The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

In early December 2025, President Trump’s administration issued its “National Security Strategy” (NSS) document.  The 33-page paper is the Administration’s most complete attempt so far to explain its thinking on national security. Editorially, the Wall Street Journal observed: “Eight years ago, in his now-distant first term, President Trump laid out a national security strategy recognizing the new world of great power competition. It was a welcome effort to articulate emerging global threats. The new strategy . . .  is an all but explicit retreat from that competition. It will please China and Russia but discomfit America’s allies. The strategy isn’t an isolationist document that you might read at a libertarian think tank. But it is clearly a declaration that America can no longer afford to, and shouldn’t in the national interest, bear the burden of global leadership.”  Several conclusions deduced from this document:

• Most notably, the strategy puts the Western Hemisphere first, playing down the rest of the world. “There’s a geographic logic to this but not a strategic one since the largest threats to U.S. security aren’t Brazil, or Colombia, or even Cuba.”  It also suggests that migration and drugs are two of the gravest threats to America. Niall Ferguson, writing in the Free Press, deftly highlights the key line in the 2025 NSS: “We will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” This, as Ferguson notes, echoes Theodore Roosevelt’s so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, first set forth in 1904. Like its Rooseveltian forerunner, the Trump Corollary asserts a U.S. right of intervention or, in Roosevelt’s words, “police power” in the hemisphere when local governments fail in their duties to keep hostile influences in check, to prevent migrant surges or to curb drug cartels.” The overthrow of Nicolás Maduro illustrates this focus.
• “By any measure the largest threat to the U.S. is the hostile power across the Pacific that has tripled its nuclear arsenal in five years—China. Yet the document describes commerce as ‘the ultimate stakes’ in the Pacific and treats trade imbalances as a bigger threat to U.S. prosperity than Beijing’s military buildup. The best defense for this weakness on China is that the Administration wants to conciliate to buy time while Beijing holds the whip hand on rare-earth production.”
• China is also the main underwriter of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, and “Russia is where the strategy’s wheels fall off.” The document counsels “strategic stability” with the power that invaded eastern Europe and has been deploying nuclear blackmail against the U.S. and NATO. “Congratulations on making the Ukraine war harder to end. Mr. Putin will wield the strategy as proof that NATO expansion and European decadence justify his imperialism.”
• Meanwhile, the document assails America’s friends across the Atlantic. “The Administration is right about Europe’s decline in self-confidence and decades of neglecting hard power. But the Administration lectures Europe on free speech while saying we should ignore how the world’s dictatorships govern themselves.”

In addition, Max Boot writes that “the Trump administration has been reallocating scarce federal resources to combating drug cartels (‘narco-terrorists’), the Venezuelan state (‘a foreign terrorist organization’) and leftist groups like antifa (a ‘violent fifth column of domestic terrorists’). Aside from obvious concerns about legality, these actions also raise serious questions about the administration’s priorities and distribution of resources.”

A March U.S. intelligence report warned that the Islamic State “will continue to seek to attack the West, including the United States,” and that al-Qaeda also “maintains its intent to target the United States and U.S. citizens.” Two terrorism experts note that there are now “five times as many Salafi-Jihadi terrorist groups designated by the U.S. Department of State” as there were on Sept. 11, 2001.  “Combating jihadist groups requires a comprehensive, long-term strategy; a few U.S. airstrikes, like the ones in Syria on Friday, won’t achieve much. Yet many of the administration’s actions undercut attempts to fight these terrorist groups.” Boot also makes the following startling reflections:

• First, resources at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have been shifted toward immigration enforcement and away from terrorism and other concerns. Nearly one-fourth of all FBI agents are working on immigration cases, even though most of the people being deported have no criminal record.
• Second, the State Department has closed offices dedicating to combating disinformation online, and the Trump administration is pressuring social media sites to scale back content moderation efforts. The administration has even threatened to deny visas to foreign workers involved in content moderation, and it is lobbying the European Union to relax its digital security standards.
• Third, the administration’s attempts to close Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other broadcasters — many offering programming in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and other languages — make it harder for the U.S. government to counter jihadist propaganda.
• Fourth, Trump’s drastic reduction in U.S. foreign aid has impeded efforts to assist allies in the Global South to stop the spread of Islamist extremism. Earlier this year, the administration even briefly cut off funding for Kurdish forces in Syria who are guarding prison camps holding 8,000 Islamic State fighters and 27,000 family members. If those detainees are released, the Islamic State threat will metastasize. Though essential funding was resumed, U.S. support is at such a low level that authorities are struggling to hold the camps together.
• Fifth, the administration’s contempt for U.S. allies and international norms imperils the international cooperation needed to fight terrorist networks. For example, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard all but blamed Australia for the Bondi Beach shooting. She wrote on X that it was “the direct result of the massive influx of Islamists to Australia,” and added, “It is probably too late for Europe — and maybe Australia.” That is not the kind of message that someone in Gabbard’s position should be sending to one of America’s closest partners. Some allies are now curtailing intelligence sharing with Washington.

In conclusion, Fareed Zakaria makes this astute observation: “What the Trump administration is proposing is not so different from what the isolationists proposed in the 1920s and 1930s: Stay out of European affairs and crack down on immigration. Indeed, then as now, skepticism of American engagement in the world went hand in hand with anti-immigration sentiment, as nativists worried that these aliens would not be able to assimilate and enacted massive restrictions on immigration . . . The Trump NSS is obsessed with immigration as a national security threat and comes close to arguing that the gravest threat that the United States faces today is migration into its own country and migration into Europe, which it says poses the prospect of ‘civilizational erasure.’”

The global situation today is much like the 1920s. The U.S. is the only country in the world with the capacity to keep the international system stable. “Its withdrawal from the world will create power vacuums, which other, less responsible powers will fill. A century ago, America refused to shoulder its burden and the international system collapsed, leading to World War II. Today, there are many other stabilizing forces in the world, but an America that looks mainly after its backyard will leave the world rudderless, unstable and chaotic. Let’s hope we will not have to learn that lesson again.”

See Wall Street Journal editorial, “A Trump Doctrine of Contradictions” (8 December 2025); Walter Russell Mead  “Introducing the ‘Trump Corollary’” in the Wall Street Journal (8 December 2025); Max Boot, “Trump is losing sight of America’s real terrorist threat” in the Wall Street Journal (22 December 2025); Fareed Zakaria, “Trump’s doctrine is ‘Make America Small Again’” in the Washington Post (19 December 2025);