, Columnist
A Bold Strategy to Save Trump From Trumpism
The administration's stated vision for restoring U.S. dominance stumbles over its inherent contradictions.
Principled realist.
Photographer: Chris Kleponis/Getty ImagesThe officials charged with writing President Donald Trump's first National Security Strategy, released Monday afternoon, faced a nearly impossible task. Given that Trump's policies and rhetoric have often seemed calculated to undercut rather than advance U.S. global leadership, there were only three possible outcomes of the strategy-crafting exercise, none of them particularly good.
First, the NSS might have been a full-throated defense of the narrowly nationalistic "America First" agenda Trump espoused on the campaign trail. This would have horrified much of the foreign policy establishment at home and hastened the already alarming drop-off in perceptions of American reliability abroad.