In his first term as U.S. president and on the campaign trail for reelection in 2024, a variety of Donald Trump’s instincts were visible. One was an appreciation of power for its own sake. For Trump, it is power, not principles, that makes the world go round. Another was Trump’s view of prosperity as a talismanic organizing principle of foreign policy. “We are going to make America wealthy again,” Trump vowed in 2016. “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” A third instinct was the close alignment of politics with personality. “Only I can fix it,” Trump declared at the 2016 Republican nominating convention.

Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which was published late last week, synthesizes and formalizes these three instincts, presenting them as the necessary drivers of international order. The NSS points to “the character of our nation, upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built,” entrusting the protection of this character to the president himself and his “team,” who in his first term “successfully marshaled America’s great strengths to correct course and begin ushering in a new golden age for our country.” It is Trump’s personality, power, and supporters that have enabled this golden age.

The strategy document is also an expression of American conservatism. Trump’s Republican Party is not that of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, two presidents who tied conservative domestic politics to liberal internationalism. Trump’s GOP is motivated more by an eagerness to separate friends from foes, a distinction that unites domestic politics with foreign policy. This binary mandates a blanket rejection of the Biden administration (to which Trump, in his introductory letter to the NSS, attributes “four years of weakness, extremism, and deadly failures”), a concern with national purity and hence with foreign contamination, and a will to shore up civilizational principles “in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world.”

The new strategy simultaneously mirrors and distorts international reality. In enshrining the importance of personality—“presidential diplomacy” in the language of this document—it nods to our media-driven world, in which individual leaders have enormous presence, latitude, and power. This is a world Trump has helped bring into being. The NSS collides with international reality by privileging raw power over persuasion and by focusing U.S. foreign policy first and foremost on the Western Hemisphere, even though the Indo-Pacific has become the world’s economic center of gravity (as the document notes) and the precedent-setting war of the early twenty-first century is taking place in Europe.

The document celebrates American power and is geared in part toward sustaining and amplifying it. At other times, however, the goal seems to be to restrain U.S. ambitions. Although the strategy document is unlikely to explain Trump’s day-to-day decision-making, it describes an aspirational world order. The order would not be American-led. It would not be the function of great-power competition or of civilizational clashes, and it would not be rules-based. It would issue instead from a dense network of personal relationships that supersede any alliances or any division of countries along the lines of democracy or authoritarianism.

This network could provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with an opening to end the war in Ukraine on his terms. It could be conducive to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s grandiose plans for his country. Most of all, though, it will accommodate the actions of a man who sees the world in viscerally personal terms, who can........

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