[SS from essay by Michael Kimmage, Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.]

In his first term as U.S. president and on the campaign trail for reelection in 2024, a variety of Donald Trump’s instincts were visible. One was an appreciation of power for its own sake. For Trump, it is power, not principles, that makes the world go round. Another was Trump’s view of prosperity as a talismanic organizing principle of foreign policy. “We are going to make America wealthy again,” Trump vowed in 2016. “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” A third instinct was the close alignment of politics with personality. “Only I can fix it,” Trump declared at the 2016 Republican nominating convention.

Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which was published late last week, synthesizes and formalizes these three instincts, presenting them as the necessary drivers of international order. The NSS points to “the character of our nation, upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built,” entrusting the protection of this character to the president himself and his “team,” who in his first term “successfully marshaled America’s great strengths to correct course and begin ushering in a new golden age for our country.” It is Trump’s personality, power, and supporters that have enabled this golden age.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/trumps-power-paradox

Posted by ForeignAffairsMag

2 comments

  1. This paper is obviously written by someone who mistook the NSS for an actual strategic guidance document. It is far from it. It’s a document in itself, there to provoke, threaten and gaslight. Pointing out its inconsistencies is as absurd as the NSS itself.

  2. Russia and China first or were we missing the **whole point** to their efforts to get him elected.

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