Trump's National Security Strategy document says more about American dominance of the world than our General Welfare

it also says that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is alive and well in the White House.

I just finished reading Trump’s National Security Strategy paper for 2025. I think i can agree with a few of the things that were said in the paper, but not for the reasons Trump and his merry band of captured regulators would prefer. I also found a few things in the paper one could reasonably expect from people who are continually searching for a moral justification for selfishness.

You can find the paper here.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America runs 33 pages and is well worth the read, even if you disagree with Trump. I disagree with Trump on a great many things, so I read the paper because I wanted to see his best case for continued maintenance of the great experiment called, “American global hegemony”.

The paper lays claim to the entire Western Hemisphere as the domain of the United States. The paper also claims that America has the power to impose the will of the United States upon other countries inside and outside of the Western Hemisphere. And finally, the paper says that America will continue to assert its power through a combination of power projection (tanks), diplomacy and negotiation, as if America (aka “The United States”) has enough leverage to continue dominating 7.7 billion other people.

I could not help but have the impression that America is not interested in good faith negotiations with other countries. Or that other countries with other viewpoints and other ideas about how the world works, are welcome to their quaint notions of sovereign autonomy, but only to the extent that their interests are secondary to American interests. This paper makes it clear that Trump, America’s Don, expects other countries to bend the knee or have it broken by America.

I think we can draw an inference in how the elites in America expect the rest of the world to behave by the following graphics, charts from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank. Both charts show the evolution of the distribution of wealth over time in the United States by percentile ranking. The first in real dollar terms and the second, by percentage. The charts cover the time from 2010 to the present year.

Pay particular attention to the dollar amounts and percentages for the bottom 50%. In 2010, the bottom 50% had just 0.5% of all wealth in the United States. That number has since increased to 2.5%, a 500% increase over the span of 10 years, and I’m not sure of the cause, and I don’t think it’s sympathy.

The charts are illustrative of a few things that will have a great impact on our capacity to implement the national security plan. They show clearly, the policy preferences of the the elites.

I also want to point out a very curious and uniform style of messaging by the people who inhabit the space around Trump, in Congress and in the executive branch. Here is an illustration straight from the document:

The messaging about this agenda is very, very uniform as being President Trump’s” agenda. President Trump’s this, President Trump’s that. It all belongs to President Trump. It’s all about Trump. Trump will decide. Trump will do something. Trump knows what’s best for us.

Describing policy proposals and decisions as belong to Trump with an apostrophe S, as in “possessive”, strikes me as a hard deflection, and it is not limited to just this document. I see the same style and choice of words used by everyone in the Trump Administration and in Congress in all policy discussions.

I believe there is a clear and unambiguous purpose to this choice of words and phrasing. I believe that Trump is the lightning rod, doing things so that seats in Congress will remain as safe seats. The emphasis is on Trump, not on enabling legislation passed by Congress that let’s Trump do those things. Not the lack of Congressional oversight that should restrain or discipline Trump when he takes action that is beyond his authority, either.

As long as we are looking at, or blaming Trump, Congress is free to trade stocks, hold fundraising meetings that we never see in the news, and become wealthy as captured regulators of American assets. This is another way of saying, in most cases, our votes don’t matter, at least until we organize to the point where our votes cannot be ignored.

There is one thing that I really, really agree upon with Trump and this document. See page 27 of the document.

Ending the continual global expansion of NATO would do wonders to settle the nerves of nations across the Atlantic. Reducing the size and scope of NATO would also serve to prevent a hot war with two very large and capable countries that some people think of as “adversaries”, Russia and China.

I agree with the document, and by proxy, with Trump on ending the expansion of NATO, especially by excluding Ukraine. I’m not thrilled about the 5% defense spending goal for NATO countries as that would reduce spending on other things like healthcare, education and public infrastructure.

I also want to point out some of the posturing language in the document, language that seems to intimate some idea of leverage or overwhelming power that America has over other countries. Here is one example from page 15 in a discussion about the Monroe Doctrine:

Here, Trump’s idea is to offer carrots to modify the behavior of other countries so that they conform to American interests. The language is at best, indifferent to the needs and concerns of other countries and at worst, condescending to them. It assumes that America is the authority that other countries must bend to.

On page 17, we see the stick. We see that America has a variety of tools available to “discourage” other countries from seeking partnership with “the adversary”, Russia and China to name two.

Missing from all of this talk about behavioral modification is leverage. Recall the charts from the Federal Reserve Bank. Recall the tiny sliver of wealth owned by the bottom 50% at the pleasure of the top 50-1%. Know that this entire system is based on the notion that people are motivated by money.

For Trump to effect his National Security Strategy, there must be “buy-in”. The bottom 50% must see that there is something in this plan for them. Astute observers will note that all the “free trade”, “hegemony” and “domination” imposed on the rest of the world by the United States for the last 50 years has done nothing to reduce the cost of living for the bottom 50% of Americans. Zero.

The top 1% are delivering dog food and calling it caviar. The top 1% intend to treat our international partners in a similar manner, and they expect the upper class of our partner countries to keep their people poor to ensure alignment with American foreign policy. The purpose of this, obviously, is to maintain cheap and ready access to natural resources in other countries without sharing the wealth with the people at the bottom who make all of this possible.

Note also that every leader of every country in the world has access to that document. They can see the “power projection” soaked with condescension. They know that Trump is not acting out of the goodness of his heart, or concern for the well being of those other countries, unless they do as Trump says.

The language says this is all on Trump, and Trump is going to do so many wonderful things for America, without even any acknowledgement of the millions of people required to make it happen. The bottom 50% have not been able to share in the prosperity of America. Not even close. I just don’t see how Trump can effect his plans without cooperation from the bottom.

These are just some of the thoughts that crossed my mind as I was reading Trump’s grand plans for the security of our nation, but not so much for our “general welfare” of the place we call home.

If they consulted anyone in the drafting of this document, it was most certainly without the informed consent of the bottom 50%.

Write on.