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Donald Trump, flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the White House in Washington, DC, on 2 December 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP The MAGA International: Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy as an ideological manifesto Published: December 17, 2025 3.25pm GMT Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, Sciences Po

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Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy
Spécialiste de la politique américaine, Sciences Po

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Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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https://doi.org/10.64628/AAK.wk37xt9aw

https://theconversation.com/the-maga-international-trumps-2025-national-security-strategy-as-an-ideological-manifesto-272094 https://theconversation.com/the-maga-international-trumps-2025-national-security-strategy-as-an-ideological-manifesto-272094 Link copied Share article

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On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration released its new National Security Strategy. Far from being a dry technocratic document, it reads like a blistering broadside against Europe, a reaffirmation of American exceptionalism, and a self-portrait of the president as a heroic defender of Western civilization against mortal threats. It is less a set of policy guidelines than a full-blown ideological proclamation.

In theory, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a technocratic, non-binding document that every US president must submit to Congress during their time in office to provide an overall framework for the country’s foreign policy.

The version published by the Trump administration in 2025, however, looks far less like a “state paper” than a MAGA (Make America Great Again) manifesto. It panders to Trump’s political base as much as the rest of the world – beginning with Washington’s European allies, accused of betraying “true” democracy. For the first time, compared with the 2017 NSS, national security is framed almost entirely through Trumpian obsessions: immigration, culture wars, and nationalism.

Three main narrative arcs

The 2025 NSS marks a clear break with the liberal tradition of constitutional democracy – fundamental rights, the rule of law, and political pluralism. It also rejects its international counterpart: the promotion of democracy through a multilateral, rules-based order. It rewrites the history of the post-Cold War era, stitches together a composite enemy (immigration, “globalist” elites, Europe), and hijacks the language of freedom and democracy for an ethno-populist vision of American exceptionalism.

The document unfolds as a grand narrative in three acts.

Act I: The betrayal of the elites

First comes the story of the failure of US policies since 1991, blamed on the hubris of elites who allegedly sought global hegemony. They are said to have waged “endless wars” and embraced “so-called free trade”. They also subjected the country to supranational institutions, at the expense of US industry, the middle class, national sovereignty, and cultural cohesion. This first act also highlights the lack of any credible new national narrative after the end of the Cold War. Trump builds his own story on that narrative vacuum.

Act II: Decline

In the Trump administration’s telling, America’s decline is economic, moral, geopolitical, and demographic all at once. It is manifested in deindustrialization, failed wars, and the crisis on the Mexican border. It echoes the “American carnage” denounced by Trump in his first inaugural address in 2017. The enemy is presented as both internal and external. Immigration is cast as an “invasion” tied to the cartels, while international institutions and foreign-policy elites – American and European alike – are portrayed as accomplices. All are folded into a single confrontational framework – that of a global war the Trump administration says it is prepared to wage against anyone who threatens US sovereignty, culture, and prosperity.

Act III: The Saviour

The NSS then casts the occupant of the White House as a providential leader, “The President of Peace,” correcting the betrayal of the elites. Trump appears as a heroic fixer – or anti-hero – who has supposedly “settled eight violent conflicts” in less than a year. He embodies a nation restored and ready to enter a “new golden age”.

This is a textbook American narrative pattern, rooted in the religious tradition of the jeremiad: a sermon that begins by denouncing sin and decadence, then calls for a return to founding principles to “save” the community. Historian Sacvan Bercovitch has shown how this jeremiad structure lies at the heart of the American national myth. A text that should have been technocratic and bureaucratic is thus refashioned into a story of fall and redemption.

American exceptionalism, Trump-style

Read closely, the 2025 NSS teems with tropes drawn from the grand myths of the United States. The aim is to “mythologize” the break with decades of foreign policy by presenting Trump’s course as a return to the nation’s origins.

The text invokes “God-given natural rights” as the foundation of sovereignty, freedom, the traditional family, and even the closing of borders. It calls on the Declaration of Independence and the “Founding Fathers” to justify selective non-interventionism. It claims the “America’s pioneering spirit” as “a key pillar” of “continued economic dominance and military superiority”.

The word exceptionalism never appears (nor does the phrase “indispensable nation”). Yet the strategy is saturated with formulations that present the United States as a unique nation with a special mission in the world – what scholars call American exceptionalism. It piles superlatives onto America’s economic and military power and casts the country as the central hub of the global monetary, technological, and strategic order.

This is foremost an exceptionalism of power. The text details at length the economic, energy, military, and financial dominance of the United States, then infers from it a moral superiority. If America is “the greatest and most successful nation in human history” and “the home of freedom on earth”, it is primarily because it is the most powerful. Virtue is no longer an ethical standard that might restrain power. Power itself is treated as evidence of virtue.

Within this framework, elites – including European elites – are portrayed as weakening America’s capacity in areas such as energy, industry, and border control. They are not just making strategic mistakes; they are accused of committing moral wrongs. In this view, exceptionalism is no longer the classic liberal idea of spreading democracy abroad. It becomes a “sovereignty-first” moral exceptionalism, with America cast as the chief guardian of “true” freedom – not only against its adversaries, but, when necessary, against some of its allies as well.

Where previous strategies stressed the defence of a “liberal international order,” the 2025 NSS casts the US primarily as a victim – exploited by its allies and shackled by hostile institutions. Exceptionalism becomes the story of a besieged superpower rather than a model of democracy.

Behind the rhetoric of “greatness”, the document often reads like a business plan designed to advance the interests of major industries – and, not incidentally, Trump’s own businesses. In this logic, profit is no longer constrained by morality; morality is re-engineered to serve profit.

A trumpist rewriting of the Monroe Doctrine

The NSS also offers a mythologized version of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), describing its approach as “a common sense and potent restoration of the historic vocation” of the United States – namely, to protect the Western Hemisphere from external interference. In reality, this appeal to the past serves to build a new doctrine – a “Trump Corollary,” echoing Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary. America is no longer merely defending the political independence of its neighbours; it is turning the region into a geo-economic and migratory preserve, a direct extension of its southern border and a showcase for US industrial power.

Under the guise of “restoring” Monroe, the text legitimizes a Trumpist version of regional leadership. It makes control over flows of capital, infrastructure, and people the very core of America’s mission. A quasi-imperial project is thus presented not as a break with the past, but as the natural continuation of American tradition.

The 2025 NSS, by contrast, openly embraces political interference in Europe. It promises to fight what it calls “undemocratic restrictions” imposed by European elites. In Washington’s view, these include regulations on US social-media platforms, limits on freedom of expression, and rules targeting nationalist or sovereigntist parties. The NSS also vows to weigh in on Europe’s energy, migration, and security choices.

In other words, Washington invokes Monroe to turn its own hemisphere into a protected sanctuary while claiming the right to intervene in European political and regulatory life – effectively granting itself what the doctrine denies to others.

Europe as the central battlefield

Europe is omnipresent in the 2025 NSS – mentioned around fifty times, roughly twice as often as China and five times more than Russia. It is described as the central theatre of a crisis that is at once political, demographic, and civilizational. The text systematically pits European “elites” against their own peoples. It accuses those elites of using regulations to impose deeper European integration and more open migration policies. Such policies are portrayed as a form of “civilizational erasure” that poses an existential threat to Europe. Without saying so, the document echoes the logic of French writer Renaud Camus’s “Great Replacement” theory, a well-documented far-right conspiracy narrative.

The Trump administration claims for itself an unprecedented right to ideological interference. It pledges to defend Europeans’ “real” freedoms against Brussels, the courts, and national governments, while implicitly backing ethno-nationalist far-right parties that present themselves as the voice of “betrayed peoples”. The European Union is portrayed as a suffocating norm-producing machine whose climate, economic, and social rules allegedly sap national sovereignty and demographic vitality.

In the process, the very meaning of “democracy” and “freedom” is turned on its head. These values are no longer guaranteed by liberal institutions and treaties but by their contestation in the name of a supposedly homogeneous and threatened people that Washington now claims to protect – even on European soil.

Russia, for its part, appears less as an existential foe than as a disruptive power, whose war in Ukraine mainly serves to hasten Europe’s decline. The 2025 NSS insists on the need for a swift end to hostilities and for a new strategic balance. China is the only true systemic rival, above all economically and technologically. Military rivalry (over Taiwan or the South China Sea) is acknowledged but is always framed through the key concern: preventing Beijing from turning its industrial might into regional and global hegemony.

The Middle East is no longer central. Thanks to energy independence, Washington seeks to offload the security burden onto regional allies, reserving for itself the role of dealmaker vis-à-vis a weakened Iran. Africa is considered as a geo-economic battleground with China, where the United States favours commercial and energy partnerships with a handful of “select countries” rather than aid programs or heavy-footprint interventions.

A doctrine that fails to command consensus

Despite the apparent coherence and the highly assertive tone of the strategy, the MAGA camp remains deeply divided over foreign policy. On one side stand “America First” isolationists, hostile to any costly projection of power; on the other, hawks who still want to use US military superiority to impose favourable power balances.

Above all, opinion polls (here, here, and here) suggest that while part of the Republican electorate embraces the language of toughness (on borders, China, and “the elites”), the American public as a whole remains broadly attached to liberal democracy, checks and balances, and traditional alliances. Americans may want fewer endless wars, but they are not clamouring for an illiberal retreat, nor for a frontal assault on the institutions that have underpinned the international order since 1945.

This article was originally published in French

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