National Insecurity

The US National Security Strategy (hereafter the NSS) is perhaps oddly named in that it pays scant attention to the security of the country itself, whether from foreign attack, natural disasters or the growing impact of climate change. The comments about defence against potential aggressor states are cursory when not fantastical ("a Golden Dome for the American homeland"). This blitheness is a persistent feature of American political culture, rooted in the assumption that two oceans protect it from sudden attack (a point the NSS makes explicit) and that the threats from the North and South are non-existent, at least since the annexation of Texas in 1845. The "infamy" of Pearl Harbour obscured that this was an assault on an imperial outpost that would not become a US state until 1959. In threatening Canada and Mexico over tariffs, and in suggesting that Denmark should do the decent thing and sell Greenland to the US, Donald Trump isn't stepping beyond this base assumption. He is merely articulating, loudly and at length, a stance that all parties have felt it prudent hitherto to keep sotto voce.

These assumptions have long been shared across the political spectrum in the US. In his Lyceum Address of 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln famously emphasised not only this sense of external security but also the fear that what threatened to union was internal: "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

The NSS takes a similar approach: an obligatory nod to the idea of an external threat that immediately gives way to a focus on internal disarray and then homes in on migration as not only a threat to the US but to the world order: "We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation. We want full control over our borders, over our immigration system, and over transportation networks through which people come into our country—legally and illegally. We want a world in which migration is not merely “orderly” but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit."

In his preface to the NSS, Trump claims that "Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest ... They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” ... And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty." The dichotomy of internationalism and isolationism is important, but it can lead us to fail to see the common elements in the thinking of American elites (which includes Trump). First and foremost is the fear that the country could be undermined by unconstrained immigration. Today the focus is on Central America and "shithole" countries in Africa. But as the rhetoric of vicious drug-pushers and greedy moochers makes clear, this is a continuation of older fears of Jewish communists, Italian gangsters and Irish hoodlums, not to mention uppity blacks. 

US elites don't fear invasion, but they do fear the dissolution of the racial and religious hierarchies that underpin their political and economic power, which makes the strategy paper's focus on European "civilizational erasure" all the more obviously a case of projection. The writers of the NSS do not understand Europe either politically or culturally, but then they don't feel that they need to. European civilisation is for them simply a proxy for a white, Christian, conservative ideal of homogenous "nations" that has no historical basis. Western European populations were already being dramatically remade through migration two centuries ago. That, after all, was one of the drivers in the emergence of the "imagined communities" of nationalism. In advocating for conservative nationalism today, the US is not promoting national sovereignty, let alone more racism, so much as arguing for the continued fragmentation of possible economic competitors. What it dislikes about the EU is the regulatory impediments to US businesses exploiting European markets. It's fear is not that the typical European will be a brown-skinned Muslim in 50 years but that she will be buying European goods in preference to American ones.

The global reaction to the NSS has largely reflected parochial concerns. South of the Rio Grande, it has focused on the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which can be read as a clear warning that regime change is coming to Venezuela, a point that Maria Corina Machado has been happy to amplify. In the Middle East, there has been a largely positive response to the shift in emphasis from "nation building" (always an implicit threat to the Gulf monarchies) to pacification, investment and trade. The claim that the region "is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was" will ring hollow in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon where Israel will remain unconstrained. In Europe there has been much pearl-clutching by liberals appalled at the antipathy towards the European Union and the stated intent for the US to act as a referee between Europe and Russia rather than a staunch ally of the former. According to Simon Schama, "Historian in me knows the Trump national security strategy document will go down as one of the great betrayals of the free world and all those responsible for it remembered in shameful ignominy."

It is ironic that a British historian noted for his comfort with the broad sweep and his emphasis on the importance of rhetoric (cf his Citizens) should fail to see that the NSS doesn't break any new ground other than in its choice of language. Other historians would point out that it simply makes clear what has always been understood to be the US's real interests and incidentally its abiding contempt for European politicians. The words may be salty but Trump has not diverged in any meaningful sense from either standard US theory or practice. As Tom Stevenson noted, "In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents." If anything, Trump has been relatively restrained, reflecting his political bases's tendency towards isolationism and his own laziness. Insofar as you can bandy around words like "betrayal", this would better fit the generation of European politicians who refused to address the new world of the 1990s and instead promoted NATO, and thus dependence on the US, as the sine qua non of collective security.

The question now is whether they have the nerve to move towards a genuine European security alliance, backed by French nuclear weapons, in which NATO would simply be an outer envelope incorporating the US and UK (London will never reject Atlanticism and its nukes are controlled by Washington). The truth is that this will not happen, partly because of political cowardice but mainly because Washington has no intention of allowing it. For all the demands that Europe step up to the plate, the strategy remains the same: to keep Europe under America's thumb. The increased spending on defence will go towards US-manufactured weapons and clear constraints will be placed on their use. Ukraine will be chopped up but Russia will not go to war with the EU. If the conflict has shown anything, it is that Russia is militarily weak and has no more popular enthusiasm for conflict than Western Europe does. The usual suspects among the UK political class will chunter about national security and the independent nuclear deterrent, but none will go so far as to identify the US as a threat. The global order will remain intact and at the very heart of it will remain a paranoid society of gun-owners who fear being murdered in their beds.