The Trump administration recently released its National Security Strategy (NSS), as mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. The NSS theoretically serves as the grand strategy document for the United States, linking the ends of policy and the means available to achieve them in light of limited resources.

The reaction from the so-called “national security clerisy” has generally been negative. The New York Times calls it “misguided and dangerous.” The Atlantic calls it “incoherent babble.” Kori Shake of the American Enterprise Institute judges it “a moral and strategic disaster.” 

There are three central criticisms of President Donald Trump‘s NSS: (1) Its apparent denigration of our European allies; (2) its seeming retreat from a policy of underwriting the “rules-based international order” that has been the basis of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II; and (3) its emphasis on the domestic “culture wars.” There is no question that the previous approach generally served the U.S. well in the past. But circumstances change, requiring concomitant change in strategy as well.

Responding to these changed circumstances is what the Trump NSS does. It corrects the shortcomings of previous NSSs. It is more than a list of aspirations. It lays out an actual approach for protecting U.S. interests. It rejects the idea that foreign policy is international altruism. It insists on reciprocity in foreign relations. It seeks compromise when possible but reserves the right to employ force when compromise doesn’t work. It chooses prudent realism over liberal internationalism, the preferred paradigm of the American foreign policy clerisy.

“Strategy” is ultimately best understood as the interaction of three factors, all within the context of risk assessment: Ends, the goals or objectives set by national policy that the strategic actor seeks to achieve; Means, the resources available to the strategic actor; and Ways, the strategic actor’s plan of action for utilizing the means available. In essence, a good strategy articulates a clear set of achievable goals, identifies concrete threats to those goals, and then, given available resources, recommends employing the necessary instruments to meet and overcome those threats while minimizing their consequences.

Typically, “strategy” now refers not only to the direct application of military force in wartime, but also to the use of all aspects of national power during peacetime to deter war and win the resulting conflict if deterrence fails. In its broadest sense, strategy is grand strategy.

As Edward Mead Earle wrote in his introduction to Makers of Modern Strategy: “Strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation — or a coalition of nations including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. The highest type of strategy — sometimes called grand strategy — is that which so integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.”

Grand strategy is intimately linked to national policy, as it is designed to bring to bear all the elements of national power — military, economic, and diplomatic — to secure the interests and objectives, or ends, of U.S. national policy.

Although strategy can be described as the conceptual link between ends and means, it cannot be reduced to a mere mechanical exercise. Instead, it is a process, described by the late Colin Gray as “a constant adaptation to shifting conditions and circumstances in a world where chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity dominate.”

Strategy, properly understood, is a complex phenomenon comprising a number of elements, including geography, history, political and military institutions, and economic factors. Accordingly, strategy can be said to constitute a continual dialogue between policy, on one hand, and these various factors, on the other, in the context of the overall international security environment.

Real strategy must also take into account factors such as technology, the availability of resources, and geopolitical realities. The strategy of a state is not self-correcting. If conditions change, policymakers must be able to discern these changes and modify the nation’s strategy and strategic goals accordingly. The U.S. has faced substantial geopolitical changes of great magnitude since the end of the Cold War. Trump’s NSS adapts to these changing circumstances without apology. It does what strategy is supposed to do: Determine what is necessary for the security and prosperity of the nation, and then execute policies intended to secure those ends. 

What most critics of the Trump NSS fail to grasp is that it represents a return to the American grand strategy that can be traced to the very founding of the American Republic, as articulated by George Washington in his Farewell Address and put into practice by the most remarkable statesman of the Early Republic, President John Quincy Adams. 

The original problem for the American republic was how to maintain its freedom of action in a world dominated by two hostile powers, England and France. As Washington wrote in his Farewell Address: “It must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves … in the ordinary vicissitudes of [Europe’s] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships and enmities.”

But, he continued: “If we remain one People, under an efficient government, the period is not far off, when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisition upon us, will not lightly hazard giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall Counsel.”

Usually invoked as a universal admonition against intervention, the Farewell Address instead represents a prudential combination of interest and principle, to be pursued unilaterally by the U.S. 

To keep Europe at bay as the young republic expanded its territory across North America, Adams favored Hamiltonian policies designed to leverage economic and commercial power as the basis of American development. He was ever an opponent of sectionalism, whether it manifested itself among the Federalists of New England during the first two decades of the 19th century or subsequently among Southern slaveholders. For Adams, sectional loyalties contributed mightily to the centrifugal forces that threatened the American Union, but were necessary to protect American independence and the liberty and prosperity of the American people.

For Adams, American disunity was the primary threat to American survival as an independent state. The choice, he wrote in 1811, was between ‘‘an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes........

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