U.S. President Donald Trump talks to the media while walking the red carpet before the 48th Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Having disrupted American politics, Donald Trump now is taking his most decisive step yet to disrupt world politics.
A 33-page National Security Strategy document released by his administration late last week amounts to a repudiation of the core precepts of three-quarters of a century of American foreign policy, a scathing critique of recent American history, a rejection of central elements of the country’s political character, and a strong indictment of the assumptions, institutions and byways of the world order that Mr. Trump’s predecessors created.
The Trump administration’s statement of national-security priorities, required by a 1986 law, is a disavowal of many if not all of the characteristics of global power that – in a great irony – permit Mr. Trump to have the military, economic and cultural assets and independence to reject them.
Mr. Trump’s policy pronouncement is a radical document, the most dramatic American statement since the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt a Europe devastated by the Second World War, one of the building blocks of the world order Mr. Trump seems determined to replace. Indeed, in toppling those building blocks, the American President has tipped and perhaps toppled many of the foundation stones of nations around the globe, especially in North America and Europe.
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No single element of this statement – the call for “Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting,” the “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism,” and the assertion that “The Era of Mass Migration Is Over,” all subheadlines to sections of the document – would be unfamiliar to any observer of American life since Mr. Trump announced his first campaign for the presidency a decade ago.
But what is striking, and consequential, is the accumulation of these elements, one after the other, in a coherently assembled document that heralds the end of an era and the withdrawal of a broad-shouldered, incomparably wealthy, peerlessly powerful country from the role it soldered together and, until now, literally soldiered to preserve.
This great departure, expressed in a document of disdain and disengagement that mentions Canada only glancingly, means that that project is over.
Previous presidents have proclaimed subtle shifts in American foreign policy – Richard Nixon’s 1973 “Year of Europe,” for example, or Barack Obama’s 2011 “Pivot to Asia” – but none has formally set out so comprehensive an overhaul of the country’s diplomatic and national-security approach as this.
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In one document, Mr. Trump, who has made a career saying things not said, is pledging to do things not done. Or, more precisely, to undo what his forerunners worked to do. It is as if Mr. Trump were heeding a mythical chorus of presidential predecessors, singing one of the signature lines of the traditional American folk ballad Rising Sun Blues: “Tell your children not to do what I have done.”
All the other great departures in modern American history – interventions in Korea and Vietnam, diplomatic relations with China, détente with Soviet Russia, armed intervention in support of Kuwait after Iraq’s 1990 invasion – were in service of the established goals of the United States: engagement to preserve the post-Second World War order.
Even George H.W. Bush’s grandly titled “New World Order,” set forth in a 1991 speech before Congress, didn’t remotely approach Mr. Trump’s panoramic new vision. The Bush conception of a “new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind – peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law,” and his plea that “such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children’s future,” could seamlessly be added to the text of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 “peace speech” without a soul discerning the intrusion.
If earlier presidents can be accused of thematic plagiarism from their predecessors, then Mr. Trump can be accused of a heist of Robert Graves’s 1929 dip into disillusionment, in an autobiography written a decade after the end of the First World War and titled Good-Bye to All That.
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This “goodbye” comes in perhaps the most remarkable written passage in modern American foreign policy, with implications even greater than Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, drafted during the worldwide conflict that so alienated Mr. Graves.
“Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest,” the 2025 statement argues. “They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own.”
One element of the Trump doctrine has powerful antecedents in American life: disdain for Europe, a notion dating to the poet Philip Freneau’s 1784 critique of “Europe’s proud, despotic shores.”
Even so, as late as the mid-1960s, American schools gave far more emphasis to teaching French (spoken by a mere six million people in the Western Hemisphere, principally in Quebec) than Spanish (spoken by as many as 200 million in the hemisphere). This was because French was explicitly regarded as the language of diplomacy and spoken by elites from Chopin to Churchill throughout the continent that Mr. Trump has singled out for facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”
One signal departure: James Monroe didn’t call his 1823 vow to keep European interests from the Western Hemisphere the Monroe Doctrine, Harry Truman didn’t call his 1947 pledge to support nations battling communism the Truman Doctrine, and Mr. Nixon didn’t call his 1969 pledge to honour existing commitments the Nixon Doctrine.
But this document, in classic Trump self-promotion, plainly speaks of the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. If the “Trump Corollary” term were added to embellish the President’s image and to establish him as a major figure in American history, it was completely unnecessary. Both this document and the precedent-shattering of the first year of his second term have done that with dramatic effectiveness and steely efficiency.