Sovereignty For Me, None For Thee

National security strategies (NSS) are odd things.  Required by law under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, most of them are filled with boilerplate and rather boring to read. However, these documents enable a new presidency to distinguish its priorities, values, and differences from previous administrations, thus revealing ideological shifts over time. 

In this respect, President Trump’s recently released NSS shows that the MAGA movement finally knows what it’s about in foreign affairs. It has merged its domestic and foreign policies into a single struggle to preserve the “spiritual and cultural health” of the nation as well as the hierarchies and norms that sustain that vitality. Its worldview is defined by right-wing obsessions with political correctness, wokeness, gender, immigration and race. 

The new NSS views other nations not through the lens of democracy v. autocracy but in terms of whether the ruling elite of that nation shares their obsessions. It challenges the legitimacy of any nation or international body that runs by liberal principles. Finally, it claims to treasure the value of sovereignty for all nation-states while establishing principles that justify U.S. interference. This approach to foreign policy marks a considerable break with previous administrations of both parties and even with the approach spelled out in Trump’s first-term NSS.

The disparate elements of this poorly written NSS are unified by the right’s desire to preserve a web of overlapping hierarchies and values: the domination of white Christian men in American society, of the United States in the Western hemisphere, and of white Christian civilization in the world. Security, in this telling, means preserving a conception of the nation rooted in a blood-and-soil identity rather than shared civic ideals.

Culture War First

In this vision, “cultural subversion” is as much if not more of a threat than great power competition. The subversion of cultural health can come from a host of sources: liberals, immigrants, global institutions, LGBT people, non-Christians, and so on. 

This mentality casts national security and sovereignty in a new light for MAGA. Take immigration, for example, which this document describes as an “invasion.” The NSS states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” “Any country that considers itself sovereign” must approach immigration policy in a way that preserves a certain vision of the country, which in this case means white and Christian. America’s sovereignty would in effect be destroyed even if it legally admitted foreigners who did not meet these traits because the nation’s essence would be transformed. 

This outlook illuminates the administration’s preference for white immigrants, like those from South Africa who are presumed to be “easily assimilated into our country,” and its revocation of temporary protected status for Afghans and its targeting of Somalis and other groups.

Restoring security and sovereignty in the MAGA sense begins with waging relentless culture war. According to the new NSS, the United States must restore “strong, traditional families that raise healthy children” as the basis of national “well-being.” The NSS denounces “globalism” and brags about getting “radical gender ideology,” “woke lunacy,” and “DEI and other discriminatory practices” out of the military. It praises “merit” (in contrast to DEI) as “among our greatest civilizational advantages” and asserts that merit has been “smothered” by “radical ideologies that seek to replace competence and merit with favored group status.” 

Ultimately, each of these complaints is reasserting the dominance of white Christian men at home and abroad, putting women, non-Christians, people of color, LGBT people, and others back in their designated places, and recreating a mythical national unity that they believe bolsters U.S. global power.

Sovereignty and Legitimacy

The post-liberal right often proclaims a principled commitment to a world of “independent, self-governed nations…each pursuing its own nation interests and upholding national traditions that are its own,” in the words of the National Conservatism Conference’s Statement of Principles. This is the “only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.” The new NSS similarly pays homage to sovereignty: “The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state…We stand for the sovereign rights of nations.”

In reality, the NSS only views other nations as legitimate, and therefore fully sovereign, if they align with the right’s culture war aims. This is most salient regarding Europe, where MAGA intellectuals have long denigrated Europe’s transnational institutions and liberal politics and lionized far-right authoritarians. 

The 2025 NSS transforms these anxieties into policy. It laments the “civilizational erasure” of Europe, which the NSS accuses of losing its “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” This is an open allusion to the right’s panic about non-white immigration and the demographic “replacement” of white Christian population in Europe, which has become the animating principle of the European far right. 

This NSS takes this point a step further by arguing that the transatlantic alliance can function only if it is composed of traditional white Christian states. It reads: “It is more than plausible that within a few decades certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”

For the authors of the NSS, a prime cause of Europe’s loss of the will to survive as a white Christian civilization is the surrender of individual nation-states’ sovereignty to “the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” EU rule has led to “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities.” Europe may be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” without bold change. 

European nations’ legitimacy and suitability as allies depends how aligned they are with the American right’s quest to preserve cultural integrity and hierarchy. The NSS that anti-democratic, transnational elites are blocking the true will of the European people, which is presumed to be traditionalist and nationalist. For example, regarding the Ukraine War, it refers to “a large European majority” which “wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments subversion of democratic processes.”

The United States, the NSS implies, should intervene in European politics to weaken transnational institutions and legitimize the far right. For example, Vice President J.D. Vance has argued that “there is no room for firewalls” in relation to parties like the white nationalist Alternative für Deutschland. He sees these parties as expressing the will of the authentic people, even though they have largely failed to gain power through democratic processes. 

The NSS further states that the United States should be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” Atrocious writing aside, this translates to encouraging the failure of the EU which is one of many “sovereignty-sapping institutions” that promote “a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.” 

Never mind that the EU remains fairly popular among European peoples and is a creation of sovereign nation-states, who participate (or leave) of their own concord. The EU can never be legitimate in the eyes of MAGA because it blocks the restoration of Europe’s authentic white, Christian identity. Thus, the 2025 NSS envisions helping the far-right get back on top, stymie immigration, undercut the EU, and reverse cultural changes.

The Trump administration has granted itself the prerogative to determine the terms of sovereignty for other nations beyond Europe as well. The new NSS, for example, has revived the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted a  right to “the exercise of an international police power” for countries that engaged in “chronic wrongdoing.” Other nations’ independence, President Roosevelt continued, “can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.” This declaration put the United States above Latin American republics by conditioning their sovereignty on U.S. whims. It became the basis for numerous military interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America in the succeeding decades.

The 2025 NSS has declared a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine in order to “restore American preeminence in the Western hemisphere.” Trump’s unprovoked escalation of tensions with Venezuela and lawless strikes on suspected drug vessels suggest that the Trump Corollary will function much like Roosevelt’s, even if the right to interference isn’t spelled out explicitly. If the sovereign is he who determines the exception to the rule, then Trump is determined to make these calls for at least one half of the globe. Sovereignty, for the right, is absolute for me but conditional for thee.

A New Ballgame

The new Trump NSS advances a notably different worldview not only from previous Democratic and Republican administrations, but from Trump’s first NSS in 2017. This document was written by Deputy National Security Advisor Nadia Schadlow, who was appointed by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. Both were products of the foreign policy establishment rather than right-wing activists. This establishment faction within the Trump administration, embodied by McMaster, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, acted as a bulwark against the right-wing firebrands of the administration and Trump’s own worst impulses.

Besides its America First branding, the 2017 NSS was remarkably conventional. It emphasized longstanding conservative themes in foreign policy: great power competition, military strength, and skepticism of rules and institutions. Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric, it declared that “the NATO alliance of free and sovereign states is one of our great advantages over our competitors, and the United States remains committed to Article V” (48). The 2017 NSS featured little culture war language or fulminations about “civilizational erasure,” and it spoke of sovereignty in conventional terms. 

In keeping with decades of U.S. strategic thought, Schadlow and McMaster portrayed the world in terms of “free nations and tyrannies.” The struggles with China and Russia were “fundamentally political contests between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies. China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” (25). Autocracies, the 2017 NSS concluded cannot “play constructive roles in the world” (41). 

This document may have been irrelevant to Trump’s first-term foreign policy, which took little interest in human rights or democracy. Odds are that Trump did not read it. The new NSS, however, cares nothing for the struggle between autocracies and democracies, not even at a rhetorical level. Instead, it sees liberalism as the problem. Liberal universalism destabilizes established folkways and hierarchies abroad, just as it erodes those things at home. “For far too long,” in Africa, for example, “American policy in Africa has focused on providing, and later on spreading, liberal ideology.” 

Instead of advancing democracy, the NSS promises to “seek good relations” with “the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.” This means indifference to autocracy, if not a preference for it. In the Middle East, for instance, it recommends “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.”

In Trump’s second administration, U.S. enemies are not necessarily authoritarian powers like China, but any population that gets in the way of restoring a predominantly white, traditional, gender-conventional, fertile, and Christian nation. This could be liberals, global bodies like the UN, NGOs, immigrants, LGBT people, and so on. This administration’s allies are any nation or group, democratic or not, that shares this vision, the essence of which is the power and prerogative of sovereign white Christian men, from the family to the civilizational unit.

A Single Struggle

In the last eight years, the post-liberal MAGA ideology has gained intellectual coherence and institutional power, displacing the old elite that still had some sway in Trump’s first term. It has organized to ensure that its proponents fill top policy-making positions. It has blended domestic and foreign policy into a single, existential, civilizational struggle to restore a conception of total sovereignty. 

Just as the traditional man must be the unchallenged sovereign in his home, MAGA men must be the same for the nation, and white Christianity the same for the world. This is a fundamentally illiberal worldview that views some people as deserving of power and autonomy and others not, based largely on immutable characteristics.

To MAGA, this nesting doll of unchecked authority exemplifies harmony, order, and justice. Their pursuit of these ends is unbound by respect for norms, laws, and decency. And, for the next three years, it will define this administration’s approach to foreign policy and domestic affairs alike. 

Featured image is "The Big Stick in the Caribbean Sea," William Allen Rogers 1904.