Part I: A National Security Strategy Preying on Disorder
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What would an ideal white supremacist foreign policy look like? That’s what the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) sets out to answer and it’s really something to behold. I’ve never seen a government document like this. I’ll be drawing on this text for many years.
It reads like it was written by Grok, and contains many straightforward lies. You could be forgiven for just finding it all absurd. But the document makes a lot of racist, counter-revolutionary, and imperialist sub-text into text—it’s telling the world in explicit, full-throated, Trump-flattering language that white Christian nationalism is what the power of the American state is all about.
So the one-liner summary is that, yes, this is a kind of manifesto for the global far right. At once a template that fascists in other countries can draw upon and a straightforward theory for how to use foreign policy to advance a global counter-revolutionary agenda from the standpoint of one of the world’s major military and economic powers.
There are several aspects of the NSS that deserve critical attention, but for the sake of time I’m going to have to break this up into a couple posts (I’m also traveling at the moment).
Global Dominance Without Hegemony
This NSS declares that the US seeks true global domination.
We want to recruit, train, equip, and field the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military…our continued economic dominance and military superiority; it must be preserved.
…we will also work to align the actions of our allies and partners with our joint interest in preventing domination by any single competitor nation.
…we should aim to restore a military balance favorable to the United States.
…A favorable conventional military balance remains an essential component of strategic competition [with China]…deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority…We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.
…We will also harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific.
And then the mother of all statements of hubris:
No adversary or danger should be able to hold America at risk.
To “hold at risk” is to be able to threaten. This is Dick Cheney-style reasoning about not living with a world of competitors but neutralizing or eliminating them. It’s an impossible standard (that also appeared in Biden’s NSS) that guarantees the pursuit of primacy, or something even worse. The implication, if it’s not obvious, is that the current benchmark of a trillion dollars for America’s war machine is not nearly enough to match the ambitions of the Trump administration.
For those of us who have fought to make primacy a dirty word, we’ve succeeded but the target has shifted. This NSS does indeed rhetorically reject primacy, avoiding the term and repudiating previous presidents’ foreign policies as attempts to secure “permanent American domination of the entire world.” The problem is that this NSS prescribes something worse—a version of primacy we’ve never before seen attempted and for which we lack adequate language.
Primacy strategies have three core features:
It requires an extreme imbalance of power in the world-system favoring the US;
It prioritizes other great powers as the foremost threat to the state; and
It insists on using force to contain or diminish even hypothetical challenges to US supremacy.
This NSS nakedly prioritizes the first and third of these attributes of primacy; the second one (great powers as priority threats) is present but subordinated to racial-supremacist reasoning. Primacy strategies are supposed to be race-agnostic and this NSS is decidedly race-centric.
So this is actually worse than primacy in the sense that unmatched military superiority, coercion, and force are the primary means of making “the nation” secure, but the threat matrix is shifting to impose and police a kind of paranoiac version of a new global color line.
The difference between primacy and hegemony is that the former is a strategy for power-hoarding; the latter is a form of political order predicated on having succeeded in power-hoarding. Most analysts fail to distinguish strategies for securing favorable imbalances of power (eg, primacy) from strategies of stability or delivering global public goods (eg, hegemonic ordering).
What this NSS prescribes is pure predation: A power-hoarding strategy without any expectation of obligation or reciprocity that a hegemonic project would require.
Next up: Latin American imperialism,European liberals as the enemy, and China in the new threat matrix…
I struggle with following the logical throughline here. One the one hand, we're calling for more equitable burden sharing with allies (under the assumption that we want to reduce requirements on the U.S.) by pushing them to increase their own military capabilities. On the other hand, we're still going to continue pursuing military primacy [or insert preferred euphemism] despite shifting more defense burdens to these same allies. But if I look really hard, the latter part makes sense (from their viewpoint) if we can accept that the administration has some amount of self-awareness and can see that they're pushing away allies, thereby increasing the likelihood that these allies will become less aligned with the U.S., less willing to help "carry the burden," and more of a potential obstacle to U.S. preferences. Then if I squint and turn my head sideways, I can maybe see how the civilizational piece fits in, where promoting global (far) right wing actors will create the types of allies who will be aligned with the administration's vision for the world. In all likelihood, I'm probably reading too much coherence into this entire project and should instead get back to digging my end-of-the-world bunker.