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Last weekend, while the foreign-policy priesthood was still arguing over footnotes in President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), American special operators were busy writing history in Caracas. Under the code name Operation Absolute Resolve, a blitz of more than 150 aircraft and coordinated cyber strikes suppressed Venezuelan air defenses, elite Delta Force units swept into the Fort Tiuna complex, and Nicolás Maduro and his wife were flown half a continent away to Manhattan to face narcoterrorism charges—an unprecedented legal and strategic gambit, and one executed with a speed that left the commentariat blinking.
For those with a sense of history, the operation had the clean, unmistakable silhouette of a classic decapitation strike—a modern, bloodlessly efficient cousin of Storm-333, the Soviet Spetsnaz raid on Kabul in 1979 that removed Afghanistan’s leadership in a single night. The difference, of course, is that Absolute Resolve achieved what Moscow never could: regime removal without mass slaughter, legal reckoning instead of summary execution, and an extraction measured in hours rather than a decade-long imperial quagmire. Same logic. Very different civilization.
And contrary to the inevitable commentary, this was not a random flare-up of bellicose neocon fever dreams. It was the NSS in action: measured ends, decisive means, and a calculated reassertion of U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. The raid clarifies the doctrine better than any white paper—America has interests, will defend them, and no longer feels obliged to manage the world’s neuroses.
Trump’s NSS is different, not merely in tone but in ontology. It is America’s first explicitly post-primacy strategy: an acknowledgment that the unipolar moment is over, and that pretending otherwise is how empires stumble into ruin.
“Trump’s NSS will not please everyone. It is not meant to.”
This is not isolationism. Nor is it Wilsonian crusading. It is something far more offensive to the modern sensibility: prioritization. For three decades, American power served less as a national instrument than as a reassurance mechanism for a post–Cold War managerial class—never to be used decisively, always diluted multilaterally, and supervised by allies and lawyers.
Where previous strategies—Bush’s messianic optimism, Obama’s calibrated ambiguity, Biden’s bureaucratic cosmology of “pacing challenges”—obsessed over managing the globe, Trump’s NSS narrows the aperture. It drops the catechism of “great power competition,” not because China and Russia have become cuddly, but because the phrase achieved little beyond flattering think tanks and keeping the conference circuit well catered. A strategy that names every problem as existential ends up solving none of them.
Instead, the document speaks in unfashionably modest terms: rebalancing with China, managing Russia. This alone has sent Western editorial boards into conniptions. After all, if Moscow is not ritualistically declared an “acute threat” every six pages, how will Brussels sleep at night? If Beijing is treated as a rival to be constrained rather than a demon to be exorcised, where does that leave the entire priesthood of values-based foreign policy?
Yet there is a bracing honesty here. The NSS concedes what the past thirty years of policy tried to wish away: Lecturing Beijing about the “rules-based order” while importing its supply chains is not strategy but self-deception. Economic power, industrial sovereignty, and technological dominance—AI, quantum computing, biotech—are treated not as accessories to national security, but as its spine. This is heresy in a town that spent a generation mistaking financialization for strength and consumption for statecraft.
On China, the strategy blends steel with restraint. It demands reciprocity rather than sermons, moves deliberately to exclude Beijing from the Western Hemisphere, and treats Taiwan not as a moral abstraction but as a concrete deterrence problem—one to be solved through overmatch, geography, and allied burden-sharing. It tacitly accepts spheres of influence; an idea Western elites abandoned sometime after the Congress of Vienna and have spent two centuries pretending no longer exists.
Russia, meanwhile, is treated less as Satan incarnate than as a chronic condition. The aim is not to redeem Moscow’s soul but to end the Ukraine war, stabilize Europe, and force the continent to assume responsibility for its own defense—an idea that terrifies European elites after the Cold War preserved American reassurance long after strategy had evaporated.
Trump’s NSS quietly de-emphasizes the Middle East, which is itself revolutionary. There are no grand democracy projects, no forever wars, no illusions about remaking ancient societies through aid packages and carefully worded communiqués. The focus is narrower and defensive: prevent domination of key choke points, contain Iran without allowing it to become the organizing principle of American strategy, expand the Abraham Accords, and leave the region marginally more stable than it was found. In Washington terms, this counts as restraint.
That restraint, however, may yet prove the document’s most vulnerable flank. Trump’s unusually close relationship with Israel—and the formidable pro-Israeli lobby in Washington—raises the obvious question of whether American power can remain disciplined, or whether it will once again be drawn into regional struggles only tangentially aligned with U.S. interests. The NSS gestures toward disengagement, but history suggests the Middle East has a habit of pulling even reluctant presidents back into its quarrels.
The most unmistakable break with post–Cold War orthodoxy is the strategy’s reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine—now helpfully rebranded as the “Trump Corollary.” The Western Hemisphere is once again treated as strategically decisive, not as an afterthought beneath the flight path to Davos. Migration, narcotics, and foreign incursions—read: Chinese and Russian influence—are framed as national-security threats, not sociological inevitabilities, and the Venezuela raid fits here like a period at the end of a long, overdue sentence: a message that America is no longer subcontracting hemispheric order to NGOs, process language, and multilateral forums.
Resistance will come, of course—not merely from individual capitals, but from organized ideological networks like the Puebla Group, which exists largely to coordinate opposition to U.S. primacy under the language of “sovereignty” and “integration,” while quietly accommodating Beijing’s checkbook diplomacy. This insistence on American primacy will strain relations across the region, and that is precisely the point. Order usually does.
Then there is Europe. Or rather, the autopsy.
No previous National Security Strategy has described an allied continent in such unmistakably civilizational terms. Europe is presented not merely as under-armed or complacent, but as demographically depleted, culturally uncertain, and increasingly incapable of sustaining the social cohesion on which collective defense depends. This diagnosis provoked predictable outrage from Brussels to Berlin.
Yet it is difficult to dismiss. Cratering birth rates hollow out entire societies, while mass migration—often unmanaged and poorly assimilated—has transformed major cities within a single generation: London, Paris, Brussels, Malmö, places scarcely recognizable within living memory. Historically, changes of this speed and scale arrived through conquest and collapse. Today they are the product of policy choice, bureaucratic inertia, and elite indifference, enforced by moral intimidation rather than bayonets. A society uncertain of its own legitimacy rarely generates the will to defend itself. The strategy’s implication is unmistakable: Allies unable to reproduce, integrate, or cohere cannot be relied upon indefinitely to deter serious threats.
The document goes further, and here the real heresy begins. Read in isolation, its language is diplomatic; read alongside the administration’s public rhetoric on Europe’s demographic collapse and migrant crisis, its implications are difficult to miss. This is not mere burden-sharing rhetoric or another demand for higher defense spending. It is an implicit judgment on Europe’s internal trajectory, and a marked departure from the post–Cold War habit of treating allied domestic politics as untouchable. For decades, Washington underwrote Europe’s security while studiously averting its gaze from how Europe governed itself. Trump’s NSS abandons that pretense. America, it suggests, has a stake not merely in Europe’s borders but in whether the societies behind them remain recognizably European at all.
The implications are explosive. If the United States reserves the right to wield political influence abroad in the name of democracy, pluralism, and “liberal values,” it can scarcely claim neutrality when similar instruments are invoked in defense of civilizational continuity. Washington has spent decades perfecting the mechanics of political influence overseas—training activists, shaping narratives, funding institutions, nudging outcomes—almost always in one ideological direction. The NSS implies, without quite saying so, that this asymmetry is no longer sustainable. This is not a rules-bound contest governed by Queensberry rules. It is a civilizational struggle conducted largely through politics and culture, and the refusal to acknowledge that fact has served only one side.
The reaction was predictable. European leaders howled about “interference,” “vitriol,” and “shock”—which is to say, they recognized themselves in the mirror and did not care for the reflection.
Trump’s NSS will not please everyone. It is not meant to. It abandons the comforting illusion that America can manage the world through abstractions while neglecting its own borders, industries, and culture. It accepts limits without surrender, restraint without retreat.
Is it flawless? No. It risks emboldening adversaries who mistake honesty for fatigue. It gambles that allies will grow up rather than sulk. It assumes that culture matters—an idea now regarded as extremist in most foreign-policy faculties.
But at least it is a strategy rooted in reality rather than ritual.
Which brings us back to Venezuela. No white paper. No sermon. Just a reminder that, every so often, power must be exercised—or it ceases to exist.
Rome did not fall because it was too cruel. It fell because it forgot what it was.
For the first time in decades, America’s National Security Strategy appears determined not to make the same mistake.
