America Declares Independence
The new National Security Strategy is the first great step towards reforming American policy in the world.
I write not about our independence from good King George, whose tax burdens on the colonists were far lighter than those we bear today. Rather, I point to President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), which declares our independence from the demands of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, aka the Blob. The Blob demands America must rule the world, regardless of the cost in blood and treasure. Trump has replied, “Nevermore!”
The key clause in the 33-page document is, “As the U.S. rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself….” That thought permeates and shapes the entire document, with some caveats. The Associated Press story on the NSS wrote, “It chides past U.S. efforts to shape or criticize Middle Eastern nations and seeks to discourage attempts for changes in those countries’ governments and policies.” (Could that be a message to Iran?). The AP continued, “The document makes clear that the U.S. wants to improve its relationship with Russia after years of Moscow being treated as a global pariah and ending the war [in Ukraine] is a core U.S. interest to ‘re-establish strategic stability with Russia.’”
The most important change from the Biden NSS relates to American policy toward China. As the December 8 Wall Street Journal wrote, “The White House’s new national-security strategy signals a softer approach to competition with Beijing, playing down ideological differences between the two superpowers and marking a break from years in which China was singled out as posing the U.S.’s greatest challenge.” Most Americans do not realize the degree to which the Blob and the military-industrial-congressional complex have been pushing war with China. They seldom call openly for such a war. But they employ that scenario as justification for our trillion-dollar annual defense budget and for demands to increase it (all for armed services with an impressive list of lost wars). Those who use a war with China scenario cynically to grab money do not realize that such tricks can condition both parties to think of war as probable, even inevitable. Self-fulfilling prophecies have a long history, as both Athenians and Spartans can attest.
In all of this the new NSS is a giant step in the right direction. As the December 9 Journal wrote in an editorial, “The strategy isn’t an isolationist document that you might read at a libertarian think tank. But it is clearly a declaration that American can no longer
afford to, and shouldn’t in the national interest, bear the burden of global leadership.” As Pat Buchanan put it, we want a republic, not an empire.
Now for the caveats. Toward the end, the new NSS looks at different regions around the world. All too often, it re-states commitments likely to involve the U.S. in foreign wars. China, regrettably, heads the list. The December 8 Journal wrote, “The document calls explicitly for working with regional allies and partners to ‘deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.’” This betrays an ignorance of Taiwan’s importance to China. China’s history is one of centrifugal tendencies that lead to internal break-up and periods of warring states. If one province can declare independence, so can others. That makes Taiwan a core interest of China, while it is a peripheral interest to the United States. Since the Second World War the U.S. has gone to war repeatedly for peripheral
interests. The results have not been happy. Adding nuclear weapons to the brew is not likely to make it go down better.
The new NSS makes one statement that is flat wrong. It says, “The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state.” That is certainly what we want. But the continuance of the state as the universal building-block is by no means guaranteed. In many nation-states, perhaps most, an increasing number of people are giving their primary loyalty to entities other than the state: to cartels and gangs, religions and tribes,
ideologies and “causes.” Some of those people are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty. In a growing number of places, the state is either vanishing or remaining only as a shell within which the real power is in the hands of these new (or old) entities. We only need look toward our southern neighbor, Mexico, to see this phenomenon unfold.
If the state is to remain the world’s fundamental political unit, it is going to need some bucking-up. That in turn requires an alliance of all states in defense of the state system. Here is where the importance of the new NSS shines in a unexpected way. An alliance of all states must start with the three great powers, the U.S., Russia, and China. The NSS calls for restoring normal relations with Russia. That’s step one.
Step two is an alliance with China. Here, something Trump said when he met China’s leader Xi Jinping is interesting. According to the December 4 Wall Street Journal, “In South Korea, Trump surprised China’s leadership by speaking of a ‘G-2’ condominium with China in world affairs—language that Xi floated at the Sunnylands
summit in 2013, just to be rebuffed by President Barack Obama.”
What might happen if Trump followed that up with Xi, proposing not a G-2 but a G-3, including Russia, with the explicit purpose of the G-3 being to uphold the nation-state system? The slogan of the new G-3 might be, “Peace, Order, and Commerce.” Other countries would be welcome to join, but the power of decision would remain with the G-3. The U.S. contribution would be intelligence, not troops, plus offers of access to the American market.
Trump sees himself as a peace-maker. His dislike of war and killing seems to be a core element of who he is. His peace-making efforts around the world are laudable, and they have been surprisingly successful. But in the end, if he wants to prevent wars between states, he has to give them a common enemy against which they must unite. He does not need to conjure one up. It’s here, and all too real. It is state collapse and the spread of Fourth Generation war, war waged by entities other than states.
Uniting all states in defense of the state system would be the art of the deal on a grand scale. It would make Trump an historic figure It would also make America’s declaration of independence from the Blob and the military–industrial complex irreversible.
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