The Situation: Why Did the White House Write This National Security Strategy?

The Situation on Friday recounted my first ride in a driverless car—a ride, it turns out, that coincided with the release by the White House of Trump’s National Security Strategy. I’ll let the reader decide whether it was a coincidence or a metaphor, and if the latter, a metaphor for what. 

The National Security Strategy is a very strange document—strange in what it includes, strange in what it leaves out, strange in its bombastic personalization of policy to President Trump, strange in displaying a certain meta-quality, and strange in its all-but-overt racism. Needless, perhaps, to say, this does not read like the national security strategies of any prior administration.

The meta-quality gives the racism a weirdly-organized sheen. The document spends the first seven of its 33 pages explaining what a strategy is, why previous American national security strategies have all sucked, what the United States (meaning the Trump administration) wants from the rest of the world, and what means are at its disposal to get what it wants. The document spends time justifying the proposition that it can’t focus on everything and has to prioritize—though it actually does bounce from subject to subject a great deal in a fashion that does not reflect rigorous prioritization.

It’s as though a teacher gave a student a rubric for doing an assignment (writing a national security strategy), and the student went ahead and filled out the rubric like a form and published it as a preface to the paper.

So by the time the document comes around to the United States being on the brink of not surviving as a constitutional republic and Europe facing civilizational collapse, the reader has been well prepared to read, respectively, about “Priorities” and the European theater in the discussion of “The Regions.”

This National Security Strategy reflects any number of remarkable judgments, some of them merely eccentric, some of them far worse than that. Here I want to focus only on two of them—one domestic and the other foreign yet linked conceptually by a frankly racial thread.

The first is this sentence on page 11: “Border security is the primary element of national security.”

Note here that the document is not defining “border security” as an important element of U.S. security or as one of the most significant elements of it. It is defining it as the single primary element of American security.

Lest you misunderstand the document here as talking about protecting the borders of the United States from foreign armies or some other conventional military threat, no, it is talking about immigration. The sentence appears in a section entitled, “The Era of Mass Migration is Over,” a section that is entirely about migration—not conventional military threats. Immediately following the sentence is the statement, “We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking.”

The primary element of national security? This idea isn’t exactly new. Back in February, in a speech at CPAC, Vice President J.D. Vance declared, “The greatest threat in Europe, and I’d say the greatest threat in the US until about 30 days ago, is that you’ve had the leaders of the west decide that they should send millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries."

But it is crazy. 

I am willing to entertain the notion that the last several administrations may have underestimated the American people’s desire for a secure border. But to put the issue of border security as the top objective in one’s national security strategy is a kind of a nativist madness that is more about cultural—and let’s be honest, racial—anxiety about immigration than it is about any tangible security threat.

To call border security the primary element of national security, after all, you have to believe that controlling and limiting migration is more important to American security than, say, maintaining a  functional and effective nuclear deterrence; having a military capable of protecting American interests at home and abroad, and stopping or deterring Russian and Chinese predations on allies. You have to believe it’s more important than having a coherent approach to protecting American critical infrastructure and cybersecurity and more important than stopping major terrorist operations.

Note that in this paragraph, the security concern is not any worry about activity that might attend uncontrolled migration—the terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking are almost after-thoughts in the paragraph. The threat is the migration itself. And the stakes? They are total. “A border controlled by the will of the American people as implemented by their government is fundamental to the survival of the United States as a sovereign republic,” the document warns darkly.

The document is, to be fair, consistent on this point. Fourteen pages later, the subject turns to America’s European allies, and this anxiety about migration comes roaring back. Because if the United States needs to control its borders to survive as a sovereign republic, Europe is already facing “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” The reason is a combination of governance by the EU and other international bodies, “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,” “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

Now back on page 1, in explaining “What Is American Strategy,” the document had scolded “American foreign policy elites” for convincing “themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” In fact, the document insists, “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

The National Security Strategy’s authors never make clear how exactly European civilizational erasure is directly threatening our interests, except to say that if present trends continue, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” The key sentence is the one that follows: “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

And by way of accomplishing these objectives, it openly proposes intervening in the domestic politics of European countries. Specifically, it proposes, “Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” and it states that “We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.”

In a particularly overt endorsement of European far-right populist nationalist parties, it also declares that “American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

Now, I am not one to throw around allegations of racism lightly, but this seems to me a profoundly racist document.

At the domestic level, it elevates migration—not its attendant pathologies but the migration itself—to the singular national security threat the country faces. And at the international level, it sees in Europe, as a result of this migration and the supposed suppression of anti-immigration populism, a total civilizational collapse. It also overtly fingers far-right parties and their ethno-nationalisms as the solution to what ails Europe.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no place for debate about the absorptive capacity of countries with respect to immigration, including absorptive capacity on the cultural side. Far from it. Such questions are legitimate, and pro-immigration forces do themselves no favors by delegitimizing such questions.

That said, here the White House is not raising questions. It is making assertions. And the assertions are, well, tendentious at best. It simply is not a defensible position that among the myriad threats facing America, the security of our southern border ranks at the top of the list. Nor is it the case that the great threat to the trans-Atlantic alliance right now is European civilizational collapse. The great threat, rather, is American abandonment of its commitments to Europe, not the other way around. And that threat has exactly zero to do with migration either in Europe or in the United States.

All of which brings me to the question of why it is important to the White House to theorize a national security policy that, in fact, has no theory behind it—that is just a set of instincts and blusters and financial and business interests. Why write a 33-page document that hopelessly intermingles foreign and domestic policy, needlessly inflames tensions with allies, and merely restates for domestic audiences what is obvious to anyone who can read or watch TV or social media: that the border is the singular obsession of the president and the administration?

Short answer: I have no earthly idea.

The Situation continues tomorrow.