Strategic Incoherence

You really ought to read the thing and try to make sense of it. That is my advice before you take anyone’s word for what is in the November 2025 US National Security Strategy. Sit down with a cup of tea, turn the pages slowly, and marvel at how a country once capable of producing Marshall, Kennan and Brzezinski has ended up with something that reads like the minutes of a particularly fractious parish council meeting.

The document begins with the usual chest thumping about America First. Fair enough if you are revving up a rally crowd, but rather less impressive as the supposed blueprint for a superpower’s place in the world. Then the real theatre starts. Europe, we are told, faces “civilisational erasure”. Not from Russia’s imperialism, not from climate-induced instability, not from the economic drag created by global shocks, but from the EU not organising itself in a way pleasing to the current administration’s cultural anxieties. According to this masterpiece of clarity, Brussels is simultaneously too weak to function and too powerful to tolerate. It is both in terminal decline and somehow the chief threat to Western civilisation. Good luck plotting a policy chart out of that.

While lecturing Europe for its sins, the document demands that Europeans step up, spend more, defend more, and take on far greater security responsibilities. This, while Washington openly cheers on the very nationalist wreckers whose aim is to break the institutions that allow Europe to defend itself in the first place. It is a bit like telling someone to run a marathon after you have set fire to their trainers.

The Russia section manages to be even more contradictory. NATO, we are assured, must remain strong. At the same time, Ukraine is encouraged to wrap things up quickly because the war is proving inconvenient. Russia is a threat, naturally, but also a potential partner in certain spheres, and perhaps deserving of a sphere of influence, depending on which paragraph you read. Strategic coherence has left the building.

China is nominally the great rival of the century, yet receives less focused attention than the EU’s approach to migration policy. Instead of outlining a serious Indo-Pacific strategy, the document prefers to lecture allies about “identity” and “civilisation”. It feels less like a strategy and more like a frustrated columnist shaking his fist at a passing cloud.

The Western Hemisphere section revives a triumphalist Monroe Doctrine while simultaneously decrying past American “imperial overreach”. One might say the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, except that both appear equally confused. And climate change – the largest driver of future instability and migration – is waved away as an ideological distraction. Migration itself is presented as both existential threat and necessary bargaining chip, depending on the mood of the page.

The overall effect is not strategic thought, but strategic incoherence. Allies are scolded for disloyalty, adversaries are offered mixed messages, and the entire post-war order is treated as disposable furniture in need of clearance. What is missing is any sense of hierarchy: what matters, what matters less, and what requires compromise. Instead we get a cultural grievance pamphlet pretending to be grand strategy.

It does not project confidence. It projects insecurity. It reads not like a superpower thinking about the next fifty years, but like a government obsessed with next week’s poll numbers. A nation that once set the terms of global order is now producing documents that can barely set out a linear argument.

If this is what passes for strategic thinking in Washington now, the conclusion writes itself. Great powers do not fall because they are defeated. They fall because they lose the ability to think clearly. This document is not a sign of American strength. It is a neon-lit warning that the United States is drifting, mentally and institutionally, towards the exit.