USA NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY DECONSTRUCTED....
Thomas Karat, a behavioural psychologist, brilliantly deconstructs Trumps National Security Strategy.
'The November 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, signed by Donald J. Trump, is not that kind of text. It reads less like a strategy and more like a manifesto: part victory speech, part ideological tract, part threat. It attempts nothing less than a rewrite of what “security” means—for Americans, for Europe, for the Global South.
And underneath the policy claims, the document reveals something deeper: a psychological portrait of a political movement that sees the world as a series of humiliations to be reversed, enemies to be punished, and audiences to be dominated. It also shows how far NATO and the broader U.S. security establishment have traveled with that movement, even as they pretend to restrain it....The first substantive chapter, “How American ‘Strategy’ Went Astray,” lays out the grievance narrative that justifies everything that follows. After the Cold War, we are told, “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” They lashed the United States to “international institutions… driven by outright anti-Americanism” and “transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”
The logic is neat: America’s suffering—economic hollowing-out, overstretched military, cultural decay—is the fault of disloyal elites who sold the country to hostile global bodies. This frames the strategy as rectification: a righteous rebalancing away from the “globalist” betrayal.
But notice the move. The text condemns the old dream of “permanent American domination of the entire world” as impossible and undesirable, then quietly reintroduces a form of it—only this time stripped of liberal multilateralism, aimed at enforcing spheres of influence and raw leverage. The problem was not domination; the problem was that the wrong people were in charge.
When the document asserts that “the world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state” and that the United States will defend sovereignty against “sovereignty-sapping incursions” of intrusive international organizations, it is not rejecting hegemony. It is rejecting shared rules.....This is where NATO and the U.S. establishment come in. For decades, they framed their power as stewardship of a liberal order. Now, under the banner of “America First,” the same tools—bases, sanctions, trade rules, IMF leverage—are being repurposed into a blunt instrument of civilizational politics.....In that sense, the Trump Corollary is not a Trump innovation at all—it is the unspoken doctrine of U.S. foreign policy made explicit and unapologetic. What is different is not the underlying claim to hemispheric supremacy, but the abandonment of the old moral packaging. Past administrations cloaked the Monroe Doctrine in talk of democracy, development, or counter-narcotics. This document dispenses with the pretense. Power is justified by power. The hemisphere is not a community; it is a strategic asset.......From a linguistic and behavioral perspective, the strategy collapses three levels into one:
External threats (China, Iran, cartels, terrorists)
Structural shifts (climate change, demographic change, economic globalization)
Internal dissent (activists, minorities, internationalists, liberal institutions)
Once collapsed, they can be treated with the same toolkit: coercion, surveillance, exclusion, force.
This is why the document feels less like a piece of bureaucratic planning and more like a security theology. It does not simply describe the world; it offers believers a totalizing way to feel about it....Read as a whole, the 2025 National Security Strategy is a mirror—uncomfortable not just for Trump’s opponents, but for the entire Western security establishment. It exposes how easily talk of “defending sovereignty” can slide into old-style imperialism, how quickly “shared values” evaporate when partners are useful authoritarians, how readily demographic panic and culture wars can be weaponized as state doctrine.
It also reveals the degree to which NATO and Europe have become structurally dependent on U.S. power. Even as the strategy derides the EU, questions the future loyalty of “non-European” allies, and freezes NATO enlargement, it knows that most European governments lack the political courage or military autonomy to push back.
For those outside the Western bubble—in Latin America, Africa, West Asia, and beyond—this document will confirm what many already suspect: that “rules-based order” was always conditional, always subject to reinterpretation when it no longer served Washington.
The tragedy is that Trump’s strategy does correctly diagnose some real failures: the hubris of post–Cold War globalism, the economic hollowing of the American middle class, the deployment of liberal language to justify disastrous wars. But instead of learning the right lessons—restraint, genuine multilateralism, justice—it offers a regression: a harder, more explicitly hierarchical empire, wrapped in the language of cultural salvation.
That is the doctrine now on the table. The only remaining question is whether allies, publics, and movements—on both sides of the Atlantic—will treat it as a warning to be resisted, or as a blueprint to be quietly adopted.
