Politics Trump’s New National Security Strategy Is Refreshing, Troubling, and Odd The long-awaited document is a mixed bag. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images) After months of internal debate and numerous rounds of revisions, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy is finally out. The 29-page document is designed to provide the American people, allies, and adversaries alike an idea of what the United States seeks to accomplish in the foreign policy space, how it intends to go about achieving the goals it sets out for itself, and what the White House will and will not tolerate. As one might expect, the Washington foreign policy circle’s heartbeat went up a few dozen beats a minute the moment the document was posted on the White House website. Overall, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less a strategy than a guidepost of what the administration intends to do. Indeed, the term “strategy” is somewhat of a misnomer; the real purpose of these efforts is to cobble together a series of general frameworks and concepts, region-by-region, that all of the different stakeholders in the executive branch—the National Security Council, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department, etc.—can rally around. That’s precisely why the drafting process took so long—everybody needs to be on board, and any one principal or department can hold up the product if they don’t think their equities are being defended.  With all this being said, there’s plenty in Trump’s strategy that is uncontroversial, right, and frankly refreshing. Unlike the national security strategies of yesteryear, when the phrase “rules-based international order” was sprinkled throughout the pages like confetti at a parade, Trump only uses the phrase once (on page 19)—and in a mocking tone. This will spark histrionics from the liberal internationalists among us, but the phrase has long since outlived its usefulness and is one of the world’s most prevalent myths anyway. Any rules in place are easily broken by the major powers, including the United States, whose history before, during, and after the Cold War is riddled with regime change wars of various stripes, covert operations against adversarial governments, and sanctions regimes against a slew of states (Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Nicaragua to name just a few) that aim to cause economic implosion. U.S. officials tend to get on their soapboxes and preach about universal values but frequently don’t practice their own gospel. At least we’re no longer pretending. The objectives outlined in Trump’s manifesto are pretty conventional as well. For instance, the U.S. doesn’t want cartels and people-smuggling rings running around unhindered in the Western Hemisphere. It hopes to maintain a predominant position in its own near-abroad, which every great power has done since the dawn of time. The U.S. military should be equipped and trained to the highest standards. Who can argue with that? Burden-sharing, in which U.S. allies in Europe and Asia devote more money to their defense budgets and otherwise act as primary security guardians in their own neighborhoods, will now be a priority. U.S. alliances, in turn, will be maintained but reformed to be more equitable. And the U.S. economy will be a top consideration in foreign policy deliberations. None of this is especially noteworthy and is frankly so unremarkable that you wouldn’t bat much of an eye if it was included in Barack Obama’s or Joe Biden’s strategies.  A refreshing tidbit: the United States will now have a focused and clear definition of the U.S. national interest. “Since at least the end of the Cold War,” the document states, “administrations have often published National Security Strategies that seek to expand the definition of America’s ‘national interest’ such that almost no issue or endeavor is considered outside its scope.” This is indisputably true and is one of the cardinal sins the U.S. foreign policy establishment commits on a daily basis: If everything is included as an interest worth defending or promoting, then the U.S. military will be overextended, the U.S. foreign policy toolkit will eventually spread too thin, and the probability of Washington achieving any of its goals goes down immeasurably. In other words, if everything is a priority, nothing is.  Finally, consider me grateful that the administration had a few choice words for the Europeans on the war in Ukraine. To this day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are shuttling between Russian and Ukrainian officials in an effort to solidify a peace process that is actually durable. Multiple drafts of a peace treaty have been revised and exchanged; input has been collected by the Ukrainians and Russians; and various formulations have been proposed with the hope that the core needs of the combatants can somehow be massaged. The fact that this has proven to be much more difficult than Trump envisioned when he first entered office in January doesn’t mean U.S. officials shouldn’t try.  The Europeans, however, haven’t really gotten in on the action and seem more comfortable with carping from the sidelines than being proactive actors. We hear a ton of speechifying from EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, French President Emmanuel Macron, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about the absolute necessity of striking a so-called “just peace” for Ukraine, which sounds terrific in theory. But in practice, it’s not possible, particularly if you use Kiev’s definition of what a “just peace” will entail: a Russian troop withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian land; Russian compensation to the tune of tens of billions of dollars; the prosecution of Russian officials and soldiers for war crimes; and ironclad Western security guarantees for Ukraine. The Europeans have said again and again that the latter item on this list won’t happen unless the U.S. military takes the lead in the arrangement. And as far as the others, the notion that any demands on this wish-list will be met is, to put it charitably, unlikely. Any peace accord in Ukraine, assuming one is reached, will be composed of ugly compromises and awful terms for the Ukrainians due to the facts on the ground as they currently exist. Ignoring this reality is akin to expanding the war for another few years, at the risk of an even worse battlefield position for Ukraine if negotiations re-commence.   Yet there are some troubling aspects to Trump’s strategy we shouldn’t sweep under the carpet. Trump’s determination that U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere should be protected is not a bad thing in and of itself, but the way the administration has attempted to pursue this objective has the risk of alienating the very countries in Latin America we need as cooperative partners.  The ongoing U.S. strikes on supposed drug-carrying boats in the Southern Caribbean is perhaps the biggest case in point. With the exception of Trinidad and Tobago and perhaps the Dominican Republic, no other state in the region supports what the Trump administration is doing. Colombia, traditionally Washington’s biggest security partner in Latin America and a country whose intelligence often leads to drug interdictions by the U.S. Coast Guard, is highly contemptuous of unilateral U.S. military action. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has called the U.S. boat strikes a campaign of extrajudicial killing, which is not far off the mark. To Trump, the strikes represent bold American action to get a handle on a problem, drug trafficking, that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. But to the vast majority of the region’s governments, what Trump is presently doing is the worst form of U.S. hegemony one can imagine, sparking memories of past U.S. interventions—the 1954 U.S.-sponsored coup in Guatemala; U.S. covert actions in Cuba; the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic; the contra wars of the 1980s in Nicaragua; and the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama—that were either failures, produced civil wars (in the case of Guatemala), or paved the way for unpopular governments (like Manuel Noriega’s immediate successor in Panama). Add the often inexplicable U.S. tariffs on Brazil as well as U.S. meddling in Argentina and Honduras’s elections and you can quickly understand why the Western Hemisphere might grow tired of a bumbling, big hegemon to the north whose preference is to throw sticks rather than carrots. The Middle East section is also a bit odd, not because of what Trump ostensibly seeks to do there—deprioritize the region from U.S. grand strategy—but rather because of its inaccurate depiction of how the regional security environment looks at the moment. You’d be forgiven for thinking the Middle East’s major conflict points have been resolved. They haven’t been, nor is U.S. mediation likely to be the silver-bullet the Trump administration claims it is.  Trump’s peace plan in Gaza is still in its initial stages, and the ceasefire that was supposed to lead to a new political order in the Palestinian enclave has been violated countless times by both Israel and Hamas. The Board of Peace that will administer the technocratic, post-Hamas interim administration in Gaza is still nowhere to be found—indeed, the Palestinian government isn’t even formed yet. Israel continues striking Lebanon on a daily basis. And Israeli forces raid Syrian territory as if it was an extension of the West Bank—raids that complicate Trump’s own strategy with Syria, including but not limited to normalizing U.S. relations with Damascus and bringing the Israelis and Syrians into some kind of deescalation agreement. Iran’s nuclear program, meanwhile, is not “obliterated” as Trump likes to say, only significantly damaged. Iran’s strategic calculation after the U.S. bombing campaign last June is likely the same as it was before the bombs were released. In short, Trump’s policy document isn’t fabulous. But it’s not a travesty either. And given Trump’s propensity to make policy on the fly, it can hardly be called permanent. The post Trump’s New National Security Strategy Is Refreshing, Troubling, and Odd appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Did Britain’s Chancellor Lie About Her Monster Budget? Quibbles about rhetoric distract from the radicalism of the tax and welfare hikes. UK Special Coverage (Photo by Henry NICHOLLS / AFP via Getty Images) British politicians rarely lie. Even Boris Johnson’s notorious claim on the red Brexit bus in 2016 that Britain sends £350 million a week to the European Union was not actually a lie. That was the official level of Britain’s contribution to the Brussels budget. What the advert didn’t say was that around half comes back in the form of rebates and investment subsidies. So this week, when the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and most of the UK media accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of “lying” about the state of the UK’s deficit in order to justify tax rises, I did not add my voice to the clamour. In fact, she had done something almost as bad. She used sleight of hand to push through yet another increase in Britain’s already unsustainable welfare bill. Reeves was doing what all politicians do, which is being economical with the truth. When she delivered her dire warnings about the “black hole” in public finances in an alarmist early morning address to UK voters just weeks before budget day, she did not inform them that the independent budgetary watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, had radically downgraded its expectations of the gap. She did not, in fact, have to increase taxes by £26 billion in order to reassure the bond markets that the UK finances were sound. The notional deficit had actually turned into a nominal surplus of about £4 billion as a result of better-than-expected tax returns. But Reeves kept talking about black holes to divert attention from what was in fact “a Budget for Benefits Street,” as Badenoch put it—a reckless gamble with the nation’s future. Britain is already drowning in a sea of welfare, the cost of which is set to rise to over £300 billion, nearly a quarter of the UK budget. Spending on health and disability benefits alone could reach £100 billion by 2029. Almost a million young people are not in work or training. Britain’s bewildering array of benefits can, for those who know how to work the system, deliver a very comfortable living without having to work. The left-leaning Centre for Social Justice has revealed that “benefits pay £2,500 more than wages of a full-time job after tax.” This is clearly insane. Yet when Reeves entered government in 2024 she promised to cut the Tory “welfare bill” and said that the government would be “laser-focused” on increasing Britain’s moribund growth rate. Reeves also promised not to increase taxes on working people. In the event, she has increased taxes on working people (and pensioners) by a total of £66 billion across two budgets. Again: Did she lie? Technically no, since she defined “taxes on working people” narrowly as referring to income tax rates, National Insurance payments, and value added tax (sales tax). These she has not actually increased. Instead, she increased taxes on businesses and froze income tax thresholds on workers, meaning that a million more Brits on modest incomes of £50,000 (about $67,000) find themselves paying tax at 42%, including 2 percent National Insurance. If they have a student loan you can add 9 percent, meaning a marginal tax rate of 51 percent. This is the so-called “stealth tax” approach to public finance. But it isn’t so stealthy anymore; taxpayers are waking up to the reality of high-tax/high-welfare Britain. A majority believe Reeves has broken her manifesto pledge. Perhaps voters would’ve cut the Chancellor a little slack if they’d thought that these tax hikes would improve the state of public services or help grow the economy. But they know, and she knows, they won’t—at least not so anyone would notice. The OBR forecast is that UK GDP will essentially flatline for the next five years at just over 1 percent if lucky, while the benefits bill grows by at least £80 billion. The Labour Party government may say they want economic growth, but many Labour MPs think “growth” should be measured by growth in spending on public services, ignoring the inconvenient truth that it is the taxes of private-sector workers—82 percent of the UK workforce—that pay the salaries and pensions of well-heeled public-sector workers. Almost the first thing Reeves did on entering government was award Labour’s paymasters, the public sector unions, by handing out above-inflation pay rises to those treasured public-sector workers. NHS junior doctors got a 22 percent increase in pay last year. They have expressed their gratitude by ordering a new wave of strike action over this Christmas season, despite warnings of the risk to patient care. The most controversial welfare hand-out in Reeves’s budget was the lifting of the two-child cap on Universal Credit payments. The Conservative government had ruled years ago that people living on benefits should not be able to have large families paid for by the taxes of working families who could not afford to have more than two children themselves. Labour said that the Tories had plunged more than 300,000 children into poverty. They hadn’t, of course: it was arguably the decisions by welfare families themselves, since the policy was first announced in 2015. No one forced them to have three or more kids. But Labour MPs cheered to the rafters when she announced that the two-child benefit cap was to be lifted. What Reeves didn’t say was that this move will also reward many Muslim families who tend to have larger families. Some Labour MPs in multiracial urban constituencies rely for their majorities on the votes of ethnic minorities and people on benefits. But did she lie about this? No. She just never talked about it, knowing that anyone who did talk about the ethnic dimension will be labelled a racist. This Labour government is testing the UK economy to destruction. Can a society survive on welfare instead of work? We’re about to find out. And that’s no lie. The post Did Britain’s Chancellor Lie About Her Monster Budget? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Let’s Bet on Pete Hegseth’s Professional Future I’m putting my money where my mouth is. The real problem with non-election years is that there’s nothing to bet on besides the boring old standbys of sportsbook and horseracing. But the political realities of the Golden Age of America may be about to change that. Pete Hegseth is a survivor. The secretary of defense has managed to hang in there for 10 months, despite the turbulence: “Signalgate,” which claimed Mike Waltz’s job as national security advisor; a circular firing squad among his aids at the Pentagon, which earned him some very interesting profiles in POLITICO and New York magazine; a military parade that was just sort of a let-down for everyone involved, both those who said it would be cool and patriotic and those who said it would be terrifying and fascistic. This is impressive in a morally neutral way. Better men have already been driven to madness and unemployment by this administration’s hijinks. There’s a certain type of brute will to hold on that you can’t help but admire. This boat business is beginning to be a stinker, though. As part of our open-ended excursion in the Caribbean that definitely isn’t aimed at regime-change in Caracas, we’ve been blowing up go-fast boats that are alleged to be involved in drug trafficking—an allegation that is credible enough at the statistical level, albeit not for the fentanyl the administration is back to telling us is coming out of Venezuela. (How many fans and supporters of the ’80s-retro administration know that this is mostly disrupting the coke supply?) The problem is that it’s all been sort of half-cocked at the pesky particular level. In October, we blew up a boat and then repatriated the survivors—not exactly the usual practice if these are the fearsome terrorists the admin is insisting they are. And now, by Washington Post reporting and (basically) the admission of the administration, it looks like in September, instead of repatriating the survivors of one of our missile strikes, we blew them up to finish the job. Prima facie, this looks pretty bad. You’re not supposed to blow up the helpless survivors of a military engagement; that’s considered pretty naughty behavior. (Comparisons to how we deal with pirates, the old legal category of the hostis humani generis, are specious; pirates, if disarmed and captured in an engagement, still got due process, even if an extremely abbreviated form of it.) People have trotted out terms like “war crimes,” which is pretty stiff stuff if “war crimes” is a category you believe exists; others have stuck with tried-and-true, down-from-the-Mountain stuff: “murder.” The administration is acting pretty spooked; Hegseth, Admiral Frank Bradley, and other participants as yet unrevealed to the viewers at home are hopping on the blame carousel. For his part, Hegseth has alleged that he “didn’t stick around” for the second boat strike, and so can’t be held responsible for whatever he said that might have been construed as an order to attack disarmed survivors; he has also said the decision, while totally, indubitably, 100 percent correct, was nevertheless made in the “fog of war.” All right then. Hegseth’s Pentagon has been a persistent clown show from the get-go, and now it is wandering onto the marshy ground of straightforward illegality and/or war atrocities. It is proven that the administration’s appetite for abject self-embarrassment isn’t limitless (cf. Waltz). So, in my official capacity as managing editor of The American Conservative, I am inaugurating the first-ever and probably only Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Professional Death Pool.  Rules: Only subscribers are eligible. Send me by email the date that you think it will be announced Hegseth will depart, what date you think will be Hegseth’s last day at the Department of Defense, and answers to two tie-breaker bonus questions: Will Hegseth resign or be fired? Will Hegseth get another administration job? (Finding my email on the site is the main barrier to entry. I will email a confirmation back to you after I’ve determined you’re actually a subscriber.) At time of publication, there are 1140 days left to the Trump administration; your date will be converted to a number from 1 to 1140. The score will be calculated by the following scheme: |DAYOFANNOUNCEMENT – YOURANNOUNCEDATE| + |DAYOFDEPARTURE – YOURDEPARTDATE|  = SCORE. A perfect score is 0. I will personally cover a year’s subscription for the winner or winners of this professional death pool. Ties will be determined by tie-breaker questions; post-breaker ties will be honored in full. (For fun, my bet is that Slippery Pete announces February 1, 2026, and leaves March 1—that is to say, Days 57 and 85.) It is my theory that reality can get very stupid, but perhaps not indefinitely stupid. The inaugural (and final?) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Professional Death Pool is a fun, edifying way to quantify just how stupid it can get. At least it’s something to do between now and midterms. The post Let’s Bet on Pete Hegseth’s Professional Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

America Did Not Owe the Afghan National Who Murdered Sarah Beckstrom Resettlement in the United States

Crooks, Disguised As 'Protectors,' Are Still on the Loose