Trump’s National Security Strategy: ‘America First’ doctrine aims for global domination

Imperialism has a new mission statement. With the release of the Trump administration’s updated National Security Strategy (NSS), the campaign to keep U.S. capitalism in the global driver’s seat is signaling that those at the helm are ready to pick up the gun.

Since he returned to office, the president’s effort to shore up American corporations’ slumping economic dominance has largely focused on roping in trading partners with tariff threats or shutting out market competitors via sanctions and export restrictions.

As aggressive as those moves have been, they may end up looking like the proverbial carrot compared to the stick which the capitalist state now appears prepared to wield for the sake of ruling class profits.

Over a century ago, Marxist political economist Rosa Luxemburg observed that militarism is not just aggression for aggression’s sake but rather the “pre-eminent means for the realization of surplus value.” The new NSS proves her point.

Whose “security”?

The NSS is not a plan for “national security,” as the White House is marketing it, but rather a ruthless strategy for securing the global dominance of U.S. monopoly capital. Its main push is to crush rival powers, slow China’s growing international influence, and maintain U.S. global hegemony.

When the document trumpets “America First,” it really means “Imperialism First,” defining the “national interest” solely as the interest of the ruling class.

This imperial blueprint arrives amid a dangerous U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean and brazen extrajudicial strikes, signaling a violent escalation in Washington’s regime-change campaign against Venezuela. The NSS leaves little doubt that this aggression is part of a broader design.

The document’s top priority, it declares, is to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere.” This so-called “Trump Corollary,” announced on the doctrine’s 202nd anniversary, is a prescription for renewed U.S. domination, disguised as protecting the region from outside actors, primarily China.

It vows to “deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability…to own or control strategically vital assets,” using coded language for a determination to block Latin American cooperation with China on infrastructure and development. It boasts, for instance, of restoring U.S. “privileged access” to the Panama Canal.

Dispensing with (everyone else’s) sovereignty

What this will mean in practice is escalated hostility toward geopolitical alliances that the U.S. sees as rivals, like BRICS, and regime-change operations against the peoples of any country asserting their own sovereignty.

Thus, the NSS’s fraudulent rhetoric of “Sovereignty and Respect” is laid bare in the document. In it, U.S. imperialism asserts its own sovereignty as absolute while explicitly planning to violate that of nations in its declared “sphere of influence.” Venezuela is clearly first in line, but the independence of every state in the region is under threat.

The NSS’s imperial vision extends further around the world, too. Its supposed “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism” is a complete farce. The entire document outlines a strategy for aggressive economic, political, and military intervention.

The document stresses preventing Chinese reunification with Taiwan due to the island’s significance to U.S. naval domination and calls on Indo-Pacific countries to grant the U.S. military greater access. It dwells extensively on maintaining an edge over China, the “near peer” rival.

Anti-communism, the go-to of capitalist ideologues, also shines through in the document’s call for “disciplined economic action” to hem in China and its socialist-oriented economic policies—which are derisively dismissed as “predatory, state-directed subsidies and industrial strategies.”

The NSS demand that NATO states spend 5% of their GDP on militarization and directly confront China and Russia is a reaffirmation of the military alliance’s function to serve as an imperialist spearhead for aggression.

In Europe, U.S. imperialism’s goal is to “cultivate resistance” to EU independence by bolstering far-right, pro-U.S. nationalist parties in order to ensure Europe remains a subservient tool for Washington. This aim pitched in terms of “helping Europe correct its current trajectory.”

The “healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe”—i.e. those with right-wing governments friendly to the Trump administration—are to be built up “through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges.”

Meanwhile, in a nod toward Moscow, the document says the Trump administration will work toward “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” This is a rhetorical tactic in the White House’s strategy of prying Russia loose from its ties with China—an effort to prevent cooperation between two countries seen as rivals.

The NSS aims for “energy dominance” and rejects the concept of “net zero” when it comes to fighting climate change. This of course signals a full, state-backed mobilization of U.S. fossil fuel capital to intensify extraction and sabotage global climate efforts.

Furthermore, the shift in Africa from “aid to investment” is explicitly about seizing the continent’s “critical minerals” for imperialist accumulation and plunder. The NSS favors partnerships with what it calls “capable, reliable states committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services.” Any countries who attempt to chart an independent path—like South Africa—earn themselves a place on Trump’s hit list.

Building a MAGA world

The document also reflects the administration’s domestic far-right politics, which of course serve its overall imperialist aims.

The call for “strong, traditional families,” pride in “past glories,” and rejection of “woke lunacy” is a right-wing cultural reaction designed to further split the working class along racial, gender, and national lines. It fosters the chauvinistic nationalism necessary to drum up support for impending imperialist wars.

The terroristic deportation campaign by ICE against immigrant workers is part and parcel of this project. It has its transatlantic reflection in the NSS’s declared goal of “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Adapting the white supremacist ideology long deployed by the far-right at home, Trump says Europe must also unite to defend against “civilizational erasure”—racist code for immigration.

Similarly, the NSS’s critique of “misguided bets on globalism” that hollowed out industry acknowledges the devastation wrought by neoliberalism but instead of pinpointing this as the result of unleashing free market capitalism, it frames de-industrialization as a mere “strategic error.” Of course, the real cause is the logic of capitalism, in its imperialist stage, which seeks maximum profit through outsourcing, financialization, and wage depression.

Thus, Trump’s turn toward protectionism and trade wars is not a rejection of this logic but an attempt to reconfigure it under conditions of systemic crisis and heightened global economic competition.

Therefore, the claim to be “pro-American worker” is a cynical ploy. Policies like Trump’s tariffs and “re-shoring” are designed to wed a section of the U.S. working class to “national” capital against other countries and immigrant workers. Their weaponized concept of “competence and merit” attacks affirmative action by presenting inequality as “natural” to mask the brutal antagonisms of capitalist society.

Partitioning the globe

The NSS presents U.S. assets—the world’s largest economy, financial system, and military—as “natural” blessings. These comparative advantages were not born “naturally,” however; they were built on centuries of domestic class exploitation, slavery, colonial plunder, and global extraction. The “world’s most dynamic economy” is dynamic precisely because of its ruthless exploitation of labor and nature both at home and abroad.

Beyond the U.S.’ largest immediate trading partners, Canada and Mexico, the nations of Latin America will be the first to find themselves in the crosshairs of this new strategy. Dominating this region is seen by the ruling class as the key in building a solid U.S. sphere of influence—a step toward holding onto global supremacy.

Building maximum resistance to U.S. aggression requires strengthening international solidarity campaigns with Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, and all countries facing the brunt of this offensive. It requires exposing the class essence of “America First” and uniting workers, and all forces for peace, against the common enemy: an imperialist system in crisis that is hurtling toward war and deeper exploitation in its desperate bid to maintain hegemony.

The document states quite clearly that the U.S. government’s objective must be “maintaining economic preeminence and consolidating our alliance system into an economic group.” On behalf of which sectors is this campaign to be waged? “AI, biotech, quantum computing,” “finance,” and “oil, gas, coal, and nuclear” are among the patron industries for whom the NSS was crafted.

So, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines when it comes to mapping the connections between Trump’s new NSS and the long-term decline of U.S. capitalism’s competitive advantage. Despite claims throughout of being “pro-worker,” the goal of this document—and the trade war that’s preceded its unveiling—is halting and reversing the erosion of U.S. monopoly corporate power via the construction of a U.S.-dominated bloc.

It has nothing to do with the real interests of the American people.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!