2025 National Security Strategy: He Who Defends Everything Defends Nothing

On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration released its much-anticipated National Security Strategy. This Congressionally-mandated document is the authoritative statement of how an administration wants the policy community and foreign governments to understand its intentions. This most recent edition, however, represented a stark departure from previous strategies, drawing a polarized reception across media outlets, think tanks, and the foreign policy community. It is not difficult to see why. To the greatest extent since the Cold War, Washington has published a strategy reflecting more realist principles: one that narrowly defines America’s core national interests, ostensibly recognizes the limits of its power, and acknowledges the need for prioritization.  

For decades, the National Security Strategy has essentially functioned as an aspirational manifesto that treated American power as unlimited. They were written under the hubristic assumption that America – the world’s “indispensable nation” – was destined to uphold the international order forever. If the U.S. were to withdraw anywhere, the system would collapse everywhere. As such, past NSS documents outlined grandiose visions for every global region and framed everything from democracy promotion to gender and global health as existential. Unfortunately, this assumption was wrong: what will collapse is not the amorphous international order, but rather the United States’ global position if it continues its quixotic quest for universal engagement.  

American foreign policy after 1991 has proven costly, counterproductive, and damaging to the nation’s credibility. This is not because of poor execution but because of how policymakers conceptualized and codified strategy. In the absence of a peer competitor, successive National Security Strategies expanded the definition of the national interest to encompass regime type, human rights practices, and social policy in far-flung lands. Embedding these objectives within the NSS led to values promotion being framed as a strategic necessity and to national security being presented as the vindication of an ever-growing moral agenda.  

Wars of choice or surrenders to mission creep in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were not aberrations; they were the logical culmination of the strategic inflation that NSS documents institutionalized. By listing a perennially expanding set of moral and political objectives as “national security interests,” post-Cold War NSS documents erased prioritization altogether and substituted moral ambition for strategic clarity. This error ensured that America would stretch its power beyond what any state could realistically sustain. 

Thankfully, the most recent NSS openly disavows the ideological purity and moral universalism of the past. Regardless of how the administration executes its foreign policy in practice, this document matters for what it represents: a decisive break from the assumption that U.S. interests are synonymous with the universal advancement of liberal political outcomes. For the first time in a generation, the United States has published a strategy that distinguishes core from peripheral interests, acknowledges the finite nature of American power, and aligns objectives within existing capabilities. By any serious standard of strategic thought, that alone constitutes progress. 

“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” This line from the Strategy’s section on burden-sharing reflects a basic reality of international politics: power is finite, and effective strategy requires discrimination. While the U.S. remains unmatched in many domains, its relative power compared to the rest of the world is in decline. Even during the 1990s, the U.S. could not do everything, everywhere, all at once. This is even more true today. Advancing U.S. core national interests abroad requires tradeoffs, deciding where American power is essential, where it is useful but non-vital, and where it should not be applied at all. With a ballooning deficit and rising competitors across the globe, the United States will confront scarcity in its foreign policy, whether it chooses to or not. The main question is whether that adjustment occurs through deliberate strategic recalibration or through forced retrenchment.  

When Prussian King Frederick the Great said, “He who defends everything defends nothing,” he captured a central insight of strategy: not everything matters equally. Past National Security Strategies routinely ignored this reality and treated geographic breadth and moral ambition as substitutes for strategic focus. The most recent NSS departs from that tradition by identifying a limited set of priorities – among them burden-sharing, revitalizing the defense industrial base, securing critical minerals, and expanding American energy dominance. By doing so, it signals a shift away from rhetorical maximalism toward a document grounded in prioritization based on material capability. 

It also rejects the illusion that each region matters equally from a grand strategic perspective. Under the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, prioritization itself became morally contentious, as if regions of lesser strategic significance somehow became intrinsically devalued. This led to performative inclusion, adding pages to avoid offense and framing every region as strategically vital. This result was a pattern of grand promises in regions of marginal importance, followed by appeals to capacity constraints when those promises went unmet. This is not inclusive – it is dishonest and potentially destabilizing. Setting realistic expectations is a sign of strategic maturity and preserves credibility. 

“A ‘strategy’ is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.” These words from the Strategy’s introduction, while seemingly obvious, underscore how disconnected past iterations have strayed from even the most basic requirements of strategic thinking. Previous National Security Strategies routinely expanded the definition of the national interests without distinguishing core American interests from peripheral ones or identifying the means required to defend them. Even this basic acknowledgment is an essential step toward restoring coherence to U.S. foreign policy after decades in which ambition routinely outpaces capacity. 

This emphasis on discipline and prioritization was reinforced by the recently released 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS), which operationalizes the vision set out in the NSS through force planning and resource allocation. Echoing the NSS’s rejection of universal engagement, the NDS plainly states: “We recognize that it is neither America’s duty nor in our nation’s interest to act everywhere on our own, nor will we make up for allied security shortfalls from their leaders’ own irresponsible choices. Instead, the Department will prioritize the most important, consequential, and dangerous threats to Americans’ interests.” A well-framed 2026 National Security Strategy therefore matters not just as rhetoric, but as the conceptual foundation from which more restrained, tradeoff-aware defense planning now explicitly flows. 

The rhetorical return to strategic discipline could not have come sooner. As America’s relative power continues to decline, the margin for error narrows and the costs of overextension rise. A more grounded, realistic National Security Strategy can reduce strategic risks in this new era. To be clear, not every provision in this Strategy is beyond critique, nor does it rupture with every element of past American grand strategy. U.S. policy, even in higher priority regions, will still need to remain prudent and realistic enough to avoid being counterproductive. 

What matters is that the Strategy rejects the core flaw that has plagued its predecessors. By acknowledging scarcity, ranking interests, and aligning ends with means, it reflects an overdue recognition that American power is strongest when it is focused, sustainable, and surgically employed. Whether this shift endures will depend on whether future policymakers treat realism not as a temporary adjustment, but as the foundation for navigating a more competitive and constrained international order.