Trump's Threat to A Century of Foreign Policy And Global Alignment

 The Trump administration has just released a national security document that reverses nearly a century of American philosophy and policies. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson write in the The New York Times (full piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/opinion/trump-security-strategy-threats.html)

*quote:
Even Republican members of Congress seem to be getting unnerved about U.S. government-ordered strikes in the Caribbean that are an illegal, immoral and distinctly unstrategic use of a superlative professional military. Yet the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released last week and by turns incoherent, ahistorical and specious, casts the strikes as a legitimate exercise of “the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” and one of any number of “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels.”

This strategy document focuses the United States’ attention on the Western Hemisphere. It subjects strategically crucial regions and allies to relegation and, in the case of Europe, outright subversion. It denigrates the European Union “and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty,” while implicitly contemplating Europe’s right-wing nativist parties as instruments for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.” Those comments effectively codify JD Vance’s hectoring speech at the Munich Security Conference last February. As the United States systematically eviscerates its constitutional order and international standing, it presumes to tell Europe that it risks “civilizational erasure.”
*end quote

Here is what this means.

For the first time since 1945, a U.S. National Security Strategy appears to cast Europe’s liberal-democratic project as more troubling than Moscow’s authoritarian one. That is not a minor adjustment of priorities; it is a reversal of the FDR-era bet on a world of cooperating democracies. The Trump administration is edging away from a decades-long alliance with the European Union and leaning instead toward an ideological partnership with nationalist regimes, including Putin’s Russia, that reject liberal norms.

It is worth pausing over what “liberal” means here. Liberal as in liberty. A liberal democracy is one in which the majority wins elections, but minorities keep their freedom - their right to practice marginal or no religion, to live in ways the majority may dislike, to pursue careers, cultures, and identities that do not conform. In such a system, a majority vote may be needed to raise or lower taxes, or to fund education and science, but it is not needed to validate particular lifestyles, ethnicities, or beliefs. The point of liberal democracy is precisely that some freedoms are not up for a show of hands.

Trump’s administration is attempting to roll that back: to turn cultural conformity, religious orthodoxy, and ethnic hierarchy into political goals rather than private choices. For a nation that once helped design and defend the liberal order, it is hard to overstate how dangerous and disorienting that turn is.