If the rest of the west wasn’t already scared about what the presidency of Donald Trump means for the world, they certainly are now. The US government’s new national security strategy, released on Friday, is abundantly clear about Trump’s aims: he does not merely want the US to dominate the world – he wants individual nations to bend to his whim. Sovereignty is for the US only – the rest of us need to follow its orders.
The strategy outlines in great detail the new world order: the western hemisphere belongs to the US, which must intervene to prevent Europe’s “civilisational erasure”, while democracy and human rights will not be promoted anywhere. In the meantime, there is not a word of criticism of either Russia or China.
Europe got a flavour of this in JD Vance’s speech at January’s Munich security conference, but this strategy goes further. For the liberal democracies of Europe, this is existential. The strategy criticises Europe’s migration policies, its “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition… and loss of national identities”.
It claims that “certain Nato members will become majority non-European” – that is, non-white – within a few decades. This, naturally, is viewed as a problem.
There’s more. The Ukraine conflict is no longer, in US eyes, an unprovoked war of aggression carried out by Vladimir Putin. It is, instead, a regional issue that needs to be mediated. The United States’s role is simply to manage “European relations with Russia… and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states”.
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Again, note that it doesn’t say “to prevent Russia invading another European nation”.
It is also telling that one of the main reasons the US gives for wanting to end the war is to enable it to “re-establish strategic stability with Russia”. The US wants to build a fresh alliance with Russia while also wanting to destroy the alliance it has with western Europe.
Thankfully, all is not lost: the strategy praises the “growing influence of patriotic European parties” – in other words, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and, of course, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The US, it says, will prioritise “Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” It is now official US policy to interfere in European elections to bolster the far right.
At least the Trump administration’s interference in Europe has been limited, so far, to words rather than actions. The same cannot be said for Latin America. The strategy baldly states that it aims to “restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere”. It promises to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties and movements broadly aligned with our principles”.
In some ways, this isn’t a surprise. After all, in the past nine months Trump has given Argentina’s Javier Milei a $40bn bailout, threatened Brazil with tariffs for refusing to drop charges against ex-president Jair Bolsonaro and pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was accused of being a key figure in a drug cartel smuggling cocaine into the US. But it’s still shocking to see the goal – hemispheric hegemony – written out so plainly; particularly the argument that the US will support opposition political parties.
Trump is touted in the strategy as a “president of peace” – and of course, in his introduction, he repeats the delusional claim that he has ended “eight raging conflicts” since becoming president again. But in Latin America, the strategy makes clear that the military will play a big role.
There will be new bases and a shift of resources from Europe and the Middle East, including “a more suitable Coast Guard and navy presence to control sea lanes”, not to mention: “Targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels.” The strikes in the Caribbean are only the beginning, it seems.
The pivot to Latin America means a shift away from the Middle East, where the US is once again raising a “mission accomplished” banner. The region is, apparently, “no longer the constant irritant and potential source of imminent catastrophe that it once was”. The main US focus there will instead be economic.
Two points are worth noting. First, Israel is barely mentioned – further proof, perhaps, of a shift in Washington from Israel to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Second, the strategy says the US will drop its “misguided experiment with hectoring these nations – especially the Gulf monarchies – into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government”.
So no more pushes for social or political reform – unless you’re in Europe, remember, where democracy is, apparently, in crisis.
Finally, what of the biggest US adversary: China? The strategy bemoans the fact that “China got rich and powerful” but also says it wants “a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing”.
It talks approvingly of China’s belt and road strategy, even hinting at the idea that the US should do something similar.
But it’s the section where China is not mentioned once that is most revealing: the section on how to prevent China from annexing Taiwan. The strategy manages to get through six paragraphs on security in south-east Asia without referring to Beijing. Instead there are references to “any competitor” and “a potentially hostile power”.
For all Trump’s talk on the campaign trail of the threat of China, he clearly views the world’s largest dictatorship as an ally – in much the same way as he hopes Russia will eventually be.
Trump and his administration detest the old world of multilateralism and globalisation. What they want instead is a world that they dominate, but where other global powers – Russia in eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia in the Middle East and, most of all, China in Asia – are able to take care of their backyards. So long, of course, as the US can still do business.
The US will not be “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.”
This is a startlingly precise scrapping of the central premise of the UN charter – namely, that all nations were sovereign and equal under international law.
It is a new world order where the globe is once again divided up into spheres of influence, but with the US as the most powerful.
There is one line in the strategy to which believers in liberal democracy can cling. No 1 in the list of US “world-leading assets, resources and advantages” is “a still nimble political system that can course correct”.
Let us all hope that it manages to do that in 2028.
Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Pool via CNP