Editorial: National security strategy: Trump vs. Trump

Congress requires each new administration to prepare and submit a formal national security strategy. The Trump administration did so Monday, releasing a 55-page overview and having President Donald Trump give a speech that outlined the strategy while also bragging about the U.S. economy.

The fact that Trump doesn’t share the view of the Pentagon that global warming is a national security threat because of its potential to trigger natural disasters and conflicts and to create refugee crises is appalling and dangerous. But his administration’s overview — and parts of Trump’s speech — were otherwise reassuring in their conventionality.

“The four pillars [cited in the overview] — protecting the American people/homeland, promoting prosperity, peace through strength and advancing interests/values — could have been used by any president since Reagan,” noted Peter Feaver in his analysis for Foreign Policy magazine.

But Trump did frame a key part of his foreign policy as a break with the past. While the last three presidents have at times in the post-Cold War era seen Russia and China as strategic partners, Trump described them as great-power rivals that “challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” The overview expanded on this point, rejecting “the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners.”

This explicit statement is grounded in a welcome realism about China’s desire to become the world’s dominant superpower and Russia’s relentless bullying of neighbors and cybercrimes.

As analysts quickly pointed out, Trump appears to have a much sunnier opinion of Russia than the foreign-policy team that prepared the overview, and his speech omitted the specifics of Russian meddling in other nations cited in the overview. But that ultimately is not the most worrisome gap. That distinction goes to the chasm between the strategy’s acknowledgment of the need for coordinated efforts to keep Chinese and Russian expansionism in check and how the president has treated the nations we will badly need for these efforts.

The list of issues on which Trump has alienated our allies is long and growing: the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord; the U.S. undercutting the nuclear deal with Iran that it negotiated under President Barack Obama in tandem with China, Russia, Germany, France and the European Union; the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal; U.S. immigration policies; and more.

While Trump has a point when he complains that our allies in NATO and other international accords should live up to their commitments to beef up their defense budgets and not just count on American military muscle for protection, he still doesn’t grasp that the United States is a huge beneficiary of the global order that these treaties have created since World War II. And his continued insistence that America is taken advantage of by other nations in trade deals is both undercut by hard evidence and insulting to nations with whom the U.S. has long had mutually beneficial relationships.

What’s odd about Trump’s quasi-isolationist rhetoric is how on the foreign-policy issue he seems most engaged with — North Korea and its growing nuclear might — Trump is all-in on the idea that America needs help. In person and on Twitter, he has called on China and its leader Xi Jinping to pressure Pyongyang to stop its threatening missile tests and to mute its belligerence.

If China continues its aggressive efforts to lay claim to much of the South China Sea — building islands with military bases atop coral reefs — the United States would be properly expected to lead the international response. But a U.S. president who likes to hector other world leaders in his phone calls might find few nations rallying to his side.

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