In my recent post, “Trapped in Silk Slippers,” I reference a public policy document usually issued every few years, the National Security Strategy (NSS), as well as its companion documents, like the National Defense Strategy (NDS). As is usual for my posting schedule, I finished writing the post weeks before it went live on the site for you readers; less usually, I started writing it all the way back in January of 2025. In an unfortunate twist for which I should have accounted, the new, 2025 NSS was released just days before my post referencing the old one. Technically, my post was outdated before you ever saw it. While the focus of “Trapped in Silk Slippers” is not the NSS, and I do not think the failure to reference the new NSS drastically affects the post’s central arguments, I do want to take a moment to examine the 2025 NSS, partially in the context of my previous post, but also as an interesting document in its own right.
The National Security Strategy is typically a fairly bland, bureaucratic document replete with designed-by-committee prose which, a little like the product generated by the Commission on Freedom of the Press, uses a lot of words to express vague and broadly acceptable sentiments without staking out strong positions or having an immediately significant impact. The previous NSS, from 2022, is no exception. This new one, though, is something different. For one thing, it’s fifteen pages shorter and uses a larger font size. Parts of it read more like a campaign speech than a strategy document, and all of it reads a bit like a manifesto. It’s informal and colloquial compared to previous entries in the genre. This departure in approach from the typical NSS is exhibited in the document’s first line: “My fellow Americans.” That, by itself, is a departure from the norm. These documents are not typically written for the typical American to read. Most Americans will never read an NSS (and, ideally, won’t need to), so the audience is members of the national security establishment, national security thinkers, analysts, and policymakers, and foreign governments. That will be the main audience for the 2025 NSS, as well, but it reads like a document pitched more directly than is customary at people without a deep interest in foreign policy.
Its organization reflects this, too, and not just because the table of contents is overfull of rhetorical questions. Where previous versions focus specifically on strategy, this new one addresses foreign policy more broadly. Its main goal, rather than expressing specific strategic stances, seems to be to make an argument for this administration’s particular view of the US’s role on the world stage and to express its priorities, and the surface-level reasoning behind them, to a general audience. Where 2022’s NSS has individual sections for discrete challenges and for nations of concern, 2025’s spends most of its words establishing overarching ideas and US strategically relevant capabilities and only addresses specific challenges and regions in the final section.
As with most everything this administration has done, the 2025 NSS was immediately controversial, and probably received more popular attention than any of its predecessors (perhaps justifying its apparent shift in intended audience). While the focus on the accomplishments of the sitting president is certainly unusual, and there is a certain paucity of detail and substance to the document, it is not as revolutionary as many depict it to be. In many key respects, it updates standard priorities and policies into different language but with the same basic meaning, documents foreign policy perspectives already obvious from other sources and simple observation, or both. There are a few exceptions, and the most significant of these is on Europe and the Russian bear-shaped elephant in the room.
In the room, but not in the NSS. Where Russia receives its own section in the 2022 NSS, the 2025 NSS allots it a single dedicated line: “reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia.” It is referenced in a few other places, but the section on “Promoting European Greatness” is primarily focused on Europe and Europe’s relationship with Russia, not the US relationship with Russia; there is no articulation of a specific US strategy towards Russia as there have been in previous editions. That is a remarkable omission, but perhaps not as significant as it might be given the documents overall lack of detail. I could comment on its statements regarding Europe’s relationship with Russia and the prioritization of a cessation of war in Ukraine, but I shall refrain, as I do not intend this post to be a full exploration of US foreign policy and my perspectives on the same. Its main goal is simply to share with you that there is a new National Security Strategy.
What the 2025 NSS reads as, more than anything else, is an attempt to state in an official format the sometimes conflicting, and still sometimes nebulous, tenets, of “America First” foreign policy. Notably, and as events of the past year have amply demonstrated, this is not a strictly isolationist foreign policy, at least under President Trump. Other voices in the administration and in the political movement with which it is associated are far more stridently, emphatically, and radically isolationist in their foreign policy views than the President and this NSS. How that vector may shift when President Trump is no longer the movement’s standard bearer is an open question that concerns me more than anything included in 2025’s NSS…but that’s getting more into politics and my opinions than I think is appropriate for this forum. Instead, I encourage you to take a read through the current NSS, and probably its predecessor, too (for context). Then, if you want to discuss further, you can find me in the comments, or on the IGC Publishing Discord.
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