The White House’s 2025 National Security Strategy is unique. These documents reflect the views of a sitting president’s closest aides and usually result from a carefully choreographed bureaucratic process. Their intended audience includes national security bureaucrats in the U.S. and abroad and the think-tankers and journalists obliged by a sense of professional responsibility to at least scan these generally leaden, cliché-ridden products of groupthink.
The 2025 NSS could not be more different. As chaotic, energetic and sometimes dysfunctional as the administration that produced it, the 33-page document voices the passionate convictions of the administration’s leading foreign policy thinkers. It is more manifesto than strategy document, expressing what its authors hope are the ideas that will guide American foreign policy for the next generation and giving us their interpretation of Mr. Trump’s underlying worldview.