Julia Davies’ policy brief examines the White House’s 2025 NSS as a deliberate break from the expansive, interventionist logic that has often characterised U.S. grand strategy. At the centre of her reading is the document’s attempt to cure what Washington commentators call the “Christmas tree problem”, a tendency for national security strategies to become all-encompassing wish lists. Davies argues that, instead, the NSS tries to narrow the definition of U.S. national interest to a stark, realist baseline: the survival and safety of the United States, supported by domestic resilience (borders, industrial capacity, energy, technology) and renewed instruments of state power.
A major portion of the brief highlights the NSS’s hierarchy of priorities and the way it links foreign policy to a domestic political agenda. Davies notes the strategy’s five core interests – Western Hemisphere migration pressures, Indo-Pacific trade practices, bolstering Europe, Middle Eastern energy access, and winning the AI/technology race – presented as the organising logic for statecraft and resource allocation. She underscores how the strategy frames internal measures – reindustrialisation, energy reshoring, deregulation, and cultural-political programmes as the enabling foundation for achieving these external goals, making the document as much a statement of political worldview as a conventional strategic blueprint.
Davies then interrogates the NSS’s regional ordering and its most controversial language. She emphasises the elevation of the Western Hemisphere to the top priority, paired with a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, alongside a more transactional, de-ideologised posture in Asia, where the strategy envisages managing U.S.–China relations through balanced trade rather than democracy-versus-autocracy framing. In contrast, she identifies the Europe section as the sharpest fault line: allies react strongly to what she presents as scolding rhetoric and a perceived double standard – non-interference is preached globally, yet Europe’s domestic trajectory is treated as a U.S. national security concern.
In conclusion, the brief frames the NSS as unorthodox but internally purposeful, attracting optimism from realist and restraint-oriented audiences who welcome a higher threshold for military adventurism. At the same time, Davies flags an unresolved tension: the strategy’s non-interventionist, selective-prioritisation posture can clash with broader claims about U.S. peace-brokering and with coercive signals, particularly in the Americas. Her overall assessment is that the 2025 NSS is best understood as a strategy of tightened national interest definition, but one whose credibility will depend on whether implementation remains disciplined and consistent with the limits the document itself tries to impose.
* The Institute for Advanced International Studies (IAIS) does not take institutional positions on any issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IAIS.
