Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy
President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians.
President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians.
www.nytimes.com
“… The
document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
“For too long, delusion undergirded our foreign policy — delusion about America’s role in the world, delusion about our interests and delusion about what we can achieve through military force,” Mr. Caldwell said. “This is a reality-based document in that regard.”
The document codifies Mr. Trump’s well-established aversion to Europe’s liberal governments and his readiness to overlook human rights abuses, as with his
“things happen” remark last month about the murder and dismemberment of a Saudi Washington Post columnist in 2018….”