A Giant First Step on a Very Long Road

Martin Sieff on the new National Security Strategy

Martin Sieff has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. He served as Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (UPI) from 1999 to 2009.


President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy will not magically solve and eliminate the catastrophic consequences of a quarter century of insane US policies in the war of so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT - Pronounce it: “Gee! Wot??”) and the Gadarene Swine mania to expand NATO without end across Eurasia and smash governments and societies across the Middle East and the entire Muslim world.

The USS Titanic has already hit those icebergs head-on: and our enormous, cumbersome, floundering and antiquated Ship of State cannot be turned around at once, or even in a year.

However, the new NSS is a crucial first and giant step towards that vital, necessary goal. It needs therefore to be recognized for this fact, and the usual endless bombardment of lies, raving hatreds and crass ignorance about what the President and his inner circle are genuinely trying to do needs to be made clear in this context.

First, the new NSS is a consistent and principled major step towards fulfilling the President’s stated goals in the unprecedented three modern presidential campaigns he has fought - and won two of them outright by such convincing margins. They represent an honest and serious attempt at delivering those crucial national security goals to the American people.

It should really be obvious even more now than it was at the start of the first Trump administration nearly nine years ago that the political and institutional hatred of the President’s goals to restructure the national security strategy of the United States is still ferociously opposed by most of our own Deep State and by the major governments and financial institutions of Britain, France, Germany, the European Union and NATO.

Nor should support for the President’s strategy and the new NSS mean that every major appointment in the administration and every contentious policy decision that is taken must be wise, right or competently implemented. That is never the case with any government or major power. I have been critical of some of the President’s appointments and some of his decisions and no doubt will be again.

However, what the new NSS makes very clear is that the President and his right-hand man, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio are indeed being adult, consistent, determined and principled in their overall direction of US national security and foreign policy.

Many decisions will be tactically reversed. Sudden U-turns will be made, as they have been. But it is infantile and ignorant to jump on these moves in isolation and shout “Ah Ha! This man is as bad as Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt combined!”

Every successful US president and his top diplomats have recognized the need in politics to make unexpected course adjustments, U-turns and recognize inevitable errors along the way.

To return to the Titanic analogy, it is no use worshipping the Far-From-Divine Plato and adhering madly, insanely even to the most admirable of abstract principles - sailing a perfect Grand Circle route from Southampton to New York if you find a big pesky iceberg in your way.

The true solution to such an unpleasant dilemma is to apply a quick dose of applied pragmatism, even if it has to be culled from Heraclitus, Aristotle or William of Occam. Therefore, make an immediate course correction and avoid the iceberg. There will be plenty of time to return to your main Grand Circle navigation course afterwards.

After all, that is the way those unprincipled cowardly wimps Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan handled such things.

Second, the President’s endless public optimism and pledges to end the bloodbath in Gaza instantaneously and bring peace in Ukraine in one day should be recognized as an inevitable and necessary part of his style.

They are also precisely the kind of public displays of confidence, especially when they are bluffs, or casually meant to be adopted or discarded, that the greatest of all military strategists, Sun Tzu himself advocated in his classic “The Art of War.”

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”

Not coincidentally, Evelyn Waugh, the greatest English novelist of the 20th century - and since - embraced Sun Tzu’s philosophy and its underlying strategic conception as the title and leitmotif of his comic masterpiece about the first months of World War II, “Put Out More Flags.” Also, significantly, Waugh dedicated the book to his lifelong friend and boozing buddy, Randolph Churchill, son of the Deified Winston, with whom he operated bravely, if ineptly, in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

Third, this NSS marks no U-turn in policymaking for Trump at all: It is the natural renewal, updating and strengthening of the NSS he issued in 2018, adapted to the changing circumstances and the catastrophic deterioration in global affairs that occurred in the dark four years of Joe “When Will He Finally Be Impeached?” Biden.

Fourth, contrary to the howls of horror predictably erupting from London, and Paris, Brussels and Berlin, the NSS is not anti-European at all: On the contrary, it clearly seeks the revitalization of the economies, nations and overall traditional Christian civilization of Europe and the restoration of the living standards of its more than a half a billion people. This NSS does not just prioritize - as it rightly does - the rejuvenation of the United States and the American people: It seeks the same goal for the peoples of Europe as well.

In this, the NSS clearly reflects the massive input, not just of the President and of Secretary Rubio, but also of Vice President J.D. Vance. We can therefore expect a new campaign of outright lies, snide innuendo and supposedly “thoughtful;” criticism to erupt from the old volcanoes of the Liberal International One World Establishment on both sides of the Atlantic to seek to discredit and politically eliminate the Vice President as well.

But among the peoples of Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Ireland and Spain, the NSS - if they are allowed to read it all without preconditioning - should set off mass demonstrations of support among hundreds of thousands of people.

That will not be allowed to happen of course. The state broadcasters across Europe and the other Guardians of Public Discourse are far too institutionally embedded for any such lapse to occur. But the cold fact remains that the new NSS seeks the wellbeing and happiness of the peoples of Europe as much as it does, those of the American people themselves.

Indeed, the NSS should be seen as a far more worthy post-80th anniversary year celebration of the Allied victory over the monstrous Nazi evil in 1945 than the pallid and predictably sickening Politically Correct Approved Celebrations that were actually held this year.

In 1944, millions of brave young American and Canadian boys crossed the Atlantic Ocean to spearhead the liberation and then defense of traditional Western civilization and Christian decency across Western Europe. President Trump’s new NSS has laid out the same noble and essential goal for a new generation in a new century. The enemies that the new strategy faces are monstrous: but the crusade must still be fought.