Trump takes his "national security" policies to a truly bizarre level

Make America Weak

David R. Lurie

Trump during his press event at Mar-a-Lago (Tasos Katopodis/Getty) where he announced his plan for a "Golden Fleet" of giant, high-tech battleships at a time when drones are rendering large warships obsolete

The new White House “National Security Strategy” announced that the Trump regime will treat the democratically elected governments of most Western European nations as adversaries of the United States, and unveiled a plan to join longtime adversaries in seeking to undermine NATO and the European Union.

While such a course of action would gravely damage the US, it is of a piece with Trump’s assaults on the nation he was elected to lead.

As the first year of Trump’s would-be dictatorship concludes, it’s clear that the president considers the rules-based democratic and economic order a barrier to his goal of establishing an autocracy. Given his dictatorial ambitions, it makes perfect sense for his regime to cozy up to strongmen while treating America’s principal democratic allies as enemies.

The future of the United States, and likely of many of our allies, will depend on whether Trump’s systematic assaults on democratic nations and institutions here and abroad are successful.

Weakening allies, strengthening adversaries

Trump’s “National Security Strategy” declares that the US will focus on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That amounts to a declaration that America will promote regime change in countries that remain governed by pro-democracy parties that support the existence of the EU and NATO.

In attempting to justify this bizarre remaking of US foreign policy, the “Strategy” complains that the leading democracies of Europe — which collectively represent one of the largest and most prosperous economic zones in the world — are in a state of crisis. It even declares they are at risk of “civilizational erasure,” purportedly because they — perish the thought — continue to permit immigration.

In place of our longstanding and prosperous European allies, the “Strategy” indicates Trump will attempt to build a new core of allies, comprised largely of those European nations that have elected highly nationalist (and in many cases, pro-Russian) governments, such as Hungary. It also implies Trumpers will try to use their newly reconstituted core of pro-Russian European allies as a mechanism for weakening both the EU and NATO, despite the fact that the US is the leader of the latter alliance and has long promoted the former.

In fact, the plan set forth in the “Strategy” document is already being implemented.

For example, Vice President JD Vance and then-Trump acolyte Elon Musk openly meddled in German politics earlier this year by encouraging citizens of that country to vote for the neo-fascist (and pro-Russian) AfD party.

And Trumpers not only valorize the authoritarian regime of Hungarian prime minister (and Trump stooge) Victor Orban, but have used Orban’s actions as models for their assaults on media, educational, and cultural institutions within the US.

Furthermore, Trump is now pressuring Ukraine — over the objections of European democracies — to accept “peace” terms that include surrendering territory in Donetsk that constitutes that nation’s bulwark against Russian invasion of the entire country. 

A Ukraine vulnerable to a complete invasion by Russia will, inevitably, also mean a Europe vulnerable to attack, particularly if Trump withdraws the bulk of US forces from the continent (which he’s already started doing).

Consistent with Trump’s now overt plan to effectively switch sides in Europe, his “peace” envoy Steve Witkoff declared that Russia — which nightly bombs Ukrainian in relentless terror attacks — “remains fully committed to achieving peace in Ukraine.” Meanwhile, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Turning Point USA audience over the weekend that the “deep state,” EU, and NATO are “undermin[ing] President Trump’s efforts towards peace” and scheming to “pull the US military into a direct conflict with Russia.”

If this increasingly explicit scheme to gut longstanding alliances with European democracies “succeeds,” it will not only be potentially catastrophic for Europe, but also for the US — the principal economic and political beneficiary of the post-war international order that Trump and his cronies are assaulting. Indeed, the Trump “Strategy” is entirely consistent with the goals of both Putin’s Russia and China’s authoritarian regime, both of which have long viewed the weakening of the Western alliance as a key part of their effort to displace the US as the leading power in the world.

Accordingly, Trump’s “Strategy” for weakening our allies in Europe is effectively a blueprint for weakening the United States.

The war within

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Trump is the first president of any party to make it the US policy to gravely weaken the country’s standing in the world. 

Yet, as the first year of the his second term comes to a close, it has become clear that his efforts to sabotage America’s economic, political, and defense relationships with major democracies abroad are part and parcel of “policies” he’s been pursuing at home — all calculated to make our nation more susceptible to autocracy.

For instance, Trump’s scheme to culturally cleanse the US of the foreign born is succeeding, but at the great expense of the nation.

While he campaigned on a purported plan to “secure the border,” Trump and his acolytes have since made clear that their actual ambition was to gut nearly the entire post-war immigration system.

The scheme has been remarkably “successful” in that — for the first time in decades — Trump has engineered net negative emigration. The problem is that this comes at a grave cost. For decades, immigrants have been a crucial economic engine for the US, allowing our economy to grow and be far more resilient than virtually any peer country.

While Trumpers like Vance celebrate the expulsion of immigrants, contending it “frees up” homes and jobs for those who remain, the reality is that an aging US — one with fewer productive workers — will inevitably become less prosperous. The Trump regime, however, is more concerned about increasing the white and “native born” population for the sake of remaking of the nation. As Vance put it at the recent Turning Point gathering, his movement wants an America in which “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s assault on trade has empowered America’s adversaries and competitors. He sold his unilaterally imposed tariff “policies” as a means of increasing prosperity at home, and of harming China, the US’s principal economic rival. But in fact, the direct opposite occurred.

The greatest beneficiary of Trump’s moves to hobble the participation of American companies in international markets has been China, which managed to offset many of its declines in exports to the US by increasing exports to other nations, many of them aggrieved by Trump’s actions. In addition, as Trump’s tariff scheme has begun to unravel due to growing inflation and retaliation, he’s rapidly made the US into a supplicant of China — the very nation he initially claimed he would bring to heel.

Trump and his emissaries have been reduced to begging President Xi to resume purchases of soybeans and other agricultural goods that China contracted to buy from other countries at a massive cost to American farmers. They’ve also been pleading for China to resume selling rare earth elements to the US, since limiting the availability of them, as China has been doing, could cripple many industries.

It’s now all but certain that Trump and his cronies will leave America’s role in the international markets that fueled our nation’s growth greatly impaired and diminished. But they are entirely willing to do such damage to our country, apparently because they believe a more inwardly focused (and less prosperous) America will serve their autocratic goals.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Trump is engaged in a comprehensive assault on the rule of law, once again to advance his dictatorial ends.

The rule of law is not merely an abstraction — it’s an asset that has been critical to America’s status as the center of international business and finance since the end of World War II. The expectation that contracts will be honored and that markets will be regulated in a predictable and largely corruption-free manner has given America a massive competitive advantage over autocratic nations. It has also made the US the preferred site for financial transactions and investments of most every kind, with incalculable economic benefits for the American people.

But Trump views such laws and rules as impediments to his personal power and has set out to undermine them in increasingly overt ways.

Trump’s Department of Justice has effectively stopped prosecuting whole categories of financial corruption. The president has also made a mockery of the nation’s legal system by openly selling pardons, especially to financial fraudsters with whom he appears to have a particular affinity. This activity amounts to an advertisement that the Trump regime is abandoning America’s commitment to adhere to the rule of law.

A glaring example of the administration’s replacement of ordered and regulated markets with a shadowy world of influence peddling is Trumpers’ exploitation of cryptocurrency markets, which Trump’s family and cronies have employed to accumulate what reportedly amounts to billions of dollars in wealth in just a matter of months. 

But for the president, the appearance that government actions are for sale to the highest bidders is a feature, not a bug.

Trump has transformed some of the nation’s largest publicly traded companies into mechanisms for him to extract personal and political benefits. For instance, he recently announced that he plans to meddle in the contest for the sale of Warner Brothers in favor of Paramount, a company now controlled by the Trump-supporting Ellison family, in part to ensure that CNN is transformed into a clone of Fox News.

This is not the first time Trump has interfered in markets to extract personal pecuniary and political benefits — he did the same thing in connection with the acquisition of Paramount by an entity controlled by the Ellisons.

Trump clearly relishes the prospect of replacing the infrastructure of regulatory and law enforcement agencies that have long insulated US financial markets from direct political meddling with an openly corrupt and authoritarian system in which the interests of Trump himself determine winners and losers. But when the rule of law in a country is displaced by arbitrary and unpredictable authoritarian rule, as happened in Putin’s Russia, the results are predictable: investors and companies flee to more stable environs as the economy declines.

The president and his cronies are, however, more than willing to make the US pay a high price for their aggrandizement.

High stakes

A year in to Trump 2.0, it’s clear that Trumpers do, indeed, have a strategy — one intended to weaken America at home and abroad.

A fully Trumped America will be a diminished nation, having squandered the assets of democracy, the rule of law, and a dynamic and growing economy — along with democratic allies — that have actually made America great, all so Trump can obtain the dictatorial control he craves.

In recent weeks, we have seen indications that the majority of the American people are beginning to recognize the depth of the threat Trump poses to the United States, let alone the world. But as his popularity diminishes and his political power becomes more contested, he’s likely to become more reckless and more determined to harm the nation he was elected to lead. Americans, therefore, must be prepared to defend their country with only greater vigilance and vigor.