Trump Administration Releases 2025 National Security Strategy

On Dec. 4, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS). The strategy document, which every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan’s has produced, outlines the executive branch’s vision for U.S. national interests and foreign policy. In a letter attached to the strategy, the president described the document as a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”

The administration’s 2025 NSS consists of four sections. The first section, entitled “What Is American Strategy” explains how U.S. strategy “went astray” under previous administrations, placing blame upon U.S. “foreign policy elites’” miscalculation of “America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens” that had no connection to the national interest. The second section outlines what the United States “should want” in its strategy, which lists priorities such as “full control over our borders … [and] immigration system,” as well as the assertion and enforcement of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The third section of the NSS outlines the United States’s means to “get what we want,” highlighting a “still nimble political system that can course correct” and Trump’s reinstatement of a “culture of competence”—largley achieved, according to the document, by “rooting out so-called ‘DEI’ and other discriminatory” practices that “degrade our institutions and hold us back.” And the fourth section, entitled “The Strategy” is subdivided into three components: principles, priorities, and regions.

Section IV of the NSS explains that President Trump’s foreign policy vision is summarized best by two words: “America First.” More specifically, U.S. policy, according to the administration, is driven by principles such as a “focused definition of the national interest,” and “peace through strength.” The NSS condenses U.S. foreign policy priorities into five bullets, including the end of the “era of mass migration” and the “protection of core rights and liberties," which declares that the purpose of the American government is to “secure the God-given natural rights of American citizens.” Another priority, entitled “Burden-Sharing and Burden Shifting” explains that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” Finally, the document breaks down the Trump administration’s strategy by region, noting that U.S. foreign policy will no longer be “dominated” by the Middle East, and that the U.S. will “enlist friends” in the Western Hemisphere to “control migration, [and] stop drug flows,” as well as to “expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners.” Trump’s strategy also outlined his administration’s vision for the future of international strategic alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), writing:

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority-non European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.

Read the Trump administration’s 2025 NSS here or below: