Today’s conversation goes on for 52 minutes, and could have run still longer if we were to examine more than the several aspects of the latest U.S. National Security Strategy document. I am pleased, nonetheless, that we had ample opportunity to explore the ways in which this 2025 document compares with Trump’s first NSS of December 2017, to see how there is continuity in thinking from then to now. Trump was then a Kissinger-mentored Realist. He is one today, as well.
His embrace of an interest driven foreign policy means that he is ready to seek compromises and compromises are arrived at by diplomacy, which is why he has placed emphasis on reestablishing communication lines with Russia. The efforts of the Biden administration to break off all contact with Russia, to close down diplomacy and to rely solely on a militarized foreign policy, was not the idiosyncratic wish of one man: it came directly from the Idealist, values driven approach to foreign policy that every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon has prioritized.
In this chat, I explained what insights into the NSS come from close textual analysis of the document, from decoding innocent statements like our favoring pragmatism over pragmatists, realism over realists; or by the mention of how Germany is deindustrializing because its industrialists are moving production to China to take advantage of cheap Russian gas there.
I also had a chance to explain the mechanisms in European politics which make it impossible to reverse course on failing policies, so that the meddling that Trump proposes in the NSS and which the Germans have denounced, is very much needed if Europe is to be saved from its present suicidal course.
There is a great deal more here for the Community to explore.
By the way, I perhaps abused my privilege as guest to promote my 2019 book of essays entitled The Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, sales of which are just beginning to take off, six years after its launch. Perhaps prospective readers were turned off by the notion that Belgium dominates the content and Belgium is too small to be of value for understanding world politics. However, I had used a play on words, since the Belgian perspective was in reality, my perspective, now that I had become a naturalized Belgian two years earlier. It is in that book that you will find my detailed analysis of Trump’s 2017 NSS, which largely sets out the thinking he has stayed with in 2025. It is there, in chapter one, that you will find my call for Trump’s impeachment over his vile speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2017 when he proposed to utterly destroy North Korea and obliterate its 22 million population. I am viewing Trump very differently these days, focusing as I do on his top priorities for global power sharing with Russia and China and choosing to overlook his bullying, imperialist ways in Venezuela and his enabling genocide in Gaza.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025
Gilbert Doctorow 