A draft of a new National Defense Strategy envisions a smaller, weaker, more self-conscious America.
I n his second term, Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy has departed from the vision he and his interpreters promoted on the campaign trail.
The president entered office promising to confront China and tie up America’s loose ends in Europe to facilitate the rebalancing of its commitments from the continent. So far, he has largely avoided the former while failing at the latter — an unsurprising outcome that has so far mirrored Barack Obama’s failure in pursuit of that same goal. Trump, who had long mouthed the Jacksonian platitudes his advisers wrote for him about the undesirability of “international unions that tie us up and bring America down,” evinced none of that skepticism when conducting strikes on Iran’s nuclear program alongside Israel. Indeed, only the truest of true believers in the effort to create an intellectual framework around populist isolationism seemed to care that Trump betrayed his own credo.
From Trump’s fraught attempt to revise the global trade regime via tariffs to his commendable diplomatic endeavors, we can say a lot about the president’s foreign policy vision. What we cannot say is that he is disengaged with the world as it is. That must frustrate mid-level functionaries at the Pentagon to no end. Otherwise, they would not be freelancing a policy of American global retrenchment designed, it seems, to force the president to pursue a McGovernite policy that puts the United States in retreat.
Trump’s legally dubious and strategically questionable air strike on what the administration insists was a drug boat originating in Venezuela was no mere tactical escalation in America’s now-literal war on drugs. Nor is the buildup of American military assets in the Caribbean some flight of fancy. According to Politico, the Pentagon is shifting its priorities away from the preservation of the U.S.-led global order in places like Europe or the Western Pacific. A draft of a new National Defense Strategy envisions a smaller, weaker, more self-conscious America that cedes spheres of influences to America’s competitors abroad — a gift they could not secure for themselves through force or coercion.
“The new strategy would largely overturn the focus of the first Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which placed deterring China at the forefront of the Pentagon’s efforts,” Politico reported. Instead, the Pentagon would “prioritize protecting the homeland and the Western Hemisphere.”
Many of the Republican officials with whom Politico reporters spoke expressed bewilderment over the extent to which this document does not seem to reflect the president’s thinking or priorities in relation to America’s interests abroad. It does, however, reflect the thinking of Pentagon officials like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby.
“Colby’s policy team is also responsible for a forthcoming global posture review,” Politico observed. “Colby aligns with Vice President JD Vance on the desire to disentangle the U.S. from foreign commitments.” For his part, Vance adopted a maximally demagogic posture over the weekend, even for him, in social media posts that coincided with Politico’s report. “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” he wrote. “Democrats: let’s send your kids to die in Russia,” the American vice president continued. “Republicans: actually let’s protect our people from the scum of the earth.” That’s just the sort of table-pounding that is designed to, if not win arguments, at least stifle them.
We don’t know the extent to which the Colby-Vance faction is taking an entrepreneurial approach to American foreign policy, if their views reflect Trump’s, or if the president cares about any of this. But this isn’t first scandal that Colby’s initiative-taking imposed on the administration he serves. Most recently, the undersecretary spearheaded a push to end the Pentagon’s Baltic Security Initiative — a congressionally authorized program that provides security assistance to the most vulnerable NATO allies on Russia’s borders. If that effort comports with Donald Trump’s wishes, it’s not clear how, given his very public openness to and support for a European expeditionary force inside Ukraine that would, with U.S. backing, preserve the peace in a postwar environment.
We should by now have enough intellectual honesty to conclude that Vance is merely using the principles shared by those who believe America has a vital role to play on the world stage against their genuine adherents. Before it was Venezuelan drug gangs, it was the Chinese Communist Party. The threat posed by Beijing, serious people like Colby and Vance insisted, was such that America had to cede its interests and obligations in places like Europe and the Middle East to forces we could no longer afford to contain. But the Trump administration is not confronting China — not, at least, remotely approaching the degree the president and his allies advertised in 2024. We might determine, therefore, that the blunt instrument represented by the “China threat” was merely the nearest weapon to the populists’ hands.
If the pro-retrenchment right’s goal is to withdraw to an American sphere of influence in the West and foment the reestablishment of similar spheres abroad, we can make similar assumptions about the kinetic phase of this administration’s approach to America’s tempestuous relations with Latin and South American states.
Those who think the Pax Americana this generation of Americans merely inherited is a fact of life that requires little tending or maintenance will doubtless agree with Vance. Keeping Americans safe is what the military is for, and what better use of U.S. might than neutralizing the dealers who satisfy Americans’ demand for intoxicants? One riposte to that barstool conception of American strategic interests abroad would be to remind Americans that the U.S. maintains a big military to deter powerful actors from starting big wars.
That is why we, in concert with our allies and partners, maintain our defensive capabilities. And if American commitments look less reliable, America’s partners will conclude that they’re better served by cutting deals with the bullies in their regions rather than balancing against them alongside a deeply insecure America that cares little for conflicts thousands of miles from its shores.
That argument seems unconvincing to the populist theorists in the Pentagon. When its officials deign to address them, they argue that the United States is a spent force. What can you do? But America’s partners and allies abroad do not yet feel that way. Not yet, at least. But this outlook could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If implemented as reported, the new National Defense Strategy document would go a long way toward making the world a safer place for America’s enemies.