Six contradictions in the US national security strategy

The US’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), published in November, has justifiably received a barrage of international criticism for its positions, including appearing to espouse the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. I will not go into the merits or demerits of the positions set out in the NSS. Rather, I will show that the NSS is largely self-contradictory, which makes it useless as a document on which to base the security of the US.

Let me point out only six self-contradictions in the national security strategy. I leave it to the interested reader to spot more. A first major internal self-contradiction is between non-interventionism and aggressive global management.The NSS explicitly claims a “predisposition to non-interventionism” (p.

9), citing the Founders’ preference for avoiding entanglement in foreign affairs. It criticises past elites for seeking “permanent US domination of the entire world” (p. Despite this, the document celebrates an incredibly active diplomatic interventionism, claiming the US president negotiated peace in eight specific foreign conflicts (including local disputes such as DRC-Rwanda and Cambodia-Thailand) within eight months.

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Furthermore, it asserts a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (p. 5), declaring that the US will “assert and enforce” its will to deny non-hemispheric competitors access to the Western Hemisphere (p. This level of involvement in the internal disputes of Africa, Asia and the domestic policies of Latin America sharply contradicts the stated “predisposition to non-interventionism”.

A second major internal self-contradiction is the professed respect for sovereignty versus political subversion.A core principle that the NSS professes to adhere to is “flexible realism” (p. 9), which states that the US will not impose “democratic or other social change” on other nations, and respects “differing religions, cultures and governing systems” (p. It specifically criticises its own “hectoring” of Middle Eastern monarchies about their governance.

However, in contradiction to this, the NSS applies a completely different standard to Europe. It explicitly states that the US will be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” (p. It criticises European governments for “subversion of democratic processes” (p.

26) and expresses a desire to “encourage” specific political outcomes favouring “patriotic European parties” (p. This creates a contradiction where the US respects the sovereignty of monarchies in the Middle East but actively plans to interfere in the internal political dynamics of democratic allies in Europe. A third internal contradiction is the strategy’s position on free market capitalism versus state-directed industrial policy.

The NSSpraises the “dynamic free market system” (p. 15) as a US advantage and criticises others for “predatory, state-directed subsidies and industrial strategies” (p. It claims that “openness […] and free market capitalism” differentiate the US from the world (p.

In direct contradiction to itself, however, the strategy simultaneously calls for a “national mobilisation” of industry (p. 14) and the “strategic use of tariffs” to force “reindustrialisation” (p. It advocates for the US government to “identify strategic acquisition … opportunities” (p. 18) and demands that agreements with allies include “sole-source contracts” for US companies (p.

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