DONALD Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) emphasises ‘America First’, as Daniel Jupp reported in TCW on Wednesday, but it is also pro-Western.
This is in contrast with Sir Keir Starmer’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) published earlier this summer which led with ‘Nato First’, actually meaning EU first. Paradoxically it is Trump’s ‘America First’ strategy which challenges Europe to rediscover its Western traditions.
The annual American NSS expresses US policy at the highest level. In American discourse, ‘national security’ incorporates homeland security and (not so incongruous) international security and foreign policy.
Since 2008, explicitly inspired by the Americans, Britain too has had a National Security Strategy, and a National Security Adviser since 2010. Since 2015 this has been eclipsed by a newly named Strategic Defence and Security Review, accurate in its separation of defence and security but pretentious in its revival of the adjective ‘strategic’.
In 2019 Boris Johnson announced a more accurately titled development: Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development, and Foreign Policy. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak subsequently each initiated a ‘refresh’ of this Integrated Review.
Starmer’s Strategic Defence Review is the least accurate and most pretentious semantic framing, a title that would be excusable if it wasn’t symptomatic of a highfalutin policy change. In fact, as reported by Lt Gen Jonathon Riley here, it is riddled with holes, contradictions and disinformation.
Its justification latterly appears based on fake fault findings of the two previous Conservative reviews, published in 2022 and 2023, namely Starmer’s pretence that Rishi Sunak’s review downgraded China from ‘threat’ to ‘challenge’, for which he blamed the collapse of the prosecutions of two Britons for spying for China. In fact, it was his own SDR that categorised China as a ‘challenge’ before the Government downgraded its testimony as to the threat in order to disable the prosecution.
Trump had a far better justification for a new NSS: to replace the one issued in 2022 by Joe Biden’s administration, changing previous descriptions of Russia and China to ‘challenges’ and ‘competitors’ but not threats.
The latest NSS specifically explains how the US is deterring ‘military threats’ from China. But it also promises to deter any threat from any actor. It doesn’t describe Russia as a threat, but it acknowledges that Russian aggression in Ukraine has persuaded many Europeans that Russian is ‘an existential threat’. The NSS promises both to calm the perception and to remind Europeans of their deterrent ‘hard power’.
In actuality, ‘America First’ means less American burden-carrying, less intervention abroad and more respect for foreign sovereignty (except in the Western hemisphere), and less ‘globalism’.
This contrasts with the explicit ‘internationalism’ and ‘engagement’ in Starmer’s latest speech on foreign policy. His ‘patriotic’ foreign policy rhetoric might superficially sound like the NSS’s appeal to ‘the courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people’. Far from it. His idea of combining internationalism with patriotism is pure spin, intended to appeal to both left and right.
‘Internationalism’ is a word that does not appear in the NSS, except as its synonym ‘globalism’, which the Review describes as ‘misguided and destructive’, not least for hollowing out the US economy, particularly the defence industry.
Trump’s administration is not against Nato, it just wants more Allied ‘burden-sharing’, consistent with his previous pressure on European countries to take up more burden. Elsewhere, the NSS links security co-operation with trade and aid, such as through the Africa Growth Act.
Starmer’s SDR’s commitment to ‘Nato First’ by contrast is two-faced. The SDR claims opportunities for Nato from the ‘UK-EU Security and Defence Partnership’ signed in May. It says: ‘The EU is a defence and security actor of increasing significance, whose unique regulatory and financial levers can complement Nato’s role as the primary guarantor of European security.’
How? Starmer had planned to sign Britain back into the EU’s defence and security programmes (most of which Britain does not need, given its own defence industry and privileged arrangements with North American and Commonwealth partners), a defence sell-out plan dissected here.
To pay for these expensive programmes, Starmer would sign Britain into the EU defence fund, but he was recently rebuffed. To succeed, further concessions over our sovereignty to the EU as a whole are demanded.
This EU-centrism implicit in the SDR is incongruous and contradictory, given global commitments inherited from prior governments, which this government does not challenge. They include freedom of passage around China, leadership of capacity-building in the Black Sea, rotating defence of Romanian airspace, leadership of a battlegroup in Estonia, extensions of Nato’s northern flank into the seas east of Norway, reinvigorated multilateral training in Norway and Greenland, and leadership of an ‘Atlantic Bastion’ in the so-called Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. Most of these commitments the SDR ignores. The only arrangements outside Nato or the EU that the SDR highlights are AUKUS and the British-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Programme.
Meanwhile, the US shifts its geographical focus from West of Russia to West of the EU. As Jupp highlighted, Trump has explicitly revived the Monroe Doctrine, meaning US primacy in the Western hemisphere.
While Trump wants less intervention abroad, he foresees more intervention in regional neighbours, already in action in the joint-service ‘intimidation’ of Venezuela, and strikes on boats ferrying drugs from South America and the Caribbean. Typically, the Labour Government has already expressed doubts about the legality of such strikes, and has supposedly stopped relevant intelligence sharing.
A popular but mistaken characterisation of Trump’s NSS is that ‘the US no longer cares about the European project’. In fact, the NSS notes that ‘America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.’
The more accurate way to think about the separation between America and Europe is that Europe has moved anti-Western, rather than America becoming anti-European. Europeans are most to blame. American criticism is the response, not the cause. The burden for restoring the relationship is on the Europeans.
Trump’s NSS prescribes that ‘American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.’
The question remains: Will it?
The British Government is stubbornly focused on the EU while representing itself as ‘Nato First’ and ‘internationalist’. Neither this confused thinking nor the EU’s alarmed reaction to Trump’s review presages well.
