America’s new National Security Strategy reads less like a plan for stability and more like a sermon for chaos, trading diplomacy for dogma and unity for delusion, writes Mark Beeson.
READING THE self-justificatory strategy documents that countries occasionally issue is not for the faint-hearted. They generally manage to be tedious, unconvincing and, to put it delicately, full of improbable assumptions and claims.
At least the recently released National Security Strategy of the United States of America isn’t dull. On the contrary, it’s truly alarming.
Consequently, it's worth a look no matter what your view of the United States and its current leader may be. For better or worse, it still exercises an enormous influence over the rest of the world in general and on enthusiastic allies like Australia in particular. Spoiler alert: to judge by this document, as bad as things are now, they could get even worse if this is what passes for America’s master plan.
Bizarrely, one of the main aims of American grand strategy under President Donald Trump – the only person who gets a mention in the author's acknowledgements – is ‘the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible’.
To be fair, given the increasingly polarised, toxic and violent nature of contemporary American society, there are worse ideas.
Unfortunately, this potentially admirable ambition is undermined by foreign and domestic policy practice. Trump is not exactly an advertisement for ‘spiritual and cultural health’ or even the more mundane variety. What makes this ambition even more unsettling, however, is that the authors of this document suggest that one of their key foreign policy goals is to halt Europe’s ‘civilisational erasure’ by encouraging nationalist political allies in Europe ‘to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties’.
By failing to protect their borders and encouraging the ‘censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition’, Europeans are thought to be threatening the foundations of their own cultures and even NATO when it becomes a ‘majority non-European’ region. Only Viktor Orbán-style populism and authoritarianism can hold back a tide of people from what Trump refers to as “shithole countries”.
It's important to remember that Trump is full of admiration for “strong men” leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and has borrowed ideas from Orbán about the need to control the media, the courts and the universities.
While the implications for domestic policy are consequently dire, they’re not much better for the international system and whatever may be left of the much-invoked rules-based international order:
“The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritise their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organisations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.”
So much for being the foundation of the sort of enlightened multilateralism that “middle powers” like Australia depend on. Indeed, for those of us who think the European Union, for all its current problems, is the best example of enlightened, cooperative and effective international cooperation that the world has ever seen, American disdain for the European model is profoundly depressing.
The claim that ‘competence and merit are among our greatest civilisational advantages: where the best Americans are hired, promoted and honoured, innovation and prosperity follow’, is comical at best, given the people who surround Trump, whose principal claim to advancement is flattering the boss and carrying out his orders, no matter how self-serving and/or inappropriate they may be.
Under such circumstances, we might have expected the anonymous authors of this report to be a little more circumspect about drawing attention to the way the Trump Administration actually works, especially when it comes to self-enrichment and facilitating the interests of cronies.
On the contrary, however, the report claims that America’s ‘soft power’ remains unrivalled, presumably because ‘we must not overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share interests and who want to work with us’. A tolerance for different outlooks might explain Trump’s bromance with the notoriously brutal regime of Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. The Administration doesn’t let a few violations of human rights or even murder get in the way of lucrative deals.
Nor does Trump worry excessively about disregarding international law, much less the sort of norms that were once thought to be central to America’s hegemonic influence. What’s described as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine helps to explain the extra-judicial killings that have distinguished American policy toward Venezuela recently. According to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the “Peace President” can employ America’s overwhelming hard power as he sees fit if he doesn’t get his way.
Given all of the above, it comes as no surprise that the National Security Strategy rejects the ‘disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries’. No evidence is provided for this or anything else in the document, of course, but that hardly matters: it’s an unequivocal expression of what the Trump regime takes to be ‘the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built’.
Thankfully, many Americans are just as concerned about this sort of disdain for truth and the dismemberment of the foundations of American democracy as key allies are. To judge by their actions, however, political and strategic elites in this country seem unperturbed; they generally remain in thrall to the U.S. and incapable of independent thought, much less action. A serious debate about the nature of security and the best way of achieving it is long overdue in this country.
We should be offering solidarity and support to those who are struggling to save American democracy, not ingratiating ourselves with its chief destroyer. Unfortunately, even the likes of the EU are finding it hard to stand up to the bullying tactics of an administration with a complete disdain for the rule of law, not to mention morality or decency. We should recognise that authoritarianism should be resisted no matter where it comes from. The costs could be incalculable if we don’t.
Mark Beeson is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. He was previously Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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