Letters from an American - December 5, 2025

Episode Date: December 6, 2025

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December 5th, 2025. Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy, or NSS, of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although, as Foreign Affairs Journalist at Politico, Nahal Tusi, noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration's foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions

the position of the U.S. in the world. The Trump administration's NSS. announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II. After a brief introduction, touting what it claims are the administration's great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II allies put in place after that war to prevent another World War. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement

and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined the character of our nation. Their vision of our country's inherent greatness and decency requires the restoration and reinvigoration of American's spiritual and cultural health, an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age, and growing numbers of strong

traditional families that raise healthy children. Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report, or NSC, 88, and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler, and 14 words to refer to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan. To achieve their white supremacist country, the document's authors insist they will not permit transnational and international organizations or foreign powers or entities to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as the disastrous climate change and net zero ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United

States, and subsidize our adversaries. The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia. The authors reject Europe's current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of civilizational erasure and calling for the U.S. to help Europe current correct its current trajectory by restoring Europe's civilizational self-confidence and Western identity. Allowing continued migration will render Europe unrecognizable within 20 years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe's societies might have a different relationship to NATO than those who signed the NATO charter. In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document's authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents.

Instead, they complain that European officials hold unrealistic expectations for an end to Russia's war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for ending the perception and preventing the reality of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance. In place of the post-World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration's NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere. through what it calls commercial diplomacy, using tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools,

and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere, as a condition of our security and prosperity, it says, a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region. The document calls for closer collaboration between the U.S. government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware

of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete, and succeed. It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and perhaps Canada. The U.S. government will identify strategic acquisition

and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. government financing program, it said, including, but not limited, to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy, the Small Business Administration, the International Development Finance Corporation, the Export-Import Bank, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, the United States must also resist and reverse measures

such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses. The document calls this policy a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, linking this dramatic reworking to America's past to make it sound as if it is historical when it is anything but. President James Monroe outlined what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in three paragraphs in his annual message to Congress on December 2nd, 1823. The concept was an attempt for the new American nation to position itself in a changing world.

In the early 19th century, Spain's empire in America was crumbling, and beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to seize their independence. In just two years, from 1821 to 1822, 10 nations broke from the Spanish Empire. Spain had restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. But Monroe and his advisors worried that the new nations would fall prey to other European colonial powers, severing new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting the new nations back toward Europe. So, in his 1823 annual message, Monroe warned that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered

as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. American republics would not tolerate European monarchies and their system of colonization, he wrote. Americans would consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. It is the true policy of the United States to leave the new Latin American republics to themselves in hope that other powers will pursue the same course, Monroe wrote. In fact, with very little naval power, there wasn't much the U.S. could do to enforce this edict until after the Civil War, when the U.S. turned its attention southward. In the late 19th century, U.S. corporations joined those from European countries to invest in Latin American

countries. By the turn of the century, when it looked as if those countries might default on their debts, European creditors threatened armed intervention to collect. After British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded the ports of Venezuela in 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to manage that nation's debt, the President announced the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine. On September 6, 1904, he noted with regret that there is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought. If countries allowed the wrong, he wrote, they put a premium upon brutality and aggression. Until some method is devised by which there shall be

a degree of international control over offending nations, he wrote, powers with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong must serve the purposes of international police. Such a role meant protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention. It also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries, but it still recognized those nations' right

to independence. Now Trump has added his own Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, promising not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion, but to reward and and encourage the region's governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy. In a speech in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the administration is more than willing to use America's considerable leverage to protect our interests. The administration says it will promote tolerable stability

in the region by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the failed law enforcement only strategy of the last several decades, and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then it says the U.S. will extract resources from the region. The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop, the plan says, to make neighboring countries, as well as our own, more prosperous. Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world

relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia's President Vladimir Putin, among others. National Security Specialist Anne Applebaum wrote, The new national security strategy is a propaganda document designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide, hard to think of another great power ever, advocating its influence so quickly and so publicly. European Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow

Ulrika Franca commented, the transatlantic relationship, as we know it, is over. Yes, we kind of knew this, but this is now official U.S. White House policy, not a speech, not a statement. The West, as it used to be, no longer exists. Today, Graham Slattery and Humera Pamook of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO's defense capabilities by 2027.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. Produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.