The U.S. National Security Strategy announced approximately a month ago introduced qualitative shifts in the American approach to conditions governing the use of military force. The document treats participation in the Israeli war against Iran as the final form of American military intervention in the Middle East, which it declares is no longer a U.S. priority and no longer harbors any source of threat to core U.S. national security interests—whether related to energy security or Israeli security. This characterization represents a point of convergence with the document’s fundamental premise, built on the “America First” doctrine and the Monroe Doctrine, which restores the concept of national security to mean security in America’s neighborhood, from Latin America to Greenland.
This new strategy includes a clear reassessment of the interventionist principle of imposing democracy that most previous American administrations—both Republican and Democratic—pursued, using democracy and human rights as pretexts for toppling regimes. The new document explicitly critiques this approach and affirms the Trump administration’s withdrawal from using force to impose regime change in any country outside the American continent. Such force may be deemed necessary to enforce American hegemony within the American neighborhood—an objective the document openly identifies as justification for using force in the region—or may be required in combating drug trafficking, controlling resources, and preventing Chinese expansion. All these rationales and objectives are included in the new U.S. National Security Strategy regarding the use of force in the Americas under what the Monroe Doctrine has become: the Monroe-Trump Doctrine, which formed the basis for justifying the use of force against Venezuela.
The document praises forms of governance that emerge from other nations’ cultures and calls for abandoning claims of an exportable governance model. The National Security Strategy goes so far as to state that monarchical systems and the absence of elections should not be grounds for American criticism of countries that find their stability, traditions, and culture compatible with this form of governance. Consequently, all of America’s wars waged under the banner of spreading democracy become subject to condemnation according to the Trump administration’s document. America will not wage war outside the American continent except when core U.S. national security interests face a threat—which the strategy maintains does not exist in the Middle East, where the priority is de-escalation and stability.
In dealing with the protests that swept Iran following the rise in foreign currency exchange rates and escalated into confrontations with Iranian security forces, Trump revives war rhetoric, undermining the U.S. National Security Strategy. Iran is not in the Americas to fall under the Monroe-Trump Doctrine, and according to the strategy published a month ago, Iran no longer poses a threat to American security or Israeli security following the U.S. strike last summer. Moreover, renewed talk of war has not been linked to references to national security threats, but rather to providing support for the Iranian opposition to change the regime or to confront it more effectively—precisely what the National Security Strategy criticized in previous policies. So will Trump torpedo his new National Security Strategy and return to war outside the Americas despite the absence of serious threats to core U.S. national security interests, which in the Middle East, as the strategy states, are represented by energy security and Israeli security—threats the month-old strategy declares non-existent?
If Trump’s recent statements prove accurate—showing a retreat from war threats and discussing cyber support for the opposition and imposing sanctions on security officials—then adherence to the National Security Strategy would have prevailed over Trump’s impulses or Benjamin Netanyahu’s desires. However, if Trump proceeds with military strikes, knowing full well they will ignite a war whose beginning he knows but whose end he cannot foresee, he may have done something far greater than merely discarding the U.S. National Security Strategy—a strategy aimed less at achieving gains than at avoiding further losses. And these losses could have ramifications difficult to contain in an already precarious American position.
History offers America a French cautionary tale: France avoided Britain’s fate of losing its global standing after the 1956 tripartite aggression against Egypt thanks to its control over Algeria. Yet Algeria became the gateway to ending France’s status when it failed to properly understand the British lesson and announce a voluntary withdrawal and recognition of Algerian independence.
