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The new National Security Strategy is out, and it’s a shock to the system. It is not just the latest public articulation of principles, ambitions, and priorities around which the United States organizes its foreign policy. Instead, it reads like a manifesto for a radically different American project. It is narrower, more partisan, more inwardly focused, and more personalized than any of its predecessors. Below are ten takeaways that matter for how the United States sees its role and place in the world.

First, the strategy is overtly about this president and not the United States as such. Most national security strategies at least try to present the United States as a cohesive whole and leave domestic politics out of it. This one instead puts partisan division and the president himself front and center. It casts “President Trump’s second administration” as an expansion of his first term — a “necessary, welcome correction” — that began “ushering in a new golden age.” It calls Trump “The President of Peace,” “leveraging his dealmaking ability” to personally secure “unprecedented peace” in eight conflicts across the globe, including ending the war in Gaza with all living hostages returned to their families. In doing so, the document merges national strategy and political campaigning.

This matters because when a national security strategy elevates the president as protagonist rather than the country, it blurs the line between institutional strategy and political messaging. That alters how allies gauge reliability, how agencies interpret guidance, and how adversaries assess continuity beyond one person.

Second, it narrows American purpose to “core national interests” and explicitly disavows the post-Cold War liberal order that the United States has built and led. The strategy defines foreign policy as “the protection of core national interests” and says that is the “sole focus” of the document. It criticizes “American foreign policy elites” for chasing “permanent American domination of the entire world” and for tying the United States to “so-called ‘free trade,’” globalism, and “transnationalism” that allegedly hollowed out the American middle class and eroded sovereignty. Where previous strategies wrapped U.S. power in the language of democracy promotion and the rules-based order, this one is markedly different. It redefines leadership and power through coercive leverage, bilateralism, and transactional alignment. This is an America that is not necessarily retreating from the world stage but consolidating its power through bullying and dealmaking.

Third, immigration is elevated to the central national security problem. The text declares, bluntly, that “the era of mass migration must end,” and that “border security is the primary element of national security.” It frames mass migration as a driver of crime, social breakdown, and economic distortion, and calls for a world where sovereign states cooperate to “stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows” and tightly control whom they admit. In effect, this makes border control and immigration enforcement the organizing lens for national security policy, not just one concern among many. This has acute consequences for military force posture, diplomacy, and resource allocation. If border security is top priority, then missions in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East become subordinated to hemispheric enforcement. More than a mere rhetorical shift, this strategy reorders the hierarchy of threats and danger.

Fourth, a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine puts the Western Hemisphere first and implies the realignment of global force posture. The strategy states that the United States will “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” to keep the Western Hemisphere free of “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets” while ensuring stability sufficient to prevent mass migration and protect critical supply chains. It’s unclear how Latin America figures into the plan, whether as an external partner region or lying within an extended U.S. security perimeter. The text foreshadows a “readjustment of our global military presence” away from theaters judged less central and toward hemispheric contingencies. There is a sharp hierarchy of regions: the Americas first, with Asia, Europe, and the Middle East explicitly important but now competing against an official hemispheric priority. This is Monroe Doctrine logic repurposed for demographic control and economic nationalism.

Fifth, protecting American culture, “spiritual health,” and “traditional families” are framed as core national security requirements. It is here where the influences of Christian nationalism and the vice president are the most apparent. The document insists that “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” are prerequisites for long-term security and links this to an America that “cherishes its past glories and its heroes” and is sustained by “growing numbers of strong, traditional families” raising “healthy children.” America is thus cast as defender of so-called traditional values, while Europe lacks “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”

The language of the document is not the typical passing nod to values and societal cohesion of previous national security strategies. It redefines culture and family as explicit national security issues, which brings domestic cultural politics into the domain of national security decision-making.

Sixth, the strategy elevates the culture wars into a governing logic for national security, and it does so through rhetoric that treats ideological and cultural disputes as matters of strategic consequence. The document denounces Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a source of institutional decay and presents this as a national security problem. Yet the argument does not remain focused on personnel policy. It expands into a broader effort to define cultural cohesion, political identity, and even social change as indicators of strategic reliability. This is clearest in the European section, where the strategy suggests that some allies are drifting because of what it describes as failing political leadership, public dissatisfaction with policy toward the war in Ukraine, and supposed structural weaknesses in European democracy. The text also speculates about demographic and cultural shifts in Europe as a way to question whether future governments will share American views of their alliances. The strategy does not substantiate these claims. Instead, it uses them to imply that cultural alignment is essential to strategic partnership.

What emerges is not a traditional assessment of allied capability or political will but a cultural test for geopolitical trustworthiness. European governments seen as insufficiently responsive to public opinion are depicted as suppressing legitimate democratic impulses. Their policy disagreements with Washington are presented as evidence of deeper cultural or ideological drift. The strategy therefore treats internal political debates within allied democracies as matters for American scrutiny, while insisting on strict insulation of American domestic politics from foreign influence. This asymmetry reveals a worldview in which cultural politics becomes an instrument of statecraft. It positions the United States to judge the internal order of its partners through the lens of ideological compatibility rather than institutional capacity or shared interests. In doing so, the strategy folds the culture war into alliance management and treats domestic cultural narratives as strategic tools rather than purely political ones.

Seventh, the “Golden Dome” missile shield is identified as a strategic objective. The strategy calls for “next-generation missile defenses — including a Golden Dome for the American homeland” to protect the United States, its overseas assets, and allies. This is an ambitious vision of layered homeland missile defense that goes well beyond the traditional focus on limited protection against rogue states. In fact, it is a doctrinal pivot. If taken literally, it implies industrial commitment and immense investment. And what is the tradeoff? Scaled back power projection? A smaller army? Any attempt at comprehensive missile defense destabilizes established nuclear deterrence logic. Pursuing it would trigger concerns in Moscow and Beijing that Washington seeks first-strike advantage.

Eighth, the long-running project of increasing burden-sharing with allies evolves into burden-shifting, anchored in the June 2025 Hague summit pledge by NATO countries to spend five percent of GDP on defense. While past strategies have asked America’s allies to do more, this one takes it to another level. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” and touts a “Hague Commitment” under which NATO countries “pledge…to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense,” a standard it says allies have endorsed and now “must” meet. This is more than arm twisting and has implications for alliance cohesion. It treats compliance as a condition for political favor. If enforced, it would trigger severe budgetary and political shocks across Europe and beyond.

Ninth, there is a harder-edged doctrine of sovereignty assertion paired with suspicion of international institutions. The strategy’s principles stress the “primacy of nations” and vow to resist “sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations,” promising to “reform” those institutions so they “assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.” It also warns against foreign attempts to “manipulate our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country.” By framing diaspora politics as a national security threat, the strategy blurs the boundary between counterintelligence and domestic political competition, a move without precedent in prior national security strategies. The assertions about sovereignty in the text expose a double standard: America is not to be messed with and yet the Trump administration sees no issue with inserting itself into the domestic political debates of allies, namely Germany.

Finally, economic nationalism and reindustrialization sit at the center of security strategy, not at the periphery. The document calls cultivating American industrial strength “the highest priority of national economic policy,” with a strong manufacturing base described as essential to both peacetime and wartime power. It promises to rebalance trade, secure critical supply chains in a Hamiltonian spirit so the United States is “never…dependent on any outside power” for key defense or economic inputs, and position the energy sector as a leading export engine. Industrial policy, tariffs, and supply chain controls are therefore not separate from strategy. Rather, they are central instruments of statecraft, on par with traditional military tools. Herein lies contradictions. Tariff-driven reindustrialization requires massive federal outlays while the strategy also demands an enlarged defense budget. And “never dependent on any outside power” is materially impossible in some sectors, such as pharmaceutical precursors, cobalt, and rare earths, without reshaping global markets.

Together, these takeaways point to a national security strategy that fuses “America First” economic and immigration policy, an assertive hemispheric doctrine, and domestic political objectives into a single organizing framework. That said, it’s unclear how much this matters in practice. All the principles put forth in the strategy have been said before by the president and his inner circle. For both allies and adversaries, the shock is not only the specific policies, but the message that the United States now sees its security in a more personalized, inwardly focused, and narrower way than before.

Rick Landgraf is commentary editor at War on the Rocks.

Image: Midjourney