Inside Trump’s New National Security Strategy

President Donald Trump issued his 2025 National Security Strategy for the United States on Friday. It’s a remarkable document, something like the Rescript of Honorius, when the emperor Honorius in the year 410 told the cities of Roman Britain that he was withdrawing Rome’s legions and they’d have to defend themselves hereafter.

Honorius had his reasons. He’d been unable to prevent the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in that year, and he needed all the military force he could summon. So the Roman Empire began to contract.

In Trump’s case, Washington has already been sacked by American barbarians who see it as the first step in inducing the implosion of American global power. The strategy, such as it is, marks the formal withdrawal of the United States from its role as leader of a worldwide rules-based order.

From now on, Trump says, America will look after itself and leave Europe and Asia to their fates. But the countries of the Western Hemisphere are now to be firmly in America’s sphere of influence. And that includes Canada.

The strategy says: “Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as ‘Enlist and Expand.’ We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.”

The “established friends” likely include countries like El Salvador, which has warehoused hundreds of U.S. deportees in its notorious CECOT prison, and Argentina, whose libertarian President Javier Milei is a strong Trump supporter. The “new partners” might be countries like Venezuela after the Nicolás Maduro regime is replaced by a Trump-friendly government.

Making Latin America an offer it can’t refuse

U.S. involvement in Western Hemisphere countries will include high levels of investment in extracting those countries’ resources while discouraging trade with non-American markets. U.S. embassies are instructed to look for “major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts.”

Meanwhile, trade with China must be sharply reduced: “America First diplomacy seeks to rebalance global trade relationships. We have made clear to our allies that America’s current account deficit is unsustainable. We must encourage Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and other prominent nations in adopting trade policies that help rebalance China’s economy toward household consumption, because Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East cannot alone absorb China’s enormous excess capacity.”

In other words, China is required to sell its stuff to its own people, while the United States sells its own stuff to countries like Canada while we stop selling to China.

This is the strategy’s only mention of Canada, but it implicitly applies to us as just another Western Hemisphere client state. As an “established friend,” we would be expected to assign our military to fight the export of drugs from South America and Mexico, while turning away anyone seeking asylum here.

A bid to ‘Make Europe Great Again’

We would welcome U.S. investment in Canada while resuming (on Trump’s terms) our trade in American goods and services. That would include military purchases, including fighter planes; we can forget our flirtation with Sweden’s Gripen fighter jets. We will buy American F-35s, probably all 88 that we ordered and maybe more as an apology to Trump.

Trump’s policy toward Europe has implications for Canada as well. He wants to “Make Europe Great Again.”

“The character of these countries is also strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies to establish conditions of stability and security,” the policy says. “We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.”

Alignment will depend on European countries remaining white-dominated, one of the security strategy’s many red flags. “Over the long term,” the strategy says, “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”

“Non-European” is a genteel euphemism for “non-white.” It assumes that “European” must by definition be “white,” though that has probably never been the case since the last ice age. So if a European country has accepted too many immigrants from Turkey, Algeria or sub-Saharan Africa, it risks “civilizational erasure” — another euphemism, meaning replacement of white people with brown people supposedly lacking the virtues of a white society.

Trump sees alignment as easier with “the healthy countries of central, eastern and southern Europe,” which presumably include Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Italy.

His policy says 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.”

“Patriotic,” of course, means far-right, like Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland and France’s National Rally.

Supporting Canadian ‘patriotic parties’

Canada could expect similar interference with our domestic affairs, including our immigration policy. The United States would explicitly support far-right parties like the Conservatives and the People’s Party of Canada and their provincial equivalents like Alberta’s United Conservative Party. Any party or government endorsing immigration and multiculturalism could expect a barrage of disinformation attacks in social media and U.S. mainstream media (which are increasingly owned by a few tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk).

Mitigating these threats is the Trump regime’s notable incompetence. Many Latin American countries have China as a major trading partner, with Chinese goods making life more affordable than it would otherwise be (especially if Trump’s America were the new trading partner).

For that matter, bilateral trade between China and Canada is estimated to have reached $64.2 billion in the first half of 2025, up nine per cent over 2024. Under Trump’s strategy, our sole market would be the United States.

The Latin Americans, like the Canadians, are unlikely to cave in to Trump, especially as his health and popular support are waning. But even an enfeebled Trump regime could do serious harm to our trade, and Canadian parties and governments will have to present a united front against the Americans — even as we lose jobs and markets.

The National Security Strategy amounts to Trump’s defection in place to Russia, which has praised the document.

Donald Trump Jr. has already warned that the United States may simply abandon Ukraine, leaving Europe (and Canada) to try to sustain it through more years of attritional war.

Then again, continued Canadian support for Ukraine could result in American reprisals, whether new tariffs or an outright ban on U.S. trade with us. That would of course hurt American businesses, but Trump would be out to prove that he’s the boss.

A regime as inherently unstable as Trump’s could fall at any time for many reasons, whether through elections, internal Trump administration power struggles or sheer happenstance. But even if the Democrats regain control of the government, the rest of the world can never again trust the United States as it once did. About a third of Americans still support Trump, as well as many billionaires who will shop around for a substitute.

The National Security Strategy is a plan for global insecurity and chaos, presumably leading to a world carved up into three spheres of influence dominated by undemocratic countries: the United States ruling Latin America and Canada as puppet states; Russia gaining control over its own eastern European former satellites, and perhaps extending its reach to Spain and Britain as well; and China dominating Asia (except for Taiwan, which would remain in the U.S. sphere).

This tripolar world bears a striking resemblance to the world of George Orwell’s 1984. Just before Winston Smith is arrested by the Thought Police, he is reading a book by Emmanuel Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. It describes a world of three superstates, Oceania (Britain and the Western Hemisphere), Eurasia and Eastasia. All are scrambling for the resources of the few countries outside their domain. The superstates make and break alliances at will, while feeding their populations an endless stream of lies.

Again, we can hope for Trump’s early departure from office, but he has already done incalculable harm in just one year. Canada will have to steel itself to considerable hardship as the price of getting out of the American sphere. But the price of becoming the 51st state would be far higher.