An Analysis of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy
Deborah Reed, GovFacts
Last updated: Dec 07, 2025
The White House has released a document that dismantles the post-Cold War consensus on American foreign policy.
The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), signed by President Donald J. Trump during the first year of his second term, re-imagines the United States’ role in the world.
For decades, American strategy was predicated on the idea of global leadership through alliance networks, trade integration, and the promotion of democratic values. The 2025 NSS replaces this with a doctrine of “Civilizational Realism” and “Hard Sovereignty.”
The document describes a “long twilight struggle” against an adversary that “operates from within our institutions, distorting systems of governance, undermining public trust, and weakening the civic and cultural foundations that uphold our constitutional order.”
The document describes certain domestic political, bureaucratic, and cultural dynamics as threats comparable to foreign aggression. The strategy explicitly links these internal challenges to foreign powers, alleging that “ideological infiltration” and “institutional capture” are mechanisms of “strategic psychological warfare” waged against the U.S. population.
This doctrinal shift provides the intellectual framework for restructuring what the administration describes as resistant federal bureaucracy.
By categorizing bureaucratic resistance or ideological divergence within the government as “subversion,” the NSS justifies sweeping personnel changes and the reclassification of civil service protections. The strategy argues that traditional approaches centered on deterrence are insufficient for this internal threat, calling instead for a strategy that “identifies and neutralizes the root causes of internal degradation.”
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An Analysis of Trump's 2025 National Security Strategy | GovFacts |
