Hyperventilating over Trump's new National Security Strategy (Though Trump himself probably hasn’t even read it)

Olga Lautman of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) takes a look at the new Trumpista US National Security Strategy (NSS) in which she judges:

Last week’s release of Trump’s National Security Strategy made one thing brutally clear and that is that the United States is no longer fully shaping its own foreign policy. … [A]n American president has published an official strategy that openly attacks America’s closest allies, encourages the collapse of Europe’s stability, and advances Russia’s strategic objectives point by point - a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview disguised as U.S. doctrine. (1)

For me this immediately called to mind a comment that Gerhard Mangott of the University of Innsbruck made in a lecture I recently attended. Mangott is a historian of Russia and his presentation was on the Russo-Ukraine War. Someone asked him if he thought Ukraine was a democracy, and he immediately said no. He mentioned the big corruption problems and also that national elections have been postponed because the Ukrainian Constitution suspends elections during an active war.

That opinion isn’t actually that controversial, though Ukraine’s boosters would often dispute that. The 2025 edition of the widely used V-Dem ratings rates Ukraine as an “electoral autocracy” (for 2024). Chatham House rates it as “Partly Free.”

He also advised people to remember that multiple things can be true at the same time. For instance, one can assume that Ukraine is not a democracy and also that the Ukrainian public has shown itself supportive of democracy.

Which is not just true for Ukraine policy! It immediately came to mind when I started reading Lauman’s piece.

For instance, for the portion quoted above, I would note that the following two things can be true:

• Trump 2.0 may be making improved relations with Russia a priority and there are good reasons to hope for such an outcome.
• Advancing Russian strategic objectives is a bad thing for the US if those objectives are seriously disadvantageous to the US and a good thing if they enhance US interests. Nuclear arms-control treaties are an example of the latter.

A lot of the NSS may align with Russian priorities without it being “a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview disguised as U.S. doctrine” or that “the United States is no longer fully shaping its own foreign policy.”

I know this kind of thing is obviously part of how people talk about politics. But calling the new NSS “a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview” is just paranoid polemical talk that sounds an awful lot like an updated version of the John Birchers who thought Dwight Eisenhower as President was a Communist agent of the Soviet Union.

She continues the habit when she writes:

The language is pure Kremlin propaganda. Europe, the NSS claims, is facing “civilizational erasure,” and the culprit, no surprise, is the ‘European Union’ — now recast as a threat to “political liberty,” a narrative lifted word for word from the information operations Moscow deployed for Brexit, Le Pen, the AfD, and every other attempt to subvert elections across Europe over the past decade.

Except for the first sentence, I said pretty much the same thing in my first reaction to the NSS. The Trump Administration is inclined to support far right parties in Europe but it’s not simply a matter of copying Russian propaganda statements. Trump and Stephen Miller and many of the other folks in Trump’s Ship of State share the ideology of those far-right parties. Not every danger to democracy in the US comes from Russia.

The other problem with this kind of polemic is that it presents Trump, an old man with visibly fading mental acuity and probably serious physical health problems, as a stealthy Russian agent, or the functional equivalent. But it misses an obvious and key fact: his diplomacy is spectacularly incompetent. No one can count on him to stick with an international agreement even in a press conference announcing it. He has no strategic vision other than collecting bribes.

Trump’s advantage to Russian foreign policy is not that he’s taking orders from Moscow – even though he often seems to consider Putin a reliable counselor. His real advantage to them is that he can’t conduct a coherent foreign policy and they can take advantage of the policy drift in many ways.

The Russians are certainly glad to see the major weakening of NATO that Trump has produced. Including threatening war against fellow NATO members Canada and Denmark (the latter over Greenland).

Notes:

(1) America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia. Unmasking Russia 12/07/2025. <https://olgalautman.substack.com/p/americas-foreign-policy-now-alligns> Accessed: 2025-08-2025).