The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy released in late 2025 offers limited predictive value regarding actual policy implementation. Such documents function primarily as branding instruments communicating administrative attitudes rather than providing accurate blueprints for likely policies. Foreign and military policies emerge not from strategy papers but from power struggles and ideology. Current American global approaches flow from contests among contending interest groups, particularly the military-industrial complex wielding substantial advantages.
The weapons industry and Pentagon allies employ diverse influence tools including tens of millions in campaign contributions, over 1,000 lobbyists, and employment tied to military facilities in key congressional districts. This trillion-dollar war machine maintains considerable influence over institutions shaping worldviews—media, think tanks, Hollywood, gaming industry, and universities.
However, militarism’s grip faces challenges from organizations including The Poor People’s Campaign, Dissenters youth antimilitarism group, antiwar veterans groups like About Face and Veterans for Peace, longstanding peace organizations, networks like People Over Pentagon, ceasefire and Palestinian rights campus movements, and groups advocating racial justice, immigration reform, police demilitarization, and compensation for environmental damage from military activities. As such organizations coalesce, representing tens of millions whose lives are impacted by expanding war machinery, possibilities emerge for creating power necessary to build more tolerant, peaceful worlds meeting majority needs rather than squandering resources on war preparations.
Strategy Document Significance
The NSS warrants attention for several reasons. First, it prompts mainstream media discussion of American global priorities—discussions requiring expansion to include perspectives from those suffering consequences of militarized domestic and foreign policies. Second, the document reflects the current administration’s unsettling intentions and worldview, which determines whether this country maintains war or peace. Finally, it suggests how the Trump administration desires perception, functioning as weapon in debates over what America should become.
The submission letter accompanying the strategy document epitomizes Donald Trump’s characteristic hyperbole. The document claims: “Over the past nine months, we have brought our nation—and the world—back from the brink of catastrophe and disaster…No administration in history has brought about such a dramatic turnaround in so short a time.” We’re expected to attribute alleged American revival to presidential team brilliance and tough-guy attitudes.
However, reasonable Americans should question such claims. Among the administration’s proudest accomplishments is getting “radical gender ideology and woke lunacy out of our military.” Translated: dismantling programs designed to reduce racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans violence in military ranks. Whether discrimination-reducing programs were ever sufficient remains doubtful, but addressing such discrimination should be beyond question. A 2024 study found over 70,000 sexual assault cases in U.S. military during 2021 and 2023, with 24 percent of active-duty women experiencing assault during Afghanistan operations. Dismissing widespread sexual violence as “radical gender ideology” constitutes policy equivalent of criminal negligence—hardly appropriate for someone wanting recognition as “president of peace.”
Questionable Peace Claims
The introduction claims the president ended “eight raging conflicts” in his first eight months—including Cambodia-Thailand, Kosovo-Serbia, Armenia-Azerbaijan, India-Pakistan, and Israel-Iran conflicts. Residents of these countries can be forgiven for not noting the president’s purported peacekeeping role or recognizing peaceful situations he claims to have created don’t exist. Skepticism is warranted from someone who decimated the diplomatic corps and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development—hardly peacemaker actions.
Western Hemisphere Focus
The military strategy aspect receiving most attention is its Western Hemisphere focus, including what’s termed the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine or “Donroe Doctrine.” This encompasses harsh immigration crackdowns—Immigration and Customs Enforcement now literally kidnapping people from city streets, regardless of immigration status or alleged criminal histories. The president sees repression waves as honor badges, arguing he “restored sovereign borders and deployed military to stop invasion.”
Border hyper-militarization parallels wildly aggressive hemispheric postures—repeated attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats in Caribbean waters and Venezuelan coasts, plus preparations for potential regime-change war against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, despite his country posing no direct threat. Republican calls for full-scale war persist despite disastrous regime-change results in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
Attacks on defenseless ships targeting individuals posing no direct threats without proven drug-trafficking involvement violate international law and proceed without Congressional approval. Data from Tufts University’s Military Intervention Project indicates the United States used military force 30 times since 2001, with Congress largely sidelined. Rarely have interventions achieved stated objectives, as documented by Costs of War Project showing post-9/11 war on terror costs exceeding $8 trillion, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and massive veteran injuries—all without achieving democracy or stability promotion goals.
Can Trump End Endless Wars?
Despite increasingly aggressive Western Hemisphere posturing, some analysts hope the Trump administration might reduce military intervention frequency globally and “end endless wars.” The strategy document contains rhetoric supporting such notions, but whether the president acts meaningfully remains questionable. The document states: “Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy…American strategies since the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes…not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes.”
The document seemingly denounces American war machinery and global military dominance drive: “After the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country…They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.”
Taken seriously, such observations would lead to sharp reductions in America’s 750 foreign bases, 170,000-plus overseas troops, globally-combat-capable Navy, dozens of ongoing counterterror operations, and arms relationships with over half of earth’s nations. That hasn’t happened under either Republican or Democratic leadership. Anti-interventionist language in the National Security Strategy targets domestic base elements sick of war and skeptical of large corporations and “deep state.”
Sadly, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth seem willing to wage significant warfare in the Western Hemisphere while essentially ignoring military activities elsewhere. Whether Trump supporters can hold him to antiwar rhetoric and blunt his military force penchant remains uncertain.
The Fight for Peace
Resisting and reversing American foreign policy militarization requires speaking truth to power while debunking myths rationalizing permanent war footing. But it also requires confronting power with power by generating broad people’s movements against militarism in all manifestations—including foreign policy militarization, immigration enforcement militarization, policing militarization, and military contributions to greenhouse gas emissions accelerating climate change.
People and organizations fight on all these fronts. Building resistance networks respecting each priority requires dedicated organizing and relationship-building. Much work is underway. The question remains: can public interest overcome special interests and bankrupt ideologies making war America’s face to the world? It’s a question none can afford neutrality on.
Original analysis by William Hartung from Foreign Policy in Focus. Republished with additional research and verification by ThinkTanksMonitor.
