Spinning Trump’s Policies into Strategy

Providence, 2.20.26

While it’s always more difficult to lay out and execute a national security strategy (NSS) than it is to critique such a strategy, when the gap between strategy and reality is as wide as it is with President Donald Trump’s 2025 NSS and his real-world policies, critiquing is necessary.

Unleashed
Trump uses the NSS to assert that he “rebuilt our alliances” and that America is “respected” in the world.

Let’s tackle that second assertion first. 

In 2024, 41% of Canadians, 33% of Mexicans, 44% of Swedes, 49% of Germans, 28% of Japanese and 19% of South Koreans held an unfavorable view of the U.S. By mid-2025, 64% of Canadians, 69% of Mexicans, 79% of Swedes, 66% of Germans, 44% of Japanese, 39% of South Koreans held an unfavorable view of the U.S.

According to polling conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, “The U.S. has lost ground as a preferred ally almost everywhere surveyed.” The report adds, “Only 16% of EU citizens now consider the US an ally.”

What happened between 2024 and mid-2025? Trump unleashed threats and tariffs against America’s allies—and forgot what he said in 2018: “America first does not mean America alone.”

As to the claim that Trump has “rebuilt our alliances,” the record suggests otherwise.

Consider Trump’s treatment of Canada. After musing about making Canada the “51st state,” Trump threatened to tear up the trade deal he made with Canada (and Mexico) and unleashed huge tariffs. As a consequence, Canada has turned to Beijing as a dependable trading partner—and, according to Prime Minister Mark Carney, been forced to “fundamentally shift our strategic posture.”

Consider Trump’s interactions with Europe. The 2025 NSS declares, “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe.” Yet the words don’t match Trump’s policies. U.S. troop withdrawals; elimination of security-assistance programs; tariffs against Europe; and ambivalence to the idea that the transatlantic community should support the one country actually fighting for freedom and security in Europe have undermined the freedom and security of Europe.  

Consider Trump’s approach to Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark. Given its strategic importance, Greenland has hosted tens of thousands of American troops over the decades, and Denmark has always been open to America’s presence in Greenland. But that wasn’t enough for Trump. So, he threatened Denmark with economic coercion and military force. 

Those who gasp that NATO has never dealt with such internal trauma are wrong. The 1956 Suez Crisis—contrived by France and Britain—angered the U.S.; Washington’s response humiliated the French and Brits. In 1966, France withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command. In 1974, Greece and Turkey went to war over Cyprus. In 1999, the commander of NATO’s peacekeeping force in Kosovo (a Brit) refused to follow the orders of NATO’s supreme military commander (an American).

In short, NATO has weathered lots of internal problems. The jarring difference today is that America is the cause the problems.

Realist
Echoing realist thinking, the NSS declares, “The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

How does the treatment of religious minorities in Nigeria threaten U.S. interests? How does a Christmas Day military strike on Nigeria defend those interests? To be sure, what’s happening to Christians and other religious minorities in Nigeria (and China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, etc.) is barbaric. Those of us on the idealistic side of the foreign policy spectrum would add that such crimes might be worthy of a U.S. response. But they don’t threaten U.S. interests.

Similarly, how does Iran’s brutal response to pro-freedom protestors “directly threaten our interests”? When Iranians began a massive wave of protests in late 2025, Trump urged them to “take over your institutions,” declared that Iran’s rulers would “pay a big price” and promised that “help is on its way.”

Again, foreign policy idealists would support such a stance. But how does such a stance reflect the realist spirit of this NSS? Furthermore, now that Tehran’s terrorist tyranny has killed thousands of protestors, what price have those mass-murderers masquerading as holy men paid?

It’s well known that President Theodore Roosevelt—a hard-nosed realist—counseled, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” What’s less well known is he also warned of the dangers of doing the opposite. “It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force… If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.”

Trump has ignored both pieces of advice—and his own NSS.

TR also counseled, “Above all we should keep our promises…We ought not as a nation to break faith.”

Keeping a promise is not only the moral thing to do; it’s the prudent thing to do. The authors of the 2025 NSS understand this, noting that “trustworthiness” is one of the characteristics that “differentiates America from the rest of the world.” Trump fails to recognize this. His equivocations about America’s NATO commitment, his moving the goalposts on NATO defense spending, his warnings to Putin (always caveated with “two more weeks”), his yo-yoing tariffs, his breach of trade deals he negotiated, his empty threats vis-à-vis Tehran signal that America’s word means little. (If the assets he’s assembled near Iran end up striking Tehran, it will be a much-diluted message—given that the strikes will be delivered many weeks after the warning was delivered, many weeks after the line was drawn, many weeks too late for thousands of Iranians.)

Soft and Schizophrenic
The NSS vows “to maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power.’” 

Yet Trump dissolved USAID, froze PEPFAR programming, canceled key elements of the President’s Malaria Initiative, dismantled the U.S. Agency for Global Media (and with it, the Voice of America), and defunded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

These were essential instruments of U.S. soft power—helping the world’s forgotten, reminding our allies that America is not only a great power but a good neighbor, countering our enemies, promoting our interests. Yet according to the Trump administration, these initiatives are “frivolous expenditures that fail to align with American values or address the needs of the American people.”

The fact that some of these efforts have been restarted or found new funding streams (the EU stepped up to keep Radio Free Europe on air) is irrelevant to this discussion: Washington cannot simultaneously maintain soft power while dismantling the main instruments of soft power.

The 2025 NSS claims, “President Trump has cemented his legacy as the President of Peace” and hails a “predisposition to non-interventionism.”Try convincingDenmark of the former. Try convincing Nigeria, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Venezuela—all on the receiving end of military operations ordered by Trump—of the latter. 

Those military interventions may be justified. But, again, Washington cannot simultaneously order military strikes against seven countries on three continents and claim the mantle of “non-interventionism.”

The document declares that “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” calls for “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our hemisphere” and announces that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” 

The puzzling thing about such a pullback from the world is that it suggests a shrinking role for the U.S. How does that correspond to “American greatness”? 

The worrisome thing about such a pullback is that is it signals a return to great-power spheres of influence. After all, if this is “our” hemisphere, the other hemisphere must be someone else’s. How does a Russian or Chinese sphere of influence serve U.S. interests? What happens when those regimes tire of focusing on “their” spheres, “their” hemisphere?

The troubling thing about focusing military resources on this hemisphere is that such a policy will lead to withdrawing military resources from other parts of the world. Is that prudent in an age when the oceans can no longer protect us from what’s “over there”?  America didn’t maintain a robust global military presence after World War II to go looking for problems, but rather to address problems before they exploded into something unmanageable.

Coherent
The NSS argues, “Our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world.” Indeed, a case can be made for a more restrained foreign policy, a more circumspect approach to the world, more husbanding of finite resources. However, the 2025 NSS does not make that case—or perhaps more accurately, the case it makes does not match the policies Trump pursues.

For example, something so important to U.S. security as to warrant threats against a treaty ally would surely be prominent in the NSS. Yet the NSS makes no mention of Greenland.

Another example: The 2025 NSS lauds Trump’s commitment to “peace through strength” and declares that “strength is the best deterrent.”

Indeed it is. Yet Trump’s FY2026 defense budget was 3.2% of GDP. The Cold War average was more than twice that. In fact, as the Council on Foreign Relations reports, Trump’s FY2026 defense budget request was “$1.5 billion less than the $849.8 billion proposed by the Biden administration for FY2025.” 

Just a few weeks after the 2025 NSS was released, Trump called for $500 billion in additional military spending. If that was planned, surely the NSS would have mentioned it. Congress would have been briefed. Spending and cutting proposals would have been circulated. None of that happened. 

Again, this underscores that there’s no rhyme or reason to Trump’s approach to national security—and definitely no strategy undergirding it.

All of which points to the broader problem with the NSS: Its authors may be realists and may be earnest about formulating a cohesive strategy, but they don’t work for a realist. And they don’t work for someone who’s earnest about strategy. They work for someone who makes national security decisions according to personal fealty and of-the-moment feelings. And so, they are forced to explain those decisions based on pretexts and after-the-fact justifications. 

That’s not strategy. That’s spinning.