Three months ago, on December 4, 2025, the Trump Administration released an extraordinary document called the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Although it shocked foreign policy circles here, and general readers in Europe, the Strategy has generated surprisingly little interest in the United States. And yet, when read for what it actually says—without trying to correct, adjust, or limit the scope of what the words on the page declare—this public description of the nation’s political goals turns out to be a document of jaw-dropping moral depravity.
Why this policy document is so concerned with “civilization” was the question that started me writing this essay. Soon, however, I was forced to address what appears to be another topic altogether: the ways in which terrible prose may reveal appalling ideas. I have come to hope that, at the very least, attentively reading what our leaders say may help us stop being surprised by what they do.
I. Civilization: Or, the Problem with Europe
Making my way through the text, I did indeed find that the National Security Strategy of the United States of America offers a full-throated defense of something it identifies as “civilization.” But it surprised me to discover that this text, composed at the court of the America First movement, is not concerned with American civilization at all, but with the civilization of another continent altogether, with “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” in the face of “the real and … stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”
What is motivating the pressing interest in defending the culture of another continent? How did this topic become so important for the national security strategy of the Make America Great faction? The authors of the Strategy could not be more clear on their contempt for Europe, and have a litany of complaints about the old continent. This makes it all the more interesting that the pressing concern they address is not a typical policy issue such as inadequate military spending or the threat economic stagnation. Here is the bill of charges against Europe, the things that threaten it with “civilizational erasure”:
The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
Have more kids! Be more confident! I don’t think it’s an accident that some of the complaints one reads in the Strategy sound like the words of a particularly intrusive elderly relative. But the incoherent nature of the list as a whole contributes to the feeling that there is something off about the desire to reshape Europe, that it is an intervention in which—like the advice of that relative—it is very hard to distinguish fantasy and self-interest from the putative concerns being expressed. Looking closely at what the authors of the Strategy say, one finds that American national interest toward Europe takes on a pathological shape. “Should present trends continue,” we hear, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” What does recognition mean here? Sometimes the authors of the Strategy sound like tourists of a certain age disappointed that the Europe they are visiting does not have the same elements that they learned about from watching grade school film strips or Saturday morning cartoons.
Trivial as it might appear, whether Americans recognize Europe is a concern of some urgency, since, according to the Strategy, such unrecognizability will ultimately lead to military collapse. This strange argument forms a crux in the Strategy, and yet it also reveals an uncertainty: The authors cannot decide whether their desire to protect Europe comes down to their commitment to libertarianism, or to their fantasies of racial purity.
It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.
For Europe to remain European is surely a tautological desire! After all, how could Europe not be European? It may seem odder still that “civilizational self-confidence” is associated with deregulation. It turns out, however, that this kind of yoking of ideological values to apparently grander claims and then to self-interest is one of the projects of this fascinating document in which bad faith, poor writing, and that inflated sense of insight only available to the truly ignorant combine into a frightening vision for the future of the world. When the authors declare that they want Europe “to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” they are uniting, by force, a claim about culture with an unrelated libertarian economic value. Yet they are also demanding an entire continent do what the authors want, based simply on their bare desire (“we want”).
The clarity with which this document confesses its confusions would be amusing, if what it is clear the authors are saying were not so alarming. “European sectors from manufacturing to technology to energy remain among the world’s most robust,” the authors acknowledge, indeed, “Europe is home to cutting-edge scientific research and world-leading cultural institutions.” So, what is this civilization risking, if all the things one typically associates with the term are in fact not collapsing?
Racist would be the simplest description of the fundamental concept underpinning this part of the Strategy. The unspoken but assumed claim is that Europe is—or better, needs to be—a set of ethno-states, the values of each of which are encoded within the DNA of particular residents. And, unsurprisingly, this is a topic around which the prose loses its moorings, since incoherent explanations are the best way to express incoherent ideas.
The full embrace of bad faith and confusions of the Strategy is manifested in its very punctation. Take the use of commas, for example. These simple tapering swirls are available to authors needing to introduce clauses that explain or elaborate on an earlier statement (as in, “I want to reclaim your attention, to have your eyes fixed on me as they used to be”). They can also separate items on a list (“I want root beer, a burger, and fries.”) These two fundamentally distinct uses of the comma, logic tells us, cannot be deployed simultaneously. And yet, the authors of the Strategy cannot figure out how they are using their commas because apparently they cannot distinguish what is an elaboration of an idea, and what is simply part of a list. Do they want Europe to regain its civilizational self-confidence because that will lead to the abandonment of a failed focus (just one more mixed metaphor in this document built on them) on suffocating regulations? And, anyway, in what sense is it non-European to regulate things?
“Over the long term,” the authors declare—with an attempt at once implausible and infelicitous to sound like they are thinking long term—“it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” For starters, “certain NATO members” suggests … well, at once certainty and vagueness. Yet the primary confusion here has to do with the urgency of what is being feared: Are we to expect it “over the long term,” or “within a few decades at the latest”? To speak about something taking place “within” a certain time frame is usually done to indicate inevitability and a relatively brief span—like “at the latest.” “The long term” is the opposite of that. The temporal inanity here is part of a characteristic confusion in the text between pretend fear and actual anxiety, or maybe simply between argument designed to sound judicious (you need to do something about immigration) and rhetoric intended to sow alarm (because something terrible is about to happen). And, of course, the fear at the heart of this claim is as infelicitously expressed as it is vague: “becoming majority non-European.” What is a non-European to the authors?
If something is “more than plausible,” are we to understand it is certain, or likely, or just something a writer is so worried about that they have reached for some slightly elevated language for conviction about its eventuality to capture their fear? Or does all this irrecoverably bad prose express something simpler? Does it say that the authors wished that, when they went on a holiday to France, everyone would wear a beret and drink wine? Is it a confession that they don’t like to see people of color on the streets of France? The Strategy does not bother to distinguish between trivial sentiments and significant policy assertions because it appears to be written by people who are either unable to distinguish the two, or who are accustomed to using the former to justify the latter. This blend of high and low stakes makes it strangely difficult to address the Strategy. One doesn’t know where to grab hold of ideas wrapped in so much unresolved prose.
What is motivating the pressing interest in defending the culture of another continent? How did this topic become so important for the national security strategy of the Make America Great faction?
The vision of a Europe composed of ethnically homogeneous peoples each prizing their own national traditions and doing no harm to others has been an important one in our popular culture: One thinks of that ride in the Disney theme parks in which a song informs us that “it’s a small world after all,” while we float by fixed animatronic children dressed in various national costumes. It is strange to see this kind of fantasy endorsed in a government document. It is also, of course, wrong at its core.
The story of Europe is not of a group of ethnically coherent nation-states losing their natural autonomy to a set of despicable supranational organizations founded after the Second World War. Starting with the Anglosphere, which this document, as we will see, identifies as especially significant for American sensibilities, one might point out that the United Kingdom is … well, a united Kingdom, made up of at least three nations, depending on how you slice things. (And you may want to ask Boris Johnson how useful it was to forget about Northern Ireland when negotiating with the European Union). Spain also comprises several nations that are not, in fact, autonomous, as does France. In fact, it is not so long ago that violent independence movements were active in all of these states. Not only are these movements always liable to rise again, but the logic of this Strategy suggests they should do so. Italy was only unified in 1861, Germany ten years later; but German borders have grown and shrunk ever since, generally in the course of bloody conflicts. And, of course, important right-wing nationalist groups are eager to break up Italy.
These are not specialized bits of information. We all more or less know these things at various degrees of detail. We know something else, too, quite clearly. Whatever the authors of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America fear about immigration into Europe, the effects of such immigration are dwarfed by the horrors that Europeans have inflicted on each other over the centuries, without the aid of Islam or people of color. There is no comparison.
In any case, to the frustration of the authors, “we” apparently cannot afford to write Europe off. “Doing so would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve.” In spite of all its failings—the doubling down on the track to not being Europe, the regulations, etc.—the United States stands ready to help Europe become Europe again: “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”
And there we have it. After half a century of fighting Communism around the world and a few decades of half-assedly being the world’s policeman, the great innovation of our new Strategy is not, in fact, a new isolationism. The resources of our nation are going to be devoted to degrading the democracies in which free European people follow paths of which we do not approve.
Some of the more humiliating moments in this Strategy bearing our name occur when the authors of the document try to explain the links between the United States and Europe as more than instrumental, as being about bonds of affection: “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent—and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.” The jingling sound of understandably/sentimentally tells us almost all we need to know about the depth of the emotion in question. But it is the tacked-on fondness for the nations of Britain and Ireland that (“of course”) makes the sentence truly frivolous.
It is as part of the celebration of simple national interests that the topic of civilization enters the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, and it does so in another elaborate expression of desire. “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Amusingly enough, while tyrants get a free pass, countries with democratic forms of government that the authors feel are related to our own must be placed on notice, and managed into a freedom that amounts to being more fully themselves—which is to say, like us. “Regarding countries that share, or say they share, these principles, the United States will advocate strongly that they be upheld in letter and spirit. We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.”
One of the great twists in the Strategy is the paradoxical claim that a strong Europe is in the interest of the United States because it will prevent any adversary from dominating Europe … the way we need to! “We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete, and to work in concert with us to prevent any adversary from dominating Europe.” It is these moments of open self-interest that make the more sentimental elements in the Strategy stand out.
I suppose various ethnonationalist parties in Europe will welcome the financial and moral support this document openly tells them is coming, but I hope they realize that their nationalist leadership will have all the freedom of action of vassals of an unprincipled empire devoted solely to its own benefit.
II. What We Want: Or, Who Are “We”?
The reader finds a clue to the emotional logic of the Strategy at its very start, though in a surprising place. “American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short,” the authors note. “They have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states.” Worse, they “have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.” As the “they” in these passages goes from being a pronoun standing in for the earlier strategies to standing in for their misguided authors, a “we” enters the argument—in italics, no less.
But, who is this “we” of which the authors speak?
Evidently, an important goal of this document is to create a “we”—to invent a collective group that needs to work out its strategy—and that has to be, given logic and grammar, different from a them. It also looks like one characteristic of this “we” is that it knows itself, though it is uncertain about its desires. “We” need to define what we want, though the authors do not need to define who we are.
The question becomes only more pressing when the authors propose that the writers of earlier strategies have “often misjudged what we should want.” To say that someone misjudges what they should want is a statement of an entirely different order from saying that someone is failing to be clear in expressing their desires. The latter is a crisis of communication, the kind of thing that happens all the time when you fail to make clear what you intend to a friend, a lover, a boss, or in a national security document. To say that someone is wrong about what they should want only works as a moral or psychological judgment. It also puts a further weight on that pronoun: “we.” Who are we? What do we want? Who are we if we do not know what we want? What is the relationship between who we are and what we (ought to) desire?
The resources of our nation are going to be devoted to degrading the democracies in which free European people follow paths of which we do not approve.
Time and again, the document’s strategy depends on the premise that the main problems nations face are internal; that conflicts among nations are not necessary nor likely if sufficient care is taken to clarify internal confusions, if we protect ourselves from those who misjudge what we (should) want. And it is here that the apparently hardheaded realistic clear-eyed document is revealed to have, at its core, an extraordinary, even revolutionarily utopian view of human nature. International ruling elites—the authors of the document give every impression of believing—will be motivated by financial benefits to usher in a new era of international cooperation and global peace based on a clear-eyed view of personal interests (who are “we,” again?)
A great deal of the work of the document is carried out through the kind of bad prose that allows unelaborated relationships to be postulated, assumed, and built on in ways that are more typical of the spoken word—say of pundits bulldozing opponents on television—than of dispassionate professional analyses. Still, the written word allows us to slow things down. Readers in a hurry could do worse than just to pause over every instance of “and” in the text, which is typically where the authors sneak in their non sequiturs or forced associations. For example, speaking still about elites (by which they evidently mean policy-pushing bureaucrats, not members of a class separated from others by actual social or economic privilege), the authors complain about how
they allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.
The prose works hard to pull the strings on a tangled knot that binds hate of a managerial class they despise, the importance of national sovereignty, and certainty about who we are and what “our” interests might be. “Allies and partners” are evidently leeches who offload their costs onto the American people. In the process they sometimes suck us into conflicts and controversies that do not matter to us (whoever we are).
The identification of appropriate objects of desire is not an accidental element in this document then, but a central motivation. “What should the United States want?” is the title of one of the sections of the Strategy, and the question is repeated more than once. To be fair, at an early culminating point in the Strategy we do get a rich account of “our” desires: “We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation.”
So, there is one answer to my earlier question about the people who constitute the “we” the Strategy imagines or tries to create. One answer is that “we” are the people who fear threats whether they are violent military attacks or whatever the authors of the Strategy are calling “influence operations” or “cultural subversion,” or “any other threat to our nation” (a category with all the precision of that entry about animals offered in the fabulous Chinese encyclopedia described in an essay by Borges, creatures “that from a distance look like flies”). “We” are a group composed of those who always need to be protected because they are always scared.
The commitment to non sequiturs as well as the aspiration to reroute “our” aspirations come to the fore when the authors turn to culture as another area in which we have desires:
We want to maintain the United States’ unrivaled “soft power” through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests. In doing so, we will be unapologetic about our country’s past and present while respectful of other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems. “Soft power” that serves America’s true national interest is effective only if we believe in our country’s inherent greatness and decency.
Pause for a moment before the unexamined bad faith and crassness of “through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests.” Where does positive influence end, and interest begin? The problem the authors of the Strategy have is that their antipathy to the very idea of disinterested actions leads them to a thoroughgoing resistance to ongoing or binding transnational commitments that might identify such actions or support or even enforce them. So they are left needing to promote an incoherent sense both that our nation is better than others (greatness being a relative term) and that the best thing we can do for other nations—because it is best for ourselves—is to take them as they are. “We will be unapologetic about our country’s past and present while respectful of other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing.” (What being respectful means here amounts to leaving one’s condescension unvoiced). A stylistic glitch irreparably undermines this sentence because the authors are trying to express something they cannot quite figure out how to say: that we need to feel our culture, and history, and current system is better than all the others, while acting as though we don’t believe those things.
No wonder, then, that “soft power” is hung between quotation marks: The authors can’t quite figure out what it is, though they have been convinced that it matters. Stranger still, this thing they call “soft power” is only effective if we believe in our country’s inherent greatness and decency, which makes belief itself purely instrumental (and so, not belief at all). The authors are led to some weird formulations as they attempt to plant this topic in the crumbly soil of their text and to prop it up in a terrain that provides no natural support for anything “soft.” The aspiration sounds more wistful than anything else, as the authors don’t quite know what to do with the less macho forms of human activity, and cannot even pretend to understand why they are to be valued. Like so many kids needing to believe in fairies to make sure Tinker Bell won’t die, patriots need to believe in inherent greatness in order to serve our national interests.
III. “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth”
The authors of the Strategy do have an answer to the challenge of establishing an ongoing basis for relationships in a world in which all obligations are seen as illusory or pernicious. It is because of our culture that we will continue to be desired as partners by others. “What differentiates America from the rest of the world—our openness, transparency, trustworthiness, commitment to freedom and innovation, and free market capitalism,” these are not good in themselves but selling points that “will continue to make us the global partner of first choice.” “America,” the authors of the Strategy go on, as they develop their vision of how one finds partners, “still holds the dominant position in the key technologies that the world needs. We should present partners with a suite of inducements—for instance, high-tech cooperation, defense purchases, and access to our capital markets—that tip decisions in our favor.”
Yet the Strategy repeatedly collapses into incoherence as it attempts to identify the value of culture on which it depends. It is not only that those human virtues that are “openness, transparency, trustworthiness, commitment to freedom” inevitably culminate for them in “free market capitalism,” but that even that broad category is insufficient. Partners need to be presented with further “inducements” that are imagined very concretely: “high tech,” “defense purchases,” “capital markets.” So, we are the partners of first choice because of things that are intangible, but we are such a compelling choice that we need to bribe people to partner up with us (“We should present partners with a suite of inducements … that tip decisions in our favor”).
Ultimately, the goal is a centralized global economy managed in America’s interest, with suitable inducements to collaborate distributed to foreign leaders. “America’s economic partners should … pursue growth through managed cooperation tied to strategic alignment and by receiving long-term U.S. investment.” And so it is that a paragraph devoted to foreign trade begins with American exceptionalism and ends with bribery.
The authors of the Strategy are not idiots. They know that what they are proposing is incoherent and cynical. Their aim is to come up with a language that will provide cover for actions that are inexcusable. “Flexible Realism” is their term of choice:
We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories. We recognize and affirm that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in acting according to such a realistic assessment or in maintaining good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours even as we push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms, furthering our interests as we do so.
The rhetoric in this poorly written document sometimes amounts to little more than the kind of things children do when one little kid hits another while yelling “no punch backs,” as though saying the words, or saying them first, will bring about the desired condition, or ward off criticism. (“Nothing inconsistent or hypocritical,” says the inconsequent hypocrite). Still, the problem is not inconsistency and hypocrisy understood as personal failings, but the mischaracterization of reality itself.
The premise being advanced here is that the “traditions and histories” of some nations amount to something stable, coherent, and fixed. But, of course, there is no conflict in the world that is based on such conditions. From the Middle East to Africa, from Europe to Russia to the Far East, the history of states and nations is one of conflicts finding various kinds of equilibrium, many of which are, in turn, revealed to be unsustainable. “Traditions and histories”? Here is a tradition: bloody warfare in Europe. Here is some history: Alsace is German, Crimea is Ukrainian, Taiwan is Chinese, Alsace is French, Macedonia is Greek, Venice is a Republic.
The concept of the “Primacy of Nations” is a good instance of the challenges faced by writers who consistently mistake remaining on the surface of complex issues with being forceful and clear. “The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state,” they declare with the unearned certainty of the truly uninformed. “It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.” I suppose these dyads sound bold and certain on a quick read, but stopping over them will reveal that they amount to so much sententious ahistorical blather: “Is and will remain” like “natural and just” are arguments disguised as statements of fact. Wait for the dust of the prose to clear and you are left with the fundamental and urgently pressing problem that the limits of the nation-state are exactly what is at issue in almost all the world’s trouble spots.
It is no coincidence that this void at the heart of the argument is one closely related to the fundamental issue the authors never address: who “we” are. Here are some questions a reasonable person might ask the authors of the Strategy: What do you mean by “natural”? How is the natural “just”? When you say “is and will remain” are you describing an unchanging constant like the speed of light, or something more conventional and complicated that people want to count on, like a mother’s love? Or, is what you have in mind something you are determined to support do-or-die, something that will remain as you say it will because you will fight to keep it that way?
To ask these questions is not to nitpick or to demand clarification of mere technicalities, because it is an unexamined concept of the “nation-state” that drives this entire project. It is characteristic of the interplay of moral stupidity and logical inanity of the document for the authors to declare that “the United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well.” An unsolvable math problem arises for the reader who is reasonably alert: We will put ourselves first and our knowing ourselves to be first will lead us to encourage others to understand their own interests as coming before our own.
It is not simply that the issue is poorly expressed, however (“Who is on first?” becoming the tragicomic question of international politics). This preposterous bit of wishful thinking disguised as a transhistorical claim simply erases all we know about nations in history. The Strategy desires to abandon “the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations,” but without acknowledging that all of those organizations were set up because it turned out that each nation prioritizing what it called its own history and interests did not lead to endless peace and prosperity. And, of course, democracy is premised on the idea that it is possible and even likely that concepts of the national interest will vary even within individual states.
Ultimately, the goal is a centralized global economy managed in America’s interest, with suitable inducements to collaborate distributed to foreign leaders.
The overblown formulations of the authors of this document obscure the fact that the system imagined in the National Security Strategy of the United States is not one in which all sovereign states are respected: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations. This reality sometimes entails working with partners to thwart ambitions that threaten our joint interests.” Whose ambitions are going to be thwarted, and how are those ambitions related to the quests for national greatness celebrated elsewhere in the document?
Well, the authors don’t bother to say, but evidently the goal is not to antagonize large, rich, and strong nations. It is to crush the aspirations of weaker ones. This is no principle at all, of course, as size, wealth, and strength are merely relative conditions—accidents of history.
Insofar as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America is practical, it is a roadmap for extraordinary corruption. Insofar as it is principled, it is about the principle of absolute power over vassal states. A quick summary of the interventionist/noninterventionist balance in the Strategy would be that if you are a tyrant you need not worry, as to be one is merely to be participating in your history and culture. If you belong to any of the categories to which we claim some connection, you are free to do whatever you want, aside from making laws we do not like—or even making arguments we disagree with. When the authors of the Strategy speak of protecting American sovereignty (“The United States will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty”), what they have in mind amounts to another laundry list of fears:
preventing its erosion by transnational and international organizations, attempts by foreign powers or entities to censor our discourse or curtail our citizens’ free speech rights, lobbying and influence operations that seek to steer our policies or involve us in foreign conflicts, and the cynical manipulation of our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country.
No outside interference for us, or for despots, but plenty of interference in the affairs of democratic nations. None of our allies is free from the authority of the United States as it pursues its own interests. Here is one telling instance, remarkable for its blithe reach, the United States demanding our allies take action to address a concern that is fundamentally of our own making:
America First diplomacy seeks to rebalance global trade relationships. We have made clear to our allies that America’s current account deficit is unsustainable. We must encourage Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and other prominent nations in adopting trade policies that help rebalance China’s economy toward household consumption, because Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East cannot alone absorb China’s enormous excess capacity. The exporting nations of Europe and Asia can also look to middle-income countries as a limited but growing market for their exports.
Our current account deficit requires us to “encourage” the nations of what we used to call the free world to change their policies: “Respect”!
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose. Dead or poorly understood metaphors and sentences the ends of which do not remember their beginnings proliferate in the piece, the bad writing betraying the incoherence of the desires of its authors. Imagine with me the life of the poor official described in the following brief sentence:
Every U.S. official working in or on the region must be up to speed on the full picture of detrimental outside influence while simultaneously applying pressure and offering incentives to partner countries to protect our Hemisphere.
This is a bewildering vision of the work of a foreign consul representing an empire to its vassal states: wary surveillance, full insight, the application of pressure, the offer of bribes (sorry: “incentives”!). How fast must one go to get up to speed on a picture? Is it hard to apply pressure while speeding up? While reading I found myself picturing a harried EMT in an ambulance rushing along a large mural decorated with colorful local legends at which he gazes absently while applying pressure to a wound and bribing a willing official. Also, what are we calling an “outside influence” when we are speaking of foreign affairs in this relentlessly inward directed document?
IV. What World Will “We” Inhabit?
I was originally interested in thinking about what the National Security Strategy of the United States of America would tell me about contemporary views of civilization on the political right. I then became fascinated by the ways the document’s prose confesses its failings at every turn. I have been amazed to see the inability to recognize either the past or the present of the world the authors of this document hope to manage. They remain suspended in a timeless space familiar from the internet in which local American political squabbles and framings are superimposed on every facet of a reality otherwise too complicated and contradictory to fit into the brief number of letters the platforms allow or the short attention spans they promote.
I have emphasized the stupidity, cruelty, and cupidity of the goals laid out in the National Security Document of the United States not to mock the Trump administration, but to encourage us all to take it very seriously. Donald Trump has consistently benefited from the disbelief of his opponents as to how far he will go, but he has told us from the beginning that he recognizes no inherent limits to his actions (“When you are a star they let you do it.”). The Strategy lays out a vision that will brook no half measure, that aims to destroy the hopes of most of a century and replace them with a nihilistic embrace of power and self-interest that is utterly impossible to reconcile with democracy, at home or abroad—and that is doomed to failure. Like any roadmap drawn with complete indifference to the actual terrain, it will lead those who follow it in directions they do not want to go.
There has been a tendency to focus on the moment-to-moment cruelty of the Trump administration. It may well be more effective to say what is clearly the case, that the situation is urgent not because the actions of some individuals are mean, but because their plans are injurious to the interests of most Americans. The Strategy aims for a world made up of kleptocratic nations, in which citizens motivated by fear are led by corrupt leaders who use their soldiers and diplomats simply to enrich themselves. It would be amusing to discuss how much the administration relies on the evocation of culture, of “soft power,” of civilization, elements its own strategies indicate it does not understand, if it were not clear that the improbable return to these themes is ultimately pathological.
Civilizational collapse is less what the authors fear, and more what they fervently desire to bring about. If we start talking clearly about what the Trump administration tells us its plans are, perhaps we can stop being surprised at what it does, and start addressing the moral and practical calamities bound to result from its intended actions.
Featured-image photograph by Hans / Unsplash (CC0 1.0)
