Late Thursday night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). The intent seems to be a return to the Monroe Doctrine by increasing the United States military presence in the Western Hemisphere, taking on the drug cartels, enhancing border security, making trade deals that are better for the United States, and enhancing American energy production.
The Hill had this to say:
The 33-page document builds on Trump’s “America First” ideology but also provides the first explicit reference to the president replicating the Monroe Doctrine, calling for U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” the document states.
The document doesn’t explicitly lay out a U.S. retreat from the globe, but it does call for increasing burden sharing among allies, elevating American economic interests and access to critical supply chains, and “unleashing” American energy production.
That's not the worst high-level take on the NSS, but a look at the actual document is illustrative.
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You can see the entire Trump administration NSS here. Here are some highlights.
The NSS states as its purpose:
To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world. And to get that right, all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why.
A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.
A strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy. The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy.
One of the more interesting (but not surprising) pieces of this NSS is the overt and robust return to the Monroe Doctrine, an early 19th-century policy intended to restrict further European colonization of the Western Hemisphere and to ensure American dominance in that region. The modern take on this doctrine by the Trump administration uses American power by employing both internal and external security measures. The NSS states:
American policy should focus on enlisting regional champions that can help create tolerable stability in the region, even beyond those partners’ borders. These nations would help us stop illegal and destabilizing migration, neutralize cartels, nearshore manufacturing, and develop local private economies, among other things. We will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy. But we must not overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share interests and who want to work with us.
A quick read of that would seem to be referencing the ongoing pressure being placed on Venezuela, and the detonation of drug-carrying speedboats, although Venezuela is not specifically mentioned anywhere in this NSS. China, however, is mentioned, and we should note that China has been working to increase its influence in Latin America. That, under the new, revised Monroe Doctrine - perhaps we should start calling it the Trump Doctrine - is another national security item that the NSS directly addresses, when discussing American strategy in the Indo-Pacific.
Clearly, the Trump administration intends to ensure that the United States continues to stand astride the Western Hemisphere like the Colossus of Rhodes. But the Pacific is an area of real concern, as well. China, again, is pushing to increase its economic and military profile in the Western Pacific, and our key allies in that region, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, are in its way.
Going forward, we will rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence. Trade with China should be balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors. If America remains on a growth path—and can sustain that while maintaining a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing—we should be headed from our present $30 trillion economy in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s, putting our country in an enviable position to maintain our status as the world’s leading economy. Our ultimate goal is to lay the foundation for long-term economic vitality.
Importantly, this must be accompanied by a robust and ongoing focus on deterrence to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific. This combined approach can become a virtuous cycle as strong American deterrence opens up space for more disciplined economic action, while more disciplined economic action leads to greater American resources to sustain deterrence in the long term.
That may be easier said than done. China, like Russia, our other primary geopolitical rival, is on the edge of a demographic cliff and is poised to step off. Time is not on China's side, which may put the Middle Kingdom in the disconcerting position of being ruled by an increasingly desperate Chinese Communist Party with a growing military, nuclear weapons, and an extremely troubling tendency to explore biological agents.
The new 2025 Trump administration's National Security Strategy warrants a careful read. The intent is simple enough: To ensure American dominance over the Western Hemisphere, to keep China out, the drug cartels down, to enhance American energy production, border security, and military dominance. Those are all good goals for the United States and our allies.
Now, we look ahead to see how these articles will be executed, noting that, of course, Democrats in Congress and elsewhere will do everything in their power to stop them.
[Editor's Note: this article was edited for clarity post-publication.]
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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