward Russia for brutally violating that principle in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Amazingly, the document informs us that “all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights,” a notable contrast with the administration’s cruel treatment of immigrants and decision to dramatically curtail refugee admissions. It loftily proclaims the need to preserve “America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense, and innovation,” which will be difficult given the administration’s decision to gut billions in research funding affecting all of these areas. The cherry on top is the anti-DEI lecture on the importance of “competence and merit” from the employer of Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel.
This document does not present a coherent strategy for securing the United States, but it reveals plenty about the hollowness of the administration’s ideology.
Tara Varma
Europe must prepare for what’s coming
The second Trump administration’s consistent, regular attacks on the European Union are now ideologically articulated in the 2025 National Security Strategy. The NSS claims to elaborate a Monroe Doctrine, fit for the 21st century, i.e., a policy of isolation and a willingness to keep out of Europe. Except that Europe seems to be the NSS’s main focus, in contradiction to a supposed new Monroe Doctrine.
Indeed, a clear plan for subversion in Europe is laid out in the NSS. The word “Europe” is mentioned 48 times in the NSS, demonstrating an evident interest in the continent’s future. But that interest does not extend to the foundations of the transatlantic alliance—namely, fostering liberal democracies and open societies on both sides of the Atlantic. The administration’s support for such foundations is now conditioned on full ideological alignment across the Atlantic.
A whole section of the NSS is dedicated to “Promoting European Greatness.” It states that Europe’s problems are “deeper” than “insufficient military spending and economic stagnation.” The administration defines that problem as a risk of “civilizational erasure.” This follows directly from Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, as well as a publication on the State Department’s Substack stating why the U.S. needed civilizational allies in Western Europe. We had identified the possibility of cooperation between the second Trump administration and like-minded parties and governments in Europe as a potential “alliance of revisionists,” whose main goal would be to dismantle the European Union’s institutions. Europe must now prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.
Valerie Wirtschafter
A ‘Trump Corollary’ will work against US policy
For decades, Latin America watchers have emphasized the region’s centrality for domestic politics across the United States and for peace and prosperity in the Western Hemisphere writ large. It is certainly past time for the United States to pay more attention to the region, and it is unsurprising that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “America First” foreign policy apparatus would be the one to more prominently center Latin America and even include it first among regional approaches. The challenges identified in the strategy—violence, migration, and regional economic growth—are even reasonable and expected, though the tactics for addressing them will likely find mixed success.
It is particularly welcome to see the administration explicitly move beyond partnership with countries whose leaders are ideologically aligned with the president. Such an acknowledgment will create space for productive relationships with Mexico and Brazil, which will be vital contributors to any successful hemispheric approach. However, the overarching framework of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is unnecessary and counterproductive to improving the United States’ positioning in the region. The history of U.S. intervention runs deep and has left a bitter legacy, even contributing to some of the challenges this strategy is trying to address. In a region where the United States’ foreign policy approach has been fraught (or altogether lacking) for decades, why is it necessary to look to the past?
Andrew Yeo
The myth of restraint
The second Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy reflects a nativist vision of American foreign policy purportedly driven by a more “focused definition” of the national interest. Critiquing past strategies as “hugely misguided” in its global overreach, the Trump administration states the new NSS as a “necessary, welcome correction” that narrows priorities to only “core, vital national interests.”
Although the NSS describes Trump’s foreign policy as “pragmatic,” “realistic,” “principled,” and “restrained,” the strategy instead conveys the opposite: a vision of U.S. primacy and global dominance that remains as expansive as liberal internationalism (only less liberal and with a harder edge).
For example, the NSS states, “We want to recruit, train, equip, and field the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military to protect our interests, deter wars, and—if necessary—win them quickly and decisively.” It also asserts, “No adversary or danger should be able to hold America at risk,” opening the door to massive defense spending, including the development of the Golden Dome. The NSS further calls for “realignment through peace —seeking peace deals at the President’s direction, even in regions and countries peripheral to our immediate core interests … to increase stability, strengthen America’s global influence, realign countries and regions toward our interests, and open new markets.”
There are elements of Trump’s NSS that offer sensible adjustments to U.S. strategy, such as pressing allies to assume greater defense burdens, promoting economic security, and investing in emerging technologies and basic science, to name a few. But Trump’s “America First” strategy, which seeks to limit America’s role in the world to core national objectives and avoid “forever global burdens,” appears contradictory and paradoxically expansive.
The Brookings Institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact.
We are supported by a diverse array of funders. In line with our values and policies, each Brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s).
