Imperialist Conflict at the Heart of the “National Defense Strategy”

Nobody should care about the US “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) right now. The Trump administration released it quietly on a Friday evening while paramilitary forces escalated a siege against Minnesota. US oligarchy has curdled into tyranny at home, an authoritarianism every bit as dark as anything you’d decry in a foreign dictatorship. We’re even repeating the dehumanizing torture abuses of Abu Ghraib, but this time on US territory.

In that context, it’s hard to give a shit about a PDF document authored by a cabal of bootlicking incels and sexual predators who are too cowardly to call themselves white supremacists even though it oozes out of their policy preferences and anti-DEI screeds like so much alcoholism from their pores.

I care when documents like this come out in spite of myself. They are tangible expressions of the puzzle of the permanent war economy that remains at the root of the terrors we currently face. The source of our pain, in its many forms, is partly traceable to what we can glean from these documents. And so I carry out my ritual of closely parsing the NDS with more care than the authors themselves gave to its writing.

I decided long ago that confronting militarism required this habit of extreme focus on the clues the powerful leave. But the ritual of digging through their word vomit is starting to become farcical in a world where facts and reason have almost no weight. I don’t know if I can carry on like this in a world of impunity and nonsense. But for now, habit compels me to care, and to report on what I find.

There are national-security bros who will look at the NDS as a masculine statement of “priorities.” Indeed, the document itself refers to prioritization 22 times in 24 pages. But like their masculinity, it’s a lie, one of many. This document does not divest of the too-many military roles and missions that had already been part of the sprawling national-security apparatus of the Biden and Obama administrations. There is no retrenchment from anywhere in this document, even as it downgrades the importance of Europe (ie, makes Europe an actual enemy, which ironically creates more demands on the military). America remains at war in many places, and in every sense of what war can be taken to mean.

There are policy elites in some ally governments—Korea, Japan, Australia—who will fret about US “extended nuclear deterrence” assurances, which were totally absent from the NDS. They will say that they rely on the US “nuclear umbrella” and US credibility is eroding. Don’t listen to them: They want nuclear weapons and only talk about extended deterrence because it sets them up to claim that US unreliability justifies their own arms-racing. But nobody actually believes in US extended deterrence; it’s a false religion with no true adherents. I would know; I was one of its propagandist-preachers. Extended deterrence is inherently not credible. But even if that weren’t true, no thinking human can be concerned with whether a US strategy document is “credible” when the US government spouts lies daily about everything from Gaza to Greenland. The credibility ship sailed long ago.

Some will say—have said—the NDS abandons the fight against China, de-prioritizes it. If only! That inference comes from semiotics for stupid people; the document arranges the China-threat section after the homeland-threat section. But the salient question is not whether the NDS places magic words in a sequence that makes us feel good and sufficiently menaces China; it’s whether the words indicate the US military will continue to invest in a force capable of fighting China inside the “first island chain” (Taiwan) and the answer is obviously yes. American oligarchy would collapse if the national security state were forced to stop gooning to East Asian war fantasies.

Much has been made of spheres of influence as a guiding concept of Trump foreign policy. As it happens, I’ve been writing about spheres of influence for a decade, drawing mostly critical conclusions. There is no doubt the US is building a force meant to assert its sphere of influence over Latin America, but nothing in Trump administration foreign policy has extended a sphere of influence to China or anyone else. The NDS cedes nothing to China. The most you could say is that it swaps out Biden-era language about China as a “pacing threat” for language about needing to deny China dominance of Asia, which truly is a distinction without a difference. People who say otherwise don’t understand defense strategy. Both configurations of language translate into military primacy same as under any previous president. Did you think the hawks wouldn’t win under this regime?

The one real insight worth gleaning from this reactionary agitprop slop—I cannot stress enough how unworthy this document is of your time—is what folks in the strategy business call a “strategy-force mismatch.” The NDS explicitly continues the China-peril standard for military primacy, which was already the key driver of the trillion-dollar military budget in previous administrations. But it piles on top of that the imperialism mission in Latin America (that’s what the gilded fleet and special forces are for), as well as the counter-insurrection mission against American citizens. God help us if America also needs to start sizing its force structure for wars against Canada and Greenland too. Soon, of course, we will be war planning on behalf of network states—I guarantee it.

The NDS and its authors are too dishonest to admit it, but between the threats it describes and the threats bandied about by Trump 2.0, the Pentagon finds itself committed to something like a six-war construct. That’s why Trump had to come out recently and literally say next year’s military budget should be $1.5 trillion, not $1 trillion. Insane. Immoral. Anti-democratic. Theft. And against the “national interest.” Guess who benefits from that?

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