SEEING RED is an irregular column on Fremantle Shipping News by Barry Healy*. In this piece, Barry considers the just published National Security Strategy of the United States of America and considers that, while a stark window into the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, the NSS also highlights the pressure points that progressive movements will need to confront. There will need to be a strengthening of solidarity with Latin America, a challenging of US-enabled far-right nationalists, defence of migrants and refugees, and expanding peace-building efforts across the Indo-Pacific.
On 5 December 2025, Donald Trump declared that he will invalidate all documents signed by Joe Biden, because he says that an autopen was used. That was the day after the White House published the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS) to replace the one issued by Joe Biden in October 2022.
Trump’s NSS is a truly weird document, dripping with his ego mania. Moreover, the AI writing detector, JustDone says 94 percent of the document “shows signs of AI generation.” So, the autopen has simply evolved.
The new NSS is vastly different to the 2022 version and spells out the brutally transactional way Australia’s great and powerful ally is operating. It could be summarised as “US Imperialism Inc.”
Credit Pegasus Anderson for Unsplash
What is new and what is not
The Statement frames the drive for profits, market dominance, and control of resources as the core national creed. It proposes the complete integration of US trade, commercial, diplomatic and military activities into a vertically integrated system to “pressure” and incentivise “partner countries”. This is called a “roadmap for American greatness.”
The Biden NSS said the “climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.” Trump’s NSS rejects “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that…threaten the United States.” Nothing more is said about it.
The document’s authorship is unmistakable. The foreword displays a familiar self-obsession, and the text itself, evoking a Führerkult, mentions Trump’s name 27 times in 33 pages.
Its central strategic shift is an end to what it calls “permanent American domination of the entire world”, dismissing this as “a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal”. The alternative vision offered is “a Golden Dome for the American homeland”—a metaphor for a fortified state.
This is not a retreat or a renunciation of global interference, however. The project of US control continues unabated. The doctrine asserts that supremacy will be maintained through keeping a choke hold on the world economy’s key nodes, ensuring prosperity in Trump World.
The military-industrial complex: war toys are us
In January 1961, the outgoing president of the USA, Dwight Eisenhower shocked his listeners when he warned of the growth of “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.”
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said. “Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications…In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Eisenhower’s nightmare has come to life in Donald Trump. More than a blueprint for military readiness, his NSS reveals a strategy of corporate subsidy through endless procurement.
It zeros in on technologies like AI and quantum computing and establishes the US state as the financial backstop for high-risk defence and tech sector R&D. The private sector will reap the eventual spillover benefits.
The US government will shield these firms from market volatility. Where the document calls US industrial strength its “highest priority,” it signals a state-driven re-shoring of production—not for workers’ benefit, but to safeguard corporate profits and independence from foreign competition.
With the USA milking Australia’s budget for hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up its nuclear submarine construction, the NSS reveals how allied nations are to be financially conscripted into servicing the US military-industrial base.
Latin America: The ‘Trump Corollary’ and Neocolonial Control
The NSS renews US focus on Latin America. It highlights a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
The original Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to new European colonisation or interference. In return, the US would not stick its nose into European matters.
Trump’s “Corollary” continues the assertion of geographical control to prevent any rival power from challenging US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, an essential part of maintaining its world-system dominance. But the promise to not interfere in Europe is explicitly ended.
The NSS declares economic war against rival powers, particularly China, whose growing investments threaten US dominance in its Latin American backyard. It even refers to “economic battlegrounds.”
“The choice all countries should face,” the Strategy states “is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world.”
Every US government official, including ambassadors and diplomats, is to champion American business, helping companies compete abroad. Embassies will achieve this by “simultaneously applying pressure and offering incentives to partner countries.”
Failing that, there will be “the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy.” While US military pressure on Venezuela began months before the Statement was released, it clearly follows this template.
Ironically, this whole-of-government approach to projecting US economic power is a direct response to the state-directed international dealings for which the document criticises China.
Europe: from ally to punching bag
While past US strategy documents emphasised a unified Western alliance—with the Biden NSS stating, “Europe has been, and will continue to be, our foundational partner in addressing the full range of global challenges”—Trump’s document rips into those European partners.
The critique is that Europe is weakening itself through “immigration policies,” “declining birthrates” and a “loss of national identities.” It drips with reactionary malice.
Beneath this jingoistic moralising lies a core contradiction of inter-imperialist rivalry. The US is unwilling to continue subsidising the defence of its wealthy European competitors through NATO.
The NSS demands a massive increase in European defence spending (to 5% of GDP). It is a directive for European capital to increase its forced subsidy to the US arms industry, guaranteeing immense profits for the US military industrial complex.
The document contains a calculated ambiguity toward Russia, which serves a tactical purpose. By directing insulting language at longtime allies, the Strategy clearly aims to sow discord within the European Union (EU). Weakening the EU would allow US capital to force favourable, bilateral, “America First” terms with individual European nations, exploiting existing divisions for corporate gain.
Indeed, the Strategy bluntly says the US will cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” It notes the “growing influence of patriotic European parties” as a “cause for great optimism.”
This encouragement of right-wing nationalist movements—in direct contradiction to the Monroe Doctrine’s non-interference principle—is a cynical manipulation. It seeks to destabilise the EU as a rival imperialist centre and redirect European defence spending toward US-approved companies.
In coming years will Australia see an upsurge of Aussie flag waving ultra-nationalists quietly urged on by the US embassy? Are the current ructions within the Liberal Party and realignments around One Nation already a symptom of this?
The Global Reserve Army of Labour: Migration as a Security Threat
Donald Trump’s personal cruelty shines through in the Strategy’s focus on migration. Declaring that the “era of mass migration is over” it prioritises full control over US borders. This arises from big business’s contradictory relationship with the global reserve army of labour.
While capitalism relies on a certain level of migration to suppress domestic wages, uncontrolled flows threaten the carefully maintained equilibrium of the labour market. More fundamentally, there is a need to maintain the ideological cohesion of national identity—a crucial tool used to discipline the domestic workforce.
By framing mass migration as a national security threat and equating it with “terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking,” the NSS provides ideological cover for the full militarisation of US borders. This ensures violent state control over the movement of labour. It uses fear and division as political tools, deliberately pitting sections of the domestic working class against immigrants.
China
The NSS depicts China as a strategic competitor in a struggle over access to markets, dominance of global supply chainsand the extraction of surplus value. China is treated as a threat not because it challenges what Washington labels “democracy,” but because it threatens the profit-making capacities of US corporations.
Although the document focuses heavily on economic issues, military power is close at hand, grounded in the notion of “military overmatch.” Even as it concedes that “American domination of the entire world” has ended, it nevertheless calls for expanding the US Navy and Coast Guard presence in the South China Sea.
This apparatus is an economic police force, ensuring that surplus value generated in the region flows primarily to US capital.
A central fixation of the NSS is the First Island Chain—from Japan to Taiwan and further south. By pledging to “deny aggression anywhere” in this zone, the US is committing to the containment of China.
Contradictorily, the NSS reaffirms long-standing status quo arrangements regarding the People’s Republic of China and the breakaway Republic of China administration on Taiwan. This status quo keeps a critical hub of global commodity production firmly within the orbit of US-led capitalism.
The NSS’s concern over Taiwan is, at its core, a concern over capital accumulation. It aims to safeguard semiconductor production infrastructure and maritime trade—the arteries through which global capital circulates.
The NSS insists that wealthy allies in the region (Japan, South Korea, Australia) increase military spending, effectively shifting the costs of maintaining a US-centred security architecture that ultimately protects American corporate interests.
The NSS aims to secure access to critical raw materials and dominate next-generation technology supply chains—semiconductors, clean energy industries, and beyond—to keep the commanding heights of global production and innovation under US control. In doing so, it seeks to ensure that economic rent continues to flow back to the imperial core.
Africa and the Middle East
African nations may feel blessed that the NSS only devotes half a page to them.
What Trump wants in Africa is “capable, reliable states committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services.” Apart from that, the US is not interested in them.
The NSS says the days when “the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.” The area is “emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment” thanks to Donald Trump’s “ability to unite the Arab world.”
As long as Israel can “remain secure”, all is sunshine and roses.
The “thorny” “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” warrants one sentence. It says that “thanks to the ceasefire and release of hostages President Trump negotiated, progress toward a more permanent peace has been made.” That there are thousands of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli gaols is invisible to Donald Trump.
The NSS: Imperialism Codified
The 2025 National Security Strategy is neither a plan for global peace nor a blueprint for security for the people of the USA. Instead, it signals that the United States is abandoning even the pretence of international stewardship in favour of a more direct, unilateral and aggressive pursuit of capital accumulation at home and abroad.
The document leads us towards a horrible future. The Western Hemisphere is to be tightly policed to facilitate corporate extraction, Europe destabilised to enrich US arms manufacturers, and the global South—especially Latin America—kept as a reservoir of cheap labour and raw materials.
Yet, as a stark window into the priorities of Donald Trump’s administration, the NSS also highlights the pressure points that progressive movements will need to confront. There will need to be a strengthening of solidarity with Latin America, a challenging of US-enabled far-right nationalists, defence of migrants and refugees, and expanding peace-building efforts across the Indo-Pacific.
By Barry Healy
* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.
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