477. How Trump’s Security Strategy Destroys The Old World Order

0:00Thank you so much for listening to The Rest is Politics. Here's the Thought for Christmas. You can gift somebody membership to The Rest is Politics. Plus, add free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &A, book discounts. So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestedpolitics.com and click Gifts. This is the most significant document we've seen. It's the sort of Bible of Trump foreign policy. It's one of the most seismic documents of Trump's presidency. It's confirmation of a changed worldview. It's America ripping its own mask off, saying we're all the worst things that our enemies always said we were.

0:40It is America amazing. Russia and China kind of neutral. We don't really worry about them too much. But then it says Europe bad. We're not partners or allies anymore. We're vassals. And if we twitch a tale, we're going to be punished beyond imagining. And it makes Europe more vulnerable than we've been in our lifetime. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Now, a lot of politicians like to talk about the future of renewables, but Fuse is on the ground building clean energy for the here and now. And they're making it happen thanks to you. Fuse Energy is putting the power in your hands by inviting you to refer land to Fuse that can then be used for renewable projects.

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2:38Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory, we're going to devote the whole episode to the U.S. national security strategy. You and I both read it. We've read it several times. I think it's one of the most seismic documents of Trump's presidency. It's confirmation of a changed worldview, and it's one that we're all of us going to have to deal with. And I think it's going to confront all of us with some very, very difficult decisions. Politicians, all of us. I think this is a really, really important documents. I think it's sensible that we devote the whole episode to it today.

3:17Although it's had quite a lot of coverage, I'm not convinced that people have really woken up to just how seismic and how big this thing is. It's consistent with a lot of the things that we've heard. It's consistent with Project 2025. It's consistent with America First. It's consistent with J.D. Vance's speech in Munich last year. It's consistent with a lot of the posture that Trump has been taking in foreign policy. But when you see it all down, written down in print, page after page after page after page, what did you make of it when you first read it? Well, it's astonishing. So I know you've also been looking at some of the past national security strategies.

3:56I geeked out and went all the way back to George W. Bush's 2002. I read Obama's, I read Biden's, and I read the first Trump strategy. This thing comes out of a completely different universe. And in fact, actually, almost the biggest contrast is with the first Trump strategy, which was written by a woman called Nadia Shadlow, who was brought in with Fiona Hill, who we interviewed on leading, and was an attempt to provide an alternative, I guess, more realist idea of American foreign policy. But this thing is totally different. So let's just hit the highlights, and maybe we can dig into the detail in a second.

4:32The first most dramatic thing is that it's very, very short and it's very, very blunt, particularly about Western Europe. In fact, it effectively is a strategy that says, we're not going to talk about what the Chinese military is doing. We're not going to talk about what the Russian military is doing. We're not even going to mention North Korea. So those three big threats, peer competitors to the US, which have been the center of every US national security strategy for decades, Their military is barely featured, and one of those countries is just excluded. We're going to essentially say we're not very interested in Africa.

5:11We don't have much to say about what people are doing in the Middle East or Asia. Our real focus is on saying Latin America effectively belongs to the United States. This is called the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine is about the US being dominant in its own hemisphere, particularly in relation to Latin America. And Western Europe is up in headlights as the one region of the world where they say minority governments are trampling on democracy and human rights. That's a reference to the idea that in France and Germany parties, the governments are trying to control far right parties and that the US needs to resist the current trajectory of Europe.

5:54in other words, resist this whole liberal democratic move, and instead put its weight behind what it calls patriotic parties, for which read far-right parties, and that America's allies in the region are the countries of Central Eastern Europe, by which they mean countries like Hungary. The Trump corollary essentially says that no foreign powers can have troops or own critical assets or minerals or rare earths or have critical investments in Latin America. Foreign, of course, does not include the United States. The United States, by implication, can have troops in Latin America, can own critical assets, but nobody else is allowed in.

6:30You see, I think it's even more kind of malign than that in a way, if you think about it. So Monroe, just people who don't know their American history, James Monroe was the American president and the Monroe Doctrine was in 1823. And it was basically saying, European colonialism, you've had your day, get out of our, this is our sphere now, we won't interfere in Europe, you don't interfere here. But then we had, and I love the way that Trump sees himself in these great historical terms, because we had the Monroe Doctrine, then we had the Roosevelt Corollary in 1904, which is what opened the door to them saying, well, okay, we can do Latin America as well, okay, because we don't want those pesky Europeans coming back in it.

7:11So we've got to And remember, this America-Europe history, this sort of fits within that. So what Trump is saying, his corollary, as you say, is that they have the right and the power to intervene in wherever they think their interests are at risk, but nobody else can come anywhere near them. That is basically what they're saying. It is the most startling announcement of a vision. And it is a vision and it's a rival to the vision, as you say, that has been preceded in the national security strategies of both the Republic and Democrat presidents. Recent national security strategies have all focused in some part on the threat from climate change.

7:52The only mentions of climate change in this one are to basically sort of do their usual net zeros, a made up load of all nonsense. So it's a massive change on that front as well. The big winners in this, without a doubt, are those countries that were defined in every previous national security strategy as America's chief adversaries. There is literally nothing on North Korea, which if you remember this time in Trump's first term, he was on his fire and fury mode because North Korea was developing nuclear weapons. They have continued to develop nuclear weapons. They now have four times as many as they had when he was doing his fire and fury, and they are not even mentioned.

8:33Russia and China, in his 2017 national security strategy, were front and centre as America's adversaries. They were trying to damage American interests. Now, that assessment was right in that China has continued to do the things that they criticised them for then. Russia has gone even further with an all-out war in Europe. if you're reading this from a Russian perspective, you're basically thinking they've sort of copied and pasted a lot of our thoughts. And on the Europe stuff, so there are four paragraphs on Russia, four paragraphs. There are several pages on Europe, four paragraphs on Russia, and none of them are critical.

9:12None of them point out who caused this current war. They are back to the position of seeing themselves as a mediator. They talk about bringing a swift cessation so that we can get back to stable relations, by which they mean business as usual, lots of money for our rich friends. And the reaction to this around Europe has been very, very interesting because you had the coalition of the willing again yesterday. You had Starmer, Merz and Macron meeting Zelensky in Downing Street. And they looked a bit more worried than they normally do. And I think they're right to look a bit more worried. But the question is, how do they react to this?

9:52And before I hand it back to you, Roy, let me just read you one of the reactions to this document. And it came from a guy called Matthias Musdorff. And he is a 59-year-old cellist who has an attachment with a Russian university, but he's also a member of the German parliament. And he's the foreign affairs spokesman for the Alternative for Deutschland. the AFD. And he said this, everything the AFD has always said is now United States strategy. One, migration is suicidal for societies. Two, Islam does not belong in Europe. Three, Russia is not an enemy, but pursues the same interest in terms of stability.

10:32Four, remigration, kicking people back out, even if they're German citizens, is necessary. Five, nations form diversity, not leftist rubbish. This relates to Trump saying that the nation state is the single most important unit in the world. Six, freedom of opinion is essential, brackets provided is our opinions. Seven, the office for the protection of the constitution must be dissolved. This is the entire basis of the German constitution. They have an office for the protection of the constitution to prevent a return to this awfulness of the past. Eight, politicians must take responsibility. those who have trampled on these values in the past belong in prison nine media and NGOs must be cut off from state funding ten undemocratic patronizing international treaties must be dissolved and organizations that oppose national interests must be left behind now that is actually a pretty it's biased but it's a pretty fair assessment of what the American document says And for them, we talk a lot about democracies not interfering in each other's politics.

11:38The Americans have interfered directly now in the politics of every single European country by saying these are the parties that they want to win. I'd like to take a second just to look at the history of these national security strategies, because I think it's difficult to see how radical Trump too is without quite getting them. So you can almost see the whole story of American power in these strategies. These traditionally are very complicated inter-agency processes where the State Department, the Department of Defense, the CIA, and many, many others, US Treasury, feed into a very complicated process.

12:12somebody holds a pen and a president then signs off. And they're actually often unbelievably impressive. They're often much clearer than the British equivalents. They're not full of waffle and platitudes. They lay out a very clear idea of what America thinks is going on. So to go through them, and you can almost see the whole story of American power here, the 2002 strategy, which was produced when you were in government, is George W. Bush straight after 9-11. And this is a document that says America is at a position of unparalleled power and influence, and that the future of the world is liberal democracy, free markets, and free trade.

12:52That America is going to work through its alliances, that it's profoundly proud of NATO, the UN, and the post-war order, and it's always going to be on the side of democracy, free trade, and free markets against its adversities around the world. And the combination of American strength and the strength of these ideas will lead to an inevitable push of democratization. Fast forward, we then get Obama in 2010, just eight years later. And suddenly the national security strategy is a very different America. It begins actually with much more of a sense of American weakness. This is just after the financial crisis.

13:30So Obama is saying security for the US actually begins with fixing things at home. He's beginning to signal American withdrawal from the world. It's all about burden sharing, but again, alliances are right at the centre. So, if alliances are there for Bush as a way of reinforcing American values, for Obama, alliances are there to share burdens. We then get to Biden's strategy. I'm going to come back to Trump one in a second. Biden's strategy is, and you've talked about this in the past, is a vision of America where the fundamental balance is between democracies and what he calls rule-respecting countries, in other words, American allies who are not democracies, he probably means the Gulf monarchies, for example, but who are nevertheless their allies, against what he calls the non-democratic revisionist states, in other words, Russia and China and North Korea, Iran.

14:26And that strategy is all about alliances, and it's all about accepting that the world can't be stopped at borders. So it emphasises climate change, it emphasises pandemics, of course, things like COVID and Ebola, transnational terrorism, and the way that actually we're in a global world that has to work together. But the most interesting one of all, and I'll finish on this, is if you get to that extraordinary first Trump strategy. The first Trump strategy is an attempt to define a realist strategy. Those other ones that I've described so far are pretty idealistic. They're all about democracy, liberty, international institutions.

15:05This one is the best attempt, for me at least, to provide a plausible conservative vision of American foreign policy. It's one that would actually resonate with the type of Tory that I would be. And it says, look, America can't do everything in the world. We have to be prudent. We have to think about our own national interests when we're doing development projects, we have to emphasize how America can benefit. But it then says, in the end, we have to call out evil where we see it. We have to recognize that America's generosity has been good for America. So it tells the whole story. This is Trump one, tells the whole story since the Second World War in terms of America setting up these international institutions, funding NATO generosity.

15:50But it says that has been good for American security and prosperity. It says, we may not be able to do everything and help everyone, but that doesn't mean that we can help no one. It says there is absolutely no moral equivalence between our democratic allies in Europe and countries like China and Russia. So it's actually about trying to bring a defense of the post-war liberal order and the American national interests together. And that is what's all gone out of the window. We're now in a world where America is basically saying the strategy, and it says it again and again on every page, America is going to be the most powerful country in the world, the richest country in the world, the technological leader, the unparalleled military.

16:32We're going to dominate the globe, nobody can touch us, there's going to be no risk, we're going to be completely invulnerable, and we're going to do it with no alliances, no partnerships, no international institutions. We're going to be the most powerful country in the world, and we're going to do it alone by drawing up drawbridges around us. That paradox, the fact that you're trying to, on the one hand, dominate the world and on the other hand say you want to have nothing to do with the world, is the problem that runs through the whole document. Yeah. I didn't go as far back as you did. I remember some of the national security strategies we were in government, but I did reread the 2017 and it's a different world.

17:08And you mentioned Fiona Hill and her role. I was told that the person who was holding the pen in 2017 was McMaster, a kind of serious grown-up guy. Now, as you say, normally this is a process, it's an interagency process, and it sort of takes quite a long time to put together. You have the feeling with this one that they've basically, and this is the power of somebody like Trump and the clarity with which he communicates himself, even with all the inconsistencies, he has written a classically Trump introduction to the thing, the new one, which essentially is all the bluster, all the bravado. I've solved all these wars, even though Thailand and Cambodia is already kind of unraveling, but I've solved all these wars.

17:53America has done more in my first year than they've done in the four years of Biden failure, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the worldview in this one, the worldview 2017 was very much Russia, China, bad, America and allies, good. Okay. This one, it is America, amazing. Russia and China, kind of neutral. We don't really worry about them too much. The Gulf monarchies, why shouldn't they be allowed to chop up people like Khashoggi? It literally says we've got to stop hectoring the Gulf about their traditional ways of rule. I think we know what we're talking about there. But then it says Europe, bad.

18:32So that is why this thing is such a change. The other inconsistency with this, the nation state is the most powerful thing. We're talking today on the day that Australia is bringing in its social media ban for children under 16. And it's really interesting thinking about that. That is the nation state doing something that it thinks is good for its country and its young people. But the enemy of that are these tech giants, mainly from America, who resent any form of intrusion into their regulatory world. And one of the most, let me just give you a couple of things that I spotted online this week.

19:10Musk got fined, X got fined$120 million by the European Commission for sort of various scams and misinformation and stuff going on. His response, the EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries so that governments can better represent their people. Do you know the first response? Medvedev, former president of Russia, exactly. Just to calculate that, I think that's something like, I get my figures wrong, but it will be something like one three thousandth of his wealth. I mean, he's 3 ,000 times richer than that fine. No, way, way, way more than that. Way, way more than that.

19:49If we were a trillionaire, it's peanuts. It's literally peanuts. But the EU should be abolished. And sovereignty returned to individual countries, brackets like Australia, who we're going to try and sort of do in because of this silly social media thing, so that governments can better represent their people. And Medvedev agrees. But get this one, Rory. Kirill Dmitrieff, who we talked about recently, he's the guy who's the sovereign wealth fund guy from Russia, who's been dealing with Witkoff and Jared Kushner to try and sort of carve up Russia between American and Russian business people. He says this, EU bureaucrats have turned into enemies of free speech.

20:24This in a country where X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, Snapchat are all banned. Enemies of Western civilization and enemies of themselves. And the first response to that one, Elon Musk. The EU woke Stasi commissars are about to understand the full meaning of the Streisand effect. This is where the Streisand effect is this thing where Barbara Streisand tried to stop somebody taking pictures of her house and it let there be more pictures of a house. That's what that's about. So he's basically saying Europe is making a big mistake in taking on him in this sort of so-called free speech space. Now what this says and what this is underlined by this document is that Europe, which felt very, very comfortable in this relationship with the United States, is now sensing, we know that Russia is an enemy, and Yvette Cooper is making a speech about some of the hybrid warfare that they're doing these days that is sort of escalating.

21:19I think she's making that speech today. We know that Russia sees us as an adversary. But what this document says is that America is looking at Europe in a similar vein. And the reason I pointed to the body language at this meeting yesterday of Starmer, Macron and Merz is that at some point, we are going to have to confront this. And the reason they don't want to confront it now is partly because we are still reliant on American intelligence in Ukraine. We are still reliant on the ability to buy the weapons that we need to help Ukraine from them. But as we build up our defense industries, I think we are kidding ourselves if we think that we're in the same space that allows us to sort of feel great if Donald Trump comes to on a state visit and rides around Windsor Castle in a carriage.

22:09One of the things that we've seen with the interviews with Mike Pompeo and others on leading is that America believes that there will be no blowback. There'll be no resistance. So this is a document that effectively says we can insult our allies, we can humiliate them, we can tell elected governments that they're minority governments abusing minority rights, that we can support far-right parties against our elected partners, and there will be no consequences. their vision for it is Europe will take it lying down. Europe will spend 5 % of GDP on defence, and they'll spend most of that buying American kit.

22:51They will accept us saying we're going to resist the entire direction of European liberal democracy. They will accept us saying, in effect, we want to dismantle the European Union and return everybody back to sovereign independent states and hand these states to far-right parties. Can I just jump in there? I think this relates to the thing about Musk. Even Germany, even France, even the UK, on their own, not as powerful as we used to be. The only body in the world, I think, that is showing a bit of intent and the competence to take on some of these tech bro billionaires and trillionaires in must case soon to be, is the European Union and the European Commission.

23:32That is why they have set themselves the target of seeking to destroy it. And I think we should understand. That is what this is about. This is about trying to destroy the one international organization that still believes in the rule of law, that still believes in human rights, that still believes in international law. And we have taken it for granted that America would always believe in those things too. And that belief has gone. So they believe that we have no alternative, that we're just going to have to tolerate being humiliated, weakened, financial pressure. We're also going to accept opening up all our economy to American tech.

24:08We're going to come and support them in their policies in the Pacific and put our troops behind them. Look at what they're proposing on Gaza, which is no American troops on the ground, but the British are going to provide 1 ,500, the French will provide 1 ,000, the Norwegians, the Germans will all put troops. We'll just do what we're told. We're not partners or allies anymore. We're vassals. And if we twitch a tale, we're going to be punished beyond imagining. We're going to be hit with tariffs, and they're going to reveal that our entire tech stack depends on the United States. We got a little hint of this.

24:42We didn't cover it completely, but do you remember when these sanctions came in against the head of the International Criminal Court? America shut off all his email accounts. Microsoft, a private company, was ordered by the United States government, because this guy had been sanctioned by Trump, to essentially shut off his entire access to data, IT, the computer system. They've just done this to UAE. They've come in and they've said to UAE, you cannot balance this against China. You are going to be 100 % US integrated in every aspect of your AI data and tech from one end to the other. And if there are any Chinese components, we're going to shut you down.

25:22And UAE has caved. And they will rely on being able to pick off country against country. And they'll feel, well, we're doing it pretty effectively. They're not holding together. It's not as if we stood up for Canada. It's not as if we stood up for Europe. we thought, oh, well, okay, we'll get our 10 % deal and we'll let Europe be screwed. Europe's not standing up for Switzerland. Switzerland gets hit with 37 % tariffs, poor old Switzerland. Oh dear, Canada's being hit. Oh dear, Japan's being hit. South Korea's being hit. We're not holding together at all. So there, gamblers, yeah, you and I will say, this is outrageous, our vassal slave status is being revealed.

25:56But if you're Pompeo, you just shrug and say, there's absolutely nothing they're going to do about it. They're going to have to do what they're told. And they may have a point, but it's very hard not to think if you look at this in a kind of historical sense. There's an awful lot of arrogance and hubris going on. And I think that's what you objected to when we interviewed Pompeo. I should just say, by the way, I think I'm right, Rory, I think I heard Francesca Albanese, who we interviewed and leading, the UN rapporteur on the Palestinian Occupied Territories, where she's had her verified status removed on social media platforms, getting buggeration in relation to bank accounts and all sorts of stuff.