OUR PICKS: THE U.S. NEW NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGYA Strategy That Ignores the Real Threats, and more

A Strategy That Ignores the Real Threats  (Thomas Wright, The Atlantic)
Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy reveals an administration that is preparing for the wrong dangers and in denial about genuine threats. What the White House presented on Friday as a hardheaded, realistic assessment of the geopolitical landscape more closely resembles France’s Maginot Line—a massive fortress built before World War II to stop a German attack that never came while failing to anticipate the one that did.
The document is remarkably different from the one the president issued in his first term. At that time, President Trump’s NSS broke new ground by focusing American strategy on great-power competition with China and Russia. Those countries, the strategy said, “challenge American power, influence, and interests” and are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”
Trump’s latest NSS is a blunt repudiation of the idea that the United States is in a strategic competition with rival powers. It prioritizes threats from the Western Hemisphere, European civilizational decline and overregulation, and trade deficits but says nothing about the Russian threat to U.S. interests and views China almost entirely through the lens of economic security. The strategy is silent on Beijing’s ambition to displace Washington as the world’s leading power and evinces hope that the U.S. can forge a “genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.” This is extraordinary. Are we actually meant to believe that Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or, for that matter, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea have become more benign since 2017?
The reason for the Trump administration’s turn around is what it is trying to accomplish. Contrary to its protestations about reining in America’s ambition after decades of overreach (what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called “utopian idealism”), it does have a grand plan: The NSS is a blueprint for building an illiberal international order, in which the U.S. can assert dominance unilaterally, strike deals with revisionist powers such as China and Russia, and work patiently to support right-wing populist parties in Europe in overthrowing centrist establishments. One might call it dystopian idealism.

The Only War the White House Is Ready for Is Culture War  (By Kori Schake, Foreign Policy)
The new U.S. National Security Strategy is a moral and strategic disaster.

Trump Is Sending a Clear Message to the Free World  (Max Boot, Washington Post)
The 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine that the Trump administration released last month drew heavily on an earlier Russian document. By contrast, the 29-page National Security Strategy released by the White House last week was entirely a made-in-America product. But the NSS will have the same effect: It will encourage Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and discourage America’s allies, particularly in Europe. There is nothing particularly surprising about this document in that it reflects the familiar MAGA worldview, but it is nevertheless deeply disheartening.

Donald Trump’s Bleak, Incoherent Foreign-Policy Strategy  (Economist)
Allies may panic; despots will cheer.
If President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) reads like a dog’s breakfast, that is because it is. Shorn of the enlightened values that have long anchored foreign policy, America First becomes a naked assertion of power that owes more to the 19th century than the world that America built after the second world war. And that leads to a document riven by contradictions.
“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” reads the letter from Mr. Trump to the American people that opens the NSS. But it is the preceding sentence that will be read by allies with gloom, and with glee by China and Russia, for it is hopelessly at odds with reality: “America is strong and respected again—and because of that, we are making peace all over the world.” Alas, that claim comes from an administration that is indeed feared, resented and obsessed over, but one that is less respected or trusted than any American government in decades.