U.S. President Donald Trump poses on the red carpet for the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 7, 2025. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
During his first presidency, Donald Trump clashed with a long list of traditional conservatives he appointed — from two U.S. attorneys general (Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr) to a secretary of state (Rex Tillerson) to a White House chief of staff (retired Gen. John F. Kelly). But the second Trump Administration, in contrast, is filled with ultra-MAGA loyalists. And those loyalists shaped the America First views expressed in a new 33-page document called the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
Eric S. Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense in the George W. Bush Administration, examines the new NSS in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 8. And Edelman, who now co-hosts the publication's "Shield of the Republic" podcast, emphasizes that it is radically different from the NSS published by the first Trump Administration.
"The first Trump Administration's NSS was written by serious people and marked a crucial inflection point by noting that the United States was moving away from the kind of conflict which had marked the previous decade and a half — namely the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations of the fight against violent Islamist extremism — and had entered an era of great-power conflict, in particular with a rising China and a revanchist Russia," Edelman explains. "The document, although festooned with references to America First, was clearly in the mainstream of U.S. post-World War II strategic thinking — even as Trump's speech announcing its publication suggested that he had never read the document. Nor did he agree with its reliance on working with and through America's traditional alliances."
Edelman continues, "The strategy published late last week with no fanfare presents something altogether different. Filled with chest-thumping pomposity, shrill rhetoric —and more than a whiff of white nationalist/supremacist idiom — it marks a sharp break not only with the post-Cold War trajectory of American strategy, but more broadly, with the direction of U.S. national security strategy since 1941. With 27 instances of Trump's name in a mere 29 pages of text, it is a strategy document worthy of North Korea."
The new NSS, the former Bush Administration official argues, is an "expression of Trumpism in full," including an "invocation of immigration restriction."
"The core of the strategy comes in a sentence midway through the document: 'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,'" Edelman notes. "This resignation from the role of chief maintainer of the global order is what marks the real break from 80 years of American foreign policy…. The Trump NSS sketches out an approach to national security policy that carries with it very real dangers."
Eric S. Edelman's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.