Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy

President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians.President Trump at the White House last month. The National Security Strategy his administration released describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in his first term — had portrayed them.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York TimesDec. 5, 2025, 5:44 p.m. ETLatin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature. But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”“For too long, delusion undergirded our foreign policy — delusion about America’s role in the world, delusion about our interests and delusion about what we can achieve through military force,” Mr. Caldwell said. “This is a reality-based document in that regard.”The document codifies Mr. Trump’s well-established aversion to Europe’s liberal governments and his readiness to overlook human rights abuses, as with his “things happen” remark last month about the murder and dismemberment of a Saudi Washington Post journalist in 2018. Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said it “discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”The strategy depicts Europe as facing “civilizational erasure” at the hands of immigrants and its mainstream leaders. It says the United States will cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s mainstream leaders, and asserts that many of their governments “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”That stance provoked an outcry from European politicians, echoing the shock when Vice President JD Vance castigated German officials in February for trying to blunt the rise of the country’s far-right party. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, posted on social media that the National Security Strategy “places itself to the right of the extreme right in Europe.”Outside Europe, departing from decades of precedent in U.S. foreign policy, the 33-page document does not characterize democracy as a value to be defended. Israel and Taiwan — two democracies whose security the United States has long sought to support — are described in the context of their regions’ economic significance, not their connection to American values.The Middle East, it says, is “a source and destination of international investment.” The document calls for “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.”In Latin America, the document says, the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Along the way, American diplomats are to hunt for “major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts.”“The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies,” the document says.The strategy offers little insight into the Trump administration’s deliberations about a possible attack on Venezuela. While it says the United States should have a “predisposition to non-interventionism,” it also says that American military force is to be redeployed to Latin America from elsewhere “to address urgent threats in our hemisphere.”Mr. Caldwell, the former adviser to Mr. Hegseth, said that many in Mr. Trump’s “America First” movement “have concerns about a regime change war in Venezuela.”“But that said, what happens in Venezuela and our own hemisphere deserves more focus than who controls the Donbas,” he added, referring to the region of eastern Ukraine that Russia is demanding in peace talks.The National Security Strategy takes a far more restrained view of geopolitical competition than prior administrations did. Gone is any reference to the worldview laid out in Mr. Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy: “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”Without describing Russia as an adversary, the new document says that “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” is a “core interest of the United States.” The goal of such a peace deal, it says, would be both to “re-establish strategic stability with Russia” and to enable Ukraine’s “survival as a viable state.”China is cast as a competitor, but mainly in the familiar commercial terms often repeated by Mr. Trump. The document says a war over Taiwan needs to be deterred because of what would be its “major implications for the U.S. economy.” It calls for “a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing,” echoing the conciliation of the trade truce that Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, announced in October.Jonathan Czin, a director for China on the National Security Council under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said the new strategy carried “a happier message for Beijing” than the versions published under Mr. Biden or in Mr. Trump’s first term. Among other things, he said, the document’s focus on Latin America should be welcome news for China.“I think it would be viewed with some relief,” said Mr. Czin, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.Megan Mineiro contributed reporting from Washington.Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.SKIP