Opinion | Opinion: Which way for US foreign policy in 2018? Don’t look to Trump’s national security strategy for answers
Document thin on specifics but suggests one general direction for ties with China
Nothing could have less predictive value in gauging US foreign policy direction under the Trump administration than its new national security strategy document.
The document released on Monday does offer something of a vision but no answers for observers seeking more clarity on how US President Donald Trump’s populist-at-home, populist-abroad message of “America first” might translate into policy.
Consider that in his speech after the document’s release, when Trump was expected to reinforce the strategy’s overarching themes, he barely touched on it. His own National Security Council spokesperson even confirmed that while Trump might have had the document, he hadn’t “read every line and every word”. One wonders if he opened the document at all.
Given all this, Trump’s first national security strategy will remain little more than an exercise in giving the “America first” doctrine a little more shape in a purely theoretical sense. Reading it at face value, the document helps crystallise a familiar vision for US foreign policy in Asia and the world: one privileging a role for the “contest for power”, if not leadership, and a winner-takes-all, zero-sum vision on economic policy and trade.
At its core, the strategy identifies three primary sets of adversaries for the United States. In terms of longer term strategic threats, there are the major “revisionist powers” China and Russia, which are explicitly singled out as challengers – despite Trump’s generally good personal relationships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Below these two grand competitors, there are two other categories: the two rogue states of North Korea and Iran, and then terrorist groups and non-state actors. The document confirms that the US remains ready to use “overwhelming” force against North Korea, thereby closing out 2017 with the spectre of a disastrous preventive war haunting the Korean peninsula.