The White House released the new US National Security Strategy for 2025 early on 5 December. Its guidelines and regional priorities will set the foreign policy agenda of the United States for the next four years and probably beyond.
In prefacing the document, US President Donald Trump wrote that in the first nine months of 2025 the US administration “brought [the United States] – and the world – from the brink of catastrophe and disaster… After four years of weakness, extremism… and deadly failures [the administration] has moved with urgency… to restore American strength at home and abroad and bring peace and stability” to the rest of the world.
According to Trump, the strategy is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the “greatest and most successful nation in human history.”
The document is 33 pages long, and going through it the reader will get the feeling that the foreign policy of the United States under the Trump administration is in a transformative phase, breaking, almost, with the foreign policy of three previous American administrations, one Republican under former president George W Bush (2001-2009), and the other two Democrat under president Barack Obama (2009-2017) and president Joe Biden (2021-2025).
Even during the first term of Trump from 2017 to 2021, US foreign policy did not deviate much from the mainstream, However, the foreign policy of Trump’s second administration will be considered transformative in terms of its objectives compared to those followed by the four previous administrations and in the reordering of various geographic regions from the standpoint of the national security interests of the United States.
In the new strategy, it is no longer Europe or the transatlantic alliance (NATO) that comes first but the Western Hemisphere, followed by Asia and the Indo-Pacific. Europe comes third followed by the Middle East. Africa concludes the chapter on strategic regions. The document says that “not every country, region, issue, or cause – however worthy – can be the focus of American strategy.”
The strategy contains certain principles that are clear departures from traditional American foreign-policy orientations. In the section on the Middle East, for example, it is stated that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
The document represents a different approach to the political realities in the region that is unlike that of previous American administrations, for it is written that the key to “successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.”
That is a great dose of strategic realism in the conduct of American relations with the Middle Eastern countries. However, despite this American strategic objectives have not radically changed, from defending energy supplies and routes to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, and from ensuring the security of Israel to expanding the Abraham Accords to other Arab and Muslim countries.
One of the foremost objectives is to deny other non-Middle Eastern powers the opportunity of exercising control over the region. “We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies,” the strategy says. It makes it clear that the United States retains “the most enviable position” in the region and one that was “reinforced” by Trump’s “successful revitalisation” of alliances in the Gulf and with other Arab countries and Israel.
I guess the most striking feature of the new strategy is the way it approaches the war in Ukraine as well as the American position vis-à-vis NATO. It states clearly that it is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine. The reasons that explain such a complete reversal are, according to the document, the stabilisation of European economies, the need to prevent an unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and, more significantly, to “reestablish strategic stability in European relations with Russia” and enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to “enable its survival as a viable state.”
As far as NATO is concerned, the document states that one of the US’ priorities “will be ending the perception and preventing the reality of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Such a formulation will be music to the ears of the Russians and the Chinese, but it will be highly unsettling for European leaders.
The Western Hemisphere as a region is priority number one in the 2025 strategy. It states that “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere… [the United States] will deny non-Hemispheric competitors [read China and, to a lesser degree, Russia] the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets” there.
The document states what it calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which it describes as the “common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”
Next week, I will be writing about the strategic priorities of the United States in the Asia-Pacific Region.
In the meantime, the 2025 National Security strategy is testimony to a changing world order that will rest on mutual understandings among the triad of the United States, China, and Russia regarding the scope and limits of their power and how they will exercise it in a way that will not lead to escalation or confrontation.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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