The release of President Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) has ignited a firestorm of criticism and debate in Washington and beyond, exposing deep rifts over the direction of U.S. foreign policy. The document, unveiled on December 5, 2025, has been met with condemnation from top Democratic lawmakers and scathing reviews from policy analysts, while also revealing the evolving—and sometimes contradictory—impulses shaping America’s role in the world.
Representative Gregory W. Meeks, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wasted no time in issuing a blistering statement. According to the official release, Meeks lambasted the strategy as emblematic of a “cynical, dog-eat-dog philosophy” that he said pervades the Trump administration. He charged, “This document is emblematic not only of Donald Trump, but the cynical, dog-eat-dog philosophy that has taken hold across his administration. It discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”
Meeks argued that the NSS’s ‘America first’ posture signals to allies that the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner, and to adversaries that “now is open season to act without fear of American pushback.” He continued, “'America first', as this administration frames it, is not a strategy. It ignores America’s core strengths: our democratic values, our network of like-minded allies, and the multilateral institutions that have helped the United States shape the global order. That rules-based system, while imperfect, has overwhelmingly benefitted the United States and our allies. Here ‘America first’ simply means America alone, and that leaves us more vulnerable.”
Meeks’s criticisms didn’t stop there. He accused the Trump administration of using national-security decision-making as a vehicle for self-enrichment, claiming, “Nearly a year into this administration, the only north star guiding Donald Trump’s national-security decision-making is using the levers of government to enrich himself and his wealthy donors. The State Department has been gutted to empower unaccountable special envoys pushing corrupt business deals. American foreign policy is for sale under the Trump administration.”
While Meeks’s statement reflected a sharp partisan divide, the critique from the policy world has been no less intense, if more nuanced. In a major analysis published the same day in The Atlantic, Eliot A. Cohen dissected the new NSS with characteristic candor, describing it as a “mess of a state paper” filled with “bombast, sycophancy, lies, inconsistencies, and grotesque self-contradictions.” Cohen lamented the contrast with past strategies drafted by intellectual heavyweights like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing that the current document seemed crafted by “lickspittles with literary aspirations but no discernible literary skills.”
Cohen zeroed in on the document’s grandiose claims, such as Trump single-handedly reversing decades of assumptions about China or bringing peace to India and Pakistan, and Israel and Iran. He wryly observed, “Only a disabled cringe reflex, for example, could have permitted the claims that Trump alone has rescued the United States from the machinations of American foreign-policy elites, let alone that he has brought peace (not merely cease-fires) to India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran, or ‘single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken assumptions about China.’”
Despite the ridicule, Cohen acknowledged that the strategy was not entirely devoid of substance. He noted that, stripped of its “rants and the brownnosing,” the document did identify real issues—such as America’s tendency to overlook the Western Hemisphere until crises erupt, the need to view Africa through a commercial rather than purely aid-based lens, and the recognition of mass migration as a genuine challenge for Europe.
On Latin America, the NSS introduces what it calls the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” which Cohen dismissed as little more than a blanket assertion of U.S. prerogative to interfere in the region. He argued the administration likely misunderstood the original Monroe Doctrine, which was about rejecting European colonial ambitions rather than aggressive American intervention. “There are no real policies here other than deals—nothing about building consensus, establishing deeper ties, or strengthening democratic institutions through, say, the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace,” Cohen wrote.
Turning to Africa, Cohen conceded the NSS’s shift from aid to commerce “captures an important idea” but warned it undervalues programs like PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, which has been widely praised. He gave a nod to the administration’s decision to move USAID to the State Department as a “sensible move” to bring coherence to U.S. foreign assistance.
On Europe, the NSS’s focus on migration as a destabilizing force resonated with Cohen, who noted, “If there is one subject that populists in the United States and Europe fully understand that most progressives do not, it is that largely uncontrolled flows of migration produced a crisis in the United States, and far more so in Europe.” He cautioned, however, that the document veers into hyperbole by suggesting the “probable extinction of European culture.”
The NSS, Cohen argued, is fundamentally a populist document, reflecting the “muddled enthusiasms, resentments, insecurities, and vanities of the president himself.” It vacillates between internationalist rhetoric—such as commitments to alliances and a forward presence in Asia—and “America First” isolationism. This ambivalence, he suggested, mirrors the internal contradictions of the Trump coalition, which brings together disparate and sometimes antagonistic factions under a banner of anti-elitism and skepticism toward traditional foreign-policy expertise.
Cohen also pointed out that the document lacks a coherent assessment of America’s adversaries. China is cast mainly as a commercial rival, Russia is described vaguely as a Eurasian power, and threats like North Korea and jihadist movements are barely mentioned. He warned, “Strategy for national security is necessary because America has both opponents and outright enemies, who have to be studied and understood if we hope to thwart, contain, or transform them. If we know nothing about them or have comforting illusions about them, or can think about them only in clichés and slogans, the result will be not strategy but mere expressions of an unchained foreign-policy id.”
For all its faults, the NSS does appear to capture a broader mood of disillusionment with foreign-policy elites—a sentiment that, as Cohen notes, is not exclusive to Trump’s base. He recalled how even Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s speechwriter, derided the establishment as “The Blob.” The difference now, Cohen suggested, is that the traditional foreign-policy establishment—epitomized by figures like Kurt Campbell and William Burns under President Biden—may be losing its grip, with both major parties drifting away from centrist, historically informed approaches.
While the Trump administration’s NSS has been pilloried for its incoherence and self-congratulation, its populist tone and willingness to question old assumptions reflect real shifts in the American political landscape. Whether these changes will make the United States more secure or more isolated remains a matter of fierce debate, but one thing is clear: the conversation about America’s place in the world is far from settled.
