Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, the Trump administration, as most administrations do at the beginning of their four-year term, issued a National Security Strategy—I guess we would call it a white paper—outlining the approach of the administration to foreign affairs and the protection of the security in the United States.

It’s written in a different style than past reports, different than the first term. And it has a lot of emphasis, as most do, on sections of the world. But what has caused the most controversy are two things.

Abroad, the report tells Europe that it’s experiencing “civilizational erasure,” and gives advice to the Europeans about what they must do to correct that, but in a manner of brotherly love or help, which the Europeans, of course, will see as condescending and interference into their internal affairs, except they want us to do it in the NATO part of the equation, but not the EU part. And that’s caused a lot of controversy.

The other is, the critics feel that it’s not critical enough of Russia and China. But if you read it very carefully, the whole point of its Pacific discussion is to bolster the alliances of Japan and South Korea, and to warn China to keep away from Taiwan and Australia.

And then, when we get to the economic domestic aspects of the National Security Strategy, it’s all aimed at China. It’s all aimed at China. It just says that we cannot be a successful, dominant power in the world, and we don’t want any other power to be dominant. And by inference, that’s Russia and China.........

© The Daily Signal