The Trump administration’s statement of the strategic goals of the United States, published last week in accordance with recent custom, is much more original than the general press response would indicate. It declares the objective of maintaining America as the “strongest, richest, most powerful, and successful” country in the world.

This is a reasonable ambition that does not imply hostility or disrespect to any other country. The statement replaces what is represented as having  been the “laundry lists of wishes or desired end-states and vague platitudes about what we should want,” of previous administrations.

Implicitly, the Clinton, Obama, George W. Bush, and Biden regimes are accused of seeking “permanent American domination of the entire world.” The Trump administration holds that “The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.” The document denounces “so-called, free trade that hollowed out our very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.” 

It alleges that allies were enabled to “offload the cost of their defense on the American people,” and promises a “new golden age” of “resilient, national infrastructure, the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically, advanced military,” and the “most robust, credible and modern defense, including the Golden Dome” anti-missile system. 

The strategy foresees America as “the world’s strongest, most dynamic, innovative, and advanced economy, the most robust industrial base, and most robust, productive, and innovative, energy sector,” and for America to become “the most scientifically and technically advanced country” benefiting from the “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, composed of a gainfully employed citizenry and strong traditional families.”

This cannot be claimed to be entirely free of platitudes itself, but America has always felt free to swaddle itself in the self-image-making of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney and even Grandma Moses. These are goals espoused by and to be achieved by Americans at no one else’s expense. 

All this strategic document requests from the world is a “reasonably stable western hemisphere” and to this end a “Trump Corollary” is added to the Monroe doctrine, assuring American access to “key strategic locations” in the Americas. It is also required that there be access to the Indo-Pacific region, which disputes Communist Chinese claims that large sections of the Western Pacific are Chinese territorial waters. The document pledges to “support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, and restoring Europe’s civilization, self-confidence and western identity.”

It promises to “prevent any adversarial power from dominating the Middle East” and to “avoid forever wars,” and summarizes its purpose in the protection of “U. S. core vital national interests.” In pursuit of these eminently reasonable goals, the Trump strategic outline cites as strengths what it calls America’s “nimble political system.”  

That is an unrecognizable description of the tumultuous logrolling operation at Washington which crashed heavily against the guard-rails of constitutional democracy with the attempts to derail Mr. Trump’s presidency via the criminalization of policy differences and the corruption of the intelligence services and FBI by the Obama and Biden administrations. Perhaps it is “nimble” in comparison to the Thuggee of the Kremlin, and the unacknowledged Stalinesque evaporations of prominent people in Beijing. 

Mr. Trump celebrates “the largest and most innovative economy, leading financial system and technological sector, most powerful and capable military, broad network of alliances, the enviable geography of the United States, its great cultural influence, the courage, will-power and patriotism of the American people, and the culture of competence, the rooting out of DEI,” and the determination to “tie together world-leading assets to strengthen American power and preeminence.”

With baffling precision, the strategic document announces that it is “pragmatic, muscular, and restrained” without being “pragmatist, hawkish, or dovish,” as it pledges the defense of “national interest and sovereignty and respect for the United States, peace through strength, a predisposition to non-intervention, a pledge to flexible realism pursuing good relations with all countries, the continued primacy of the nation” as the basis of human organization. 

The strategy tout the pursuit of “a balance of power so no one can threaten our interest, the end of the era of open migration, and the protection of the core rights and liberty of America. We will oppose the elite-driven anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in the Anglo-sphere, (i.e. South Africa), throughout the democratic world, and especially in Europe.”

And it pledges to oppose unfair trade practices, unjust unemployment, grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage, threats to America’s supply chain, the importation of fentanyl and other dangerous drugs into the United States, and cultural subversion.” 

Mr. Trump’s strategy expresses great concern about what is called European “civilizational erasure,” making the point that Europe has descended to only 14 percent now of the world’s gross economic product from 25 percent in 1990, and declares Europe to be “strategically and culturally vital to the United States” and that the United States is “sentimentally as well as practically attached to Europe.”  China is referred to only as a rival to the United States, a challenge it promises to meet. It is clear that America will not tolerate external influences compromising the integrity of America’s hemisphere. 

Russia is referred to as an aggressive assailant of Ukraine, of whom the Europeans are unjustifiably fearful, since Europe is stronger than Russia in every way except nuclear weapons, where the British and French deterrents are sufficient and the Western Alliance remains firm. This has been criticized by some intelligent commentators. (I decline to respond to the wailings of hurt feelings of some European spokesmen.)

Unlike President Franklin Roosevelt’s statements about Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and the Demosthenean outcries against the USSR of all presidents between Truman and Reagan except the first years of the over-hopeful Jimmy Carter, there is no suggestion that America is in mortal danger or facing any threat it can’t manage without conflicting with the reasonable ambitions of any other state. Nor should there be.