The White House has released its new National Security Strategy. It is a stunning document and I’ll have more to say about it as the week goes on.
It reminds me a great deal of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, though it disavows the idea that “governments and societies everywhere must be remade in America’s image for us to be secure.” It is a document that frames American foreign policy as a moral challenge to Americans to take up their duty of ending authoritarianism across the globe. And it explicitly rejects the idea that there are any financial, political, or moral limits to this project. “There is nothing beyond our capacity,” it proclaims in the introduction.
There is no pivot to Asia here; just a dense network of interlocking and overlapping partnerships in which the U.S. leads everywhere, all the time. There are vows to invest, align, and “compete responsibly” with the People’s Republic of China, but the plan is so lacking in details that it is hard to credit it at all.
I predict our leaders will continue their general drift toward rewriting America’s strategy as a globalized culture war against conservative-coded autocracies. At the same time, we will become even more dependent upon China, a power that is visibly ailing and may be starting to sink under the weight of its contradictions.