The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For
At last: clarity, hierarchy, and a foreign policy with a spine.
The newly published National Security Strategy is beautiful. What makes the document powerful isn’t the prose but the clarity. For the first time in decades, America has a strategy grounded not in theories, slogans, or airy talk of an “international community,” but in the concrete interests of a real nation: our own.
In Newsweek last year, I argued that America had to shake off the primacist hangover of the post–Cold War with what I called foreign policy stoicism: humility, hierarchy, and a sober respect for the nation-state, oriented toward changing what can most easily be changed and prioritizing the most concrete threats. The think-tank world—even the conservative one—treats these arguments as eccentric, premature, or impolite. But the new NSS doesn’t merely acknowledge this logic; it snaps into place like a long-delayed correction. For those of us who have been making this case from the margins, the document feels revolutionary not because it echoes us, but because it drags the center of gravity toward reality.
It is not an op-ed; it’s a governing blueprint.
Many commentators, desperate to shoehorn the document into familiar categories, have rushed to call it “realist” or “restrained.” But this entirely misses the point. America First, as presented here, is not realism in the graduate-seminar sense. It is realism in the statesman’s sense: clarity about ends, honesty about means, and an unapologetic commitment to the fortunes of the republic.
The NSS captures this in one of its most important lines: America First is “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist’, realistic without being ‘realist’, principled without being ‘idealistic’, muscular without being ‘hawkish’, and restrained without being ‘dovish’.” That is not merely a doctrinal statement; it is a moral one. The intellectual schools of foreign policy have their uses, but the real task of strategy is simpler and older: determine what is necessary for the survival and flourishing of the nation and then do that, without distraction, apology, or delusion.
This also explains why so many critics, especially in Europe, have reacted to the strategy with alarm and theatrical indignation. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk lamented, “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem.” A chorus of think-tankers joined him. But these reactions say more about European expectations than about the strategy itself. Far from dismissing Europe, the NSS places Europe exactly where it belongs: not above America’s core interests, not beneath them, but within a hierarchy of priorities.
The truth is that Europe’s critique is built on selectively projected fantasies. For years, and currently, Europe has condemned America’s pursuit of its own interests, especially in the Western Hemisphere, while simultaneously expecting the United States to underwrite its defense, restrain its adversaries, and absorb the political and financial costs of its own hesitations. Yet the same Europe that demands unwavering American commitment has repeatedly hedged with China, ignored the obvious vulnerabilities of its energy policy, and treated its alliance with the U.S. as a kind of moral entitlement rather than a strategic relationship.
The NSS simply attempts to restore symmetry. It acknowledges Europe’s historic and cultural importance and the enduring value of the alliance, while making the obvious point that sovereign nations have sovereign responsibilities. States are not schoolchildren. They respond to incentives. They pursue interests. They can and should be pushed, not coddled. The United States expects Europe to contribute not because we care less about Europe, but because we believe Europe can do more.
The most striking aspect of the NSS is that it shatters silence about the Western Hemisphere in particular. For decades, major think tanks have ignored the region. They maintain chairs for Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; host conferences on Indo-Pacific architecture and European burden-sharing; release white papers on the Gulf, NATO, Taiwan. Yet the hemisphere, the region that most directly shapes the survival of the American republic, was largely treated as an afterthought. The very few people working on hemispheric issues can assure you: this is the most pathbreaking development in U.S. foreign policy in years. The NSS finally acknowledges what has long been obvious: Asia may be the global priority, but the hemisphere is the civilizational one.
The NSS finally says out loud what many of us have argued quietly: proximity shapes power. If the United States wants to compete with China—economically, technologically, militarily—it must simultaneously secure the space in which its own republic exists. A great power does not project strength globally while hemorrhaging authority regionally. China seems to get this instinctively. It does not confront nuclear competitors while tolerating cartel rule on its own doorstep. It does not speak of deterrence while permitting mass migration that strains the civic and economic foundations of the nation itself. A republic that cannot control its borders cannot control its destiny. A country that allows its hemisphere to be infiltrated by hostile powers cannot act with clarity abroad.
Every statesman from John Quincy Adams and Alexander Hamilton onward understood that the Western Hemisphere is not a sentimental concern; it is a strategic prerequisite for national survival. What the NSS offers is not simply nostalgia for the Monroe Doctrine, nor a Cold War revival, nor a concession to diaspora pressure groups. It offers something far simpler: a recognition that the United States must secure its neighborhood if it intends to remain a sovereign power. Just as the Founders believed, just as the early republic believed, just as every serious strategist has believed, the hemisphere matters most because geography is not an academic abstraction. This, too, is part of America First’s philosophical simplicity. It begins with what is directly in front of us, not with what flatters our moral vanity.
Some critics dismiss this as overly transactional or insufficiently moral. But the NSS demonstrates the opposite. It is moral precisely because it is responsible. It understands that before the United States can lead a coalition in Asia, or shape outcomes in Europe, or broker peace in the Middle East, it must remain a functioning republic. A country that is not confident in its sovereignty, not secure in its borders, not rooted in its own civilizational inheritance, is not a country capable of bearing the burdens of a great power. America First is not isolationist. It is not primacist. It is republican in the deepest sense. It is a strategic doctrine grounded in the belief that the American people deserve a government that protects them before it protects the world.
The genius of the NSS is that it refuses to anthropomorphize states or sentimentalize alliances. It does not treat allies as fragile ornaments or adversaries as cartoon villains. It does not pretend that the United States can forever subsidize those who refuse to subsidize themselves. It rejects the unseriousness of the last 30 years: the fantasy that America could dominate the world at no cost, with no prioritization, and without consequence at home.
The NSS demands more of Europe because Europe has the wealth, the population, and the institutions to do more—and because the alliance must be reciprocal if it is to endure. It reframes Asia not as an arena for ideological crusade but as the central theater of economic and technological competition. It approaches the Middle East not as a moral mission but as a domain of interests. And it treats Africa not as a canvas for liberal guilt but as a landscape of opportunities and risks.
Not all disruptions are destructive. Any honest historian knows that the most destabilizing act can be simply to face reality after decades of refusing to see it. The NSS forces that reckoning. It isn’t a manifesto or a theory. It’s a strategy built not for the world we wished for, but for the world we actually inhabit.
In the end, its power lies in restoring American statecraft to its proper foundation: a sovereign people deserves a sovereign strategy. For the first time in a long time, we finally have one.
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, 2025-12-12 05:01:00, , The American Conservative, %%, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/feed/, Juan P. Villasmil
