The Trump Administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy on December 4, 2025.[1] It was unusual for a NSS in that it did not specify and explain the risks to the United States and its allies posed by adversaries. Rather than outlining the intent and capabilities of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, as the first Trump NSS did in 2017 and the Biden NSS did in 2022, it focused its criticism on the decisions of ally nations that risk what the 2025 NSS called “civilizational erasure.” And unlike the 2017 Trump NSS, it also failed to take hold of the role as “leader” among its allies in the civilizational West. But it did maintain similarities with the first Trump Administration’s NSS in ways that are important to highlight, and it does present opportunities to build on important continuity from across administrations.
First, it emphasized the administration’s view that the “world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.”[2] This view, that nation states will vie for power according to the perceived interests of each one, was reflected in the first Trump NSS, putting it in the conservative as opposed to liberal school of thought in international relations.
Recall the first Trump NSS, from 2017. There is an emphasis on sovereign nation-states as those with the capacity to enable stability, none more than the United States. It sets a strategy to lead in the world while prioritizing American interests and defending the American way of life. It also describes the strategy as one of “principled realism” in an era of challenging competition between nation-states with rival interests and aspirations to harm the United States and its vital interests, including its treaty allies. It also criticized previous administrations for relying too much on other nations complying with fair practices within international institutions and for failing to more forcefully compete for U.S. advantage. It said, “We stood by while countries exploited the international institutions we helped to build. They subsidized their industries, forced technology transfers, and distorted markets.”[3]
It pointedly characterized the behavior of America’s most powerful adversaries saying,
China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence. At the same time, the dictatorships of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran are determined to destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people.[4]
It is from this assessment of the motives of adversary nations that the 2017 Trump NSS articulated a strategy to defend U.S. interests by competing with, deterring, and, if necessary, wining against adversaries.
The 2022 Biden NSS likewise embraced a leadership role for the United States. But in a meaningful nuance, its authors viewed the means of improving a fraying international order differently than the 2017 Trump NSS. The 2022 Biden NSS placed a greater emphasis on international institutions and cooperation, in contrast to encouraging strong, sovereign nations. Woodrow Wilson sought to replace power rivalry with cooperation through supranational organizations.[5] It would not be accurate to categorize the Biden NSS as purely Wilsonian, but it did give more weight to Wilsonian aspirations than either Trump strategies. It characterized the threats posed by Russia and China as less directed towards the United States concretely, and more towards the global system, as such:
Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown. The PRC, by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.[6]
Thus, the Biden NSS, while clearly identifying the external threats, could more accurately be described as a strategy within the conceptional framework of liberal internationalism.
Despite the meaningful differences from its predecessors in the form of highlighting its European allies’ democratic deficiencies and failures to husband and strengthen resources to vie for sovereignty and power, its departure from the first Trump NSS in its muted discussion of its many varied authoritarian adversaries, and its decision to eschew a leadership role among allies, the 2025 NSS does not signal a shift in core global interests. Indeed, it reaffirms that its vital interests are within its own hemisphere, global sea lanes far from its hemisphere, the Middle East, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific. It also expresses the goal of maintaining “the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.”[7]
Therefore, the United States’ allies and Washington’s own foreign policy strategists can continue to build on the strategies that bolster the credibility of deterrence against the shared threats to those expressed areas of overlapping vital interests. The first Trump Administration and the Biden Administration sought to encourage European and Pacific allies, for example, to increase conventional deterrence, even as the United States maintains its fundamental role of nuclear deterrence and assurance.
The 2025 NSS makes it especially clear that the United States won’t cede ground to China. It reaffirms U.S. policy that it “does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”[8] The United States will continue working with allies to create incentives for shared adversaries to choose peace. This is further bolstered by the Trump Administration’s decision to maintain AUKUS, bolster the Quad, and to prioritize military weapons sales to Taiwan.[9]
Even despite its sharp critique of several Europeans policies, the 2025 NSS lauds commitments from NATO allies to boost defense spending and to take on more of the defense burden. Moreover, it declares that “transatlantic trade remains one of the pillars of the global economy and of American prosperity.” Indeed, last year U.S. exports of goods and services to Europe accounted for 28 percent of all U.S. exports and Europe contributed 59 percent of all foreign direct investment into the United States.[10] The 2025 Trump NSS places a greater focus on its material interests and less on the value of democracy-promotion as such, but its democratic allies have produced such economic prosperity, prodigious scientific research and technology, etc. that their security remains tied to America’s security.
Thus, even if U.S. diplomacy takes a sharp departure, including its use of trade and tariffs to shape and change the behavior of allies and adversaries alike, the United States should, and seems to be poised to, continue to prioritize nuclear weapons modernization and bolstering the credibility of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence. Shortly after the release of the NSS, American Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum that the U.S. nuclear deterrent “is the foundation of our nation’s defense. Nothing else matters if we don’t get this right, and so we will.”[11] It is also important that he rightfully noted that the United States faces “two other major nuclear-armed powers.”[12] The U.S. Strategic Posture Commission concluded that deterring China and Russia simultaneously places a demand on U.S. strategic posture such that the nuclear modernization program of record is “necessary but not sufficient.”[13] The 2025 Trump NSS’s statement that nuclear deterrence is a priority along with Golden Dome is, therefore, consistent with the recommendations of this pivotal bipartisan report. The Trump administration has signaled in other ways that it is open to, and even favors, prioritizing nuclear deterrence. And so, maintaining bipartisan efforts to do this, working with allies to invest more in their respective defense industrial bases and increasing their role in conventional deterrence (as well as the nuclear deterrence mission) should continue.
The 2025 NSS’s sharp criticisms of allies certainly risks trust and credibility of assurances and positive diplomatic cooperation. Allies will understandably bristle at the public criticisms of domestic policies while the United States emphasizes the defense of the principle of national sovereignty. Furthermore, the public debate and even the issuance of U.S. threats to forcibly acquire Greenland likewise make diplomatic efforts to encourage allies to invest more in conventional weapons and to buy American weapons systems far more difficult. (President Trump has clarified that the United States will not use threats of force against its ally, Greenland,[14] and Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified that discussions for securing Greenland are now occurring in professional diplomatic fora.[15] Still, the damage between allies may have lasting negative consequences.) Policymakers in Congress and across the administration should, as the 2025 NSS encourages, have “clear eyes” and acknowledge these setbacks, make corrections where possible, and work to restore and maintain the working relationships necessary to collaborate with allies on the most urgent and pressing threats to U.S. vital interests. Still, the reality of the threats, and this administration’s acknowledgment of U.S. vital interests retain continuity on which the United States and its allies can and should build.
Read the full journal in the National Institute for Public Policy.
Endnotes
- The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, November 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Sec…. ↑
- Ibid., p. 9. ↑
- The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, December 2017), https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf. ↑
- Ibid., p. 2. ↑
- Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949) p. 16. ↑
- The White House, National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: White House, October 2022), p. 8, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf. ↑
- National Security Strategy, 2025, op. cit., p. 3. ↑
- Ibid., p. 23. ↑
- Zita B. Fletcher, “Trump Backs US Nuclear Submarine Deal for Australia,” Defense News, October 21, 2025, https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2025/10/21/trump-backs-us-nuclear-sub…; “2025 Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting,” U.S. Department of State, July 1, 2025, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/07/2025-…; Matthew Lee and Simina Mistreanu, “US Announces Massive Package of Arms Sales to Taiwan Valued at More than $10 Billion, Angering China,” Associated Press, December 18, 2025, https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2025/12/18/us-preps-mas…. ↑
- These figures are based on data from January through October 2025, which is the latest available and not yet seasonally adjusted. Ken Roberts, “New Trade War Risk? For 1st Time, Europe Bigger Export Market than Asia,” Forbes, January 21, 2026, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/21/new-trade-war-risk-f…; Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Table 6.2. U.S. International Financial Transactions for Direct Investment by Country and Industry,” U.S. Department of Commerce, January 14, 2026, https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=62&step=6&isuri=1&tablelist=31006&pr…; Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Table 4.5. U.S. International Transactions in Primary Income on Direct Investment by Country and Industry,” U.S. Department of Commerce, January 14, 2026, https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=62&step=6&isuri=1&tablelist=31004&pr…. ↑
- Secretary Pete Hegseth, “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Keynote Address at the Reagan National Defense Forum,” Department of War, December 6, 2025, YouTube video, https://youtu.be/LAQbqbhVsdc?si=g-Ly8VVdDXAtr24i&t=1482. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, America’s Strategic Posture: The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States (2023), pp. 51, 101, https://www.ida.org/research-and-publications/publications/all/a/am/ame…. ↑
- President Donald J. Trump, “Davos 2026: Special Address by the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” January 21, 2026, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-donald-trump-president-united-states-america/. ↑
- Aamar Madhani, “Rubio says technical talks with Denmark, Greenland officials over Arctic security have begun,” Associated Press, January 28, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/trump-rubio-greenland-denmark-technical-talks-7e2180f90bc6e7a6005a6895a8164a00. ↑