The ‘Restrainers’ Get Their Consolation Prize

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

 

It’s reasonable to expect that a presidential memorandum outlining an administration’s national security strategy would reflect, if not a coherent approach to the preservation of U.S. interests abroad, at least the president’s thinking on foreign affairs. The Trump administration’s stab at a National Security Strategy fails on both counts.

 

Rather, what the document seems to reflect are the highest aspirations of the so-called “restrainers” inside the administration who have so far failed to compel it to reorient the United States away from the world abroad and, apparently, require a consolation prize. The document they produced is more ideological and, therefore, less prescriptive than anything the much-maligned “neocons” ever crafted for public consumption.

 

The document alleges, unconvincingly, that the president is focused primarily on making the Western Hemisphere safe for the United States. To achieve this, it appears to advocate paring back America’s commitments elsewhere in the world, which is counterproductive if securing the Western Hemisphere is, indeed, the administration’s true goal. America’s near-peer competitors, China and Russia, are most active in our hemisphere and elsewhere when their interests in their respective regions are secure. Helping our adversaries achieve those nearer-to-home goals would imperil our security in the Western Hemisphere. But giving these large anti-American powers a leg up seems to be, if not the objective of this strategy document, an ancillary consequence of it.

 

The strategy boasts — indeed, it is mostly boasts — of this president’s willingness to cast off “three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China,” which it defines as opening U.S. markets to the Chinese in the hopes that liberalism would accompany economic openness. But the document itself treats the threat posed by China as a primarily economic problem, and it promotes a “mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing” as the solution. Given the Trump administration’s efforts to relax national security–related export controls that we’re now selling to our Chinese competitors, the document may actually reflect the president’s thinking on the People’s Republic.

 

The U.S. “does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” the strategic posture review asserts (language that is arguably softer than Biden-era versions of this dossier) and it emphasizes the need to preserve deterrence. But it only name-checks China a handful of times, and almost entirely with respect to mutual economic interactions. The insecurity conveyed by a document that one Johns Hopkins University scholar said would be regarded by Beijing as a “a relatively favorable turn in U.S. grand strategy” in its direction is unlikely to deter anyone.

 

In addition, the document insists that the days when the Middle East “dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.” Since when? June? Did American commitments in Western Asia end with the administration’s strikes on the Iranian nuclear program? That’s not even wishful thinking. It is a statement predicated on the assumption that the document’s audience is not aware how much the post-war peace process in Gaza is a shaky edifice that commands a lot of the administration’s time and attention.

 

Through Trump’s pragmatic leadership, the Middle East is “emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment,” the document maintains. Having declared this fact into existence, the U.S. can “finally prioritize American interests” elsewhere. And yet, we can assume that the 40,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in the region are preserving something of value to the United States, and it’s likely to act in a self-interested way when those things are threatened.

 

If the expansionist regime in Moscow represents a threat to U.S. interests abroad, this document is blind to it. To the degree that the Kremlin is a challenge to U.S. policymakers, it is only insofar as our European allies continue to stubbornly resist America’s efforts to appease Vladimir Putin into submission. Indeed, readers could be forgiven for concluding the biggest threat to American security and prosperity comes from our Western European allies.

 

In contrast to the way the document describes our adversaries, it singles out Europe with conspicuous scorn. The Europeans’ actions “undermine political liberty and sovereignty” everywhere, including here at home. The U.S. should prioritize “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and promote “the growing influence of patriotic European parties,” by which the administration’s functionaries mean right-of-center populist political parties (which are by no means friendly to the U.S. and its interests).

 

Between this and the document’s gratuitous hostility toward “American foreign policy elites,” it’s clear that this memo was crafted for the benefit of a domestic American audience by authors with gigantic chips on their shoulders and raging inferiority complexes.

 

As Republicans with a living memory of the Obama years should know, beating up on Europe is how American politicians pretend to be tough. It’s a bit like clubbing a baby seal for the benefit of spectating polar bears. Maybe they’ll go easy on you if they see the zeal with which you execute a shared objective.

 

The “threat” posed by the social compact that prevails in Europe is abstract, and there are no real consequences associated with raising attention to it. There are consequences associated with aggravating regime functionaries in Moscow and Beijing, so the document takes a pass.

 

If there is anything in this plan that is real enough to be of value to policymakers, it is the document’s focus on creating conditions in which the U.S. retreats back into its hemisphere. It attempts to hijack the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine — a 1904 directive licensing the United States to intervene in and police security affairs in Latin America — as the “Trump Corollary,” which is not distinct from TR’s directive. The difference between them is that, in Roosevelt’s time, the United States sought to establish a status quo in which the U.S. could project power beyond its hemisphere. Trump and company are engineering a reversal of the objective Roosevelt and his successors sought and secured.

 

The best you can say for this document is that it is irrelevant. National Security Strategy memoranda are like the governing platforms that the two major political parties issue every four years. They are statements of purpose. They don’t forecast policy. And yet, for all its modest import, the document still retains the capacity to shock.

 

This document does not present readers with an objective reading of the prevailing geostrategic landscape. It’s a polemic devised by a highly ideological cadre of policymakers — a group that is inclined to accuse everyone else of being blinkered by ideology — who have lost most of the policy fights they’ve encountered, in part, because their theories about how the world should look tend not to survive fist contact with the world as it is.

 

If this missive does serve as the model for foreign policy makers in this administration, it would fast beget a world in which U.S. interests are less secure — by definition, insofar as it would cede the U.S. global hegemony our ancestors fought to bequeath to us to forces that are hostile to American interests. And all in the effort to conjure into existence a world that passed into history along with La Belle Epoque.

 

That would not be a safer world for Americans, but it would put the screws to those in the United States and Europe who favor an extroverted American presence on the world stage. Indeed, that seems to have been the foremost objective of this “strategy” document.