Photo: Mandel NGAN / AFP / Getty
The world awoke on Saturday to find that the US had invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president and – we learned from Trump himself – was now “running the country”. A natural response to this might be: “He’s mad.” No point trying to understand or explain. Or perhaps you think it’s because of the Epstein files – a crashingly overdone attempt to draw attention away from Trump’s relationship with the disgraced billionaire?
What if the truth were both more straightforward, but also more worrying? One of the strange contradictions about Trump is that he is both an outrageous liar, and someone who tells you exactly what he is planning. He told the world that he would end the war in Ukraine by giving Russia what it wanted, and he’s tried to do that. He was talking about taking over Greenland as early as 2019. People thought it was a joke, but now that the White House is refusing to rule out military action it doesn’t seem very funny.
Trump’s chaotic foreign policies should not blind us to the fact that there is a strategy behind them: the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). The document - published on 4 December - spells out plans for a world transformed by an America-first agenda, in which allies are expendable and great powers carve up their spheres of influence. The document opens with clear aims:
“First and foremost, we want the continued survival and safety of the United States as an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given natural rights of its citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests … We want full control over our borders, over our immigration system … We want … the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military … We want the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”
[Section II, part 1: What do we want overall?]
So far, so normal for a conservative president that likes white people, Christian religion and swaggering on the world stage. The underlying message might not be out of place from an earlier Republican president such as Ronald Reagan, who spoke of ”faith … family values,” as “the bedrock of our nation.” Where Trump’s NSS is a radical departure is in its approach to the rest of the world. Since the end of the second world war, the US has believed that its values and norms are worth protecting and spreading. This meant restricting the power of its adversaries, notably the USSR/Russia and China. We might debate whether America’s actions have lived up to the ideology and whether its allies were always paragons of liberal democracy, but that has been the broad thrust of American foreign policy for 80 years. No longer. You will search in vain in the NSS for references to a “rules-based international order” (except dismissively). Instead there is an entirely new framework for engaging with the world: one in which there are no values, but rather a 19th-century idea of a “balance of power”:
“We will work with allies and partners to maintain global and regional balances of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries. As the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself, we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others. This does not mean wasting blood and treasure to curtail the influence of all the world’s great and middle powers. The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.”
[Section IV, part 1: The Strategy: Principles; emphasis Arthur Snell]
These ideas help us understand Trump’s approach to numerous conflicts. One of the most cherished ideals of Vladimir Putin is the concept of “spheres of influence”: countries that border Russia, such as Ukraine and Georgia, should not have the right to join Nato or the EU. A policy to maintain regional balances of power is a policy that says that Russia can dominate Ukraine, that Israel can do what it likes in the Middle East, and perhaps even that China can dominate Taiwan, as long as America’s economic interests are guaranteed. But where these ideas have the most immediate impact is in America’s backyard. If Putin can dictate what happens to eastern Europe, America claims the right to exert full control over the “western hemisphere”, a phrase commonly used by Americans to refer to North and South America. This is not a new idea: the “Monroe doctrine” has its origins in 1823 and has come to mean the US asserting an exclusive right of interference in the Americas region – whether to limit the actions of European colonists, or, during the Cold War, the role of the USSR in supporting leftwing political movements. But in the NSS, the Monroe doctrine is expanded:
“We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
[Section II, part 2: What do we want in and from the world? The Strategy: Principles; emphasis Arthur Snell]
It is immediately clear from this passage how the actions over Venezuela are to “assert and enforce” these ideas. The only difference is that Trump himself can’t pronounce “corollary”, so he is calling it the “Donroe Doctrine”, a phrase he introduced to the world at his Mar-a-Lago press conference to announce Maduro’s arrest.
The idea that “might is right” and that the Americas are for the US to dominate aligns with the bit of the NSS that has garnered the most attention – its approach to Europe, which it sees as facing:
“the … stark prospect of civilizational erasure … migration policies that are transforming the continent… [that] will be unrecognizable in 20 years. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence … The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the [Ukraine] war…”
Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize:
- Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia…
- Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations…
- Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of Nato as a perpetually expanding alliance.
[Section IV, part 3 (C): The Strategy; The Regions: Promoting European Greatness]
This hostility to a modern, liberal, integrated Europe is not a throwaway line that Trump mentions in late-night social media posts: it’s a central pillar of his strategy. Which brings us to Greenland. A world in which “stronger nations” exert “regional” control, contrasted with a declining civilisation led by unrealistic politicians, is a world in which Denmark has no business controlling a large island in North America. As Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller told CNN this week: “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time … By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” For a long time there has been a tendency to argue that we should “take Trump seriously, but not literally”. What the National Security Strategy tells us is that we have to take him both seriously and literally.
Europe’s leaders knew that Trump would be hostile to NATO. They knew that he wanted to end the war in Ukraine on terms favourable to Russia and that he had designs on Greenland. In all of these cases, they chose to believe that Trump was merely bluffing, with no intention of carrying through on his threats. Valuable time to build up alternative arrangements was lost as diplomats and security officials refused to believe the evidence in front of their eyes. Their failure has left us all dangerously exposed.
Read the full strategy document here.
Arthur Snell hosts the Behind the Lines podcast. His book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2022 is published by Canbury Press