The National Security Strategy: Structure, Contradictions, and China

China will have found much to like in the National Security Strategy (NSS) that the Donald Trump administration issued in November 2025. The basic idea of the NSS was that the United States should stop taking responsibility for the management of the global system and stop trying to impose its values on countries that, on a deep level, don’t share them. The NSS opens by declaring that the United States can and will no longer bear the costs of “permanent American domination of the entire world.” The United States should manage its security policy strictly in its own self-interest and in particular concentrate on securing the border and control of the Western Hemisphere. These pronouncements are music to Chinese ears.

In this short piece, I will explain why the Chinese will welcome these points and take them as being consistent with a short-term stabilization in U.S.-China relations. In the simplest possible terms, Chinese strategists see these strategic adjustments as part of U.S. retrenchment, a necessary step in the management of U.S. decline. And they will have determined that this U.S. retrenchment—if it were in fact pursued—would make China’s rise easier, less dangerous, and ultimately unstoppable.

However Chinese analysts will also note that after going through all the key regions and issues, the NSS also finds no area where the United States will actually retreat and no great power objective that it will forego. In short, the NSS, largely fails in meeting the mandate it sets for itself in its opening pages: that “not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy” and that “a strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize.” The Chinese have noticed this disconnect and are likely to conclude that the United States is not in fact willing to carry out a long-run program of retrenchment. Thus, while there is hope for a short-term easing of tensions—especially those related to trade—the medium-term prospect is for continued tension, dangerous misunderstandings, and the persistent risk of conflict.

What China Will Like About the NSS

There are four aspects of the U.S. National Security Strategy that China will welcome.

First, the United States has now declared that it will no longer support the global system primarily built by previous administrations of both parties. This is an enormous relief to China, as it has spent decades seeking ways to undermine the U.S.-led global system, portraying its own actions as being consistent with a more fair (i.e., less-U.S. dominated) global system, and generally trying to create more space for its own expanding power and influence. China has simultaneously copied and attempted to subtly discredit the U.S.-led system.

Now, all of a sudden, it has no need to do so, since the Trump administration is intent on discrediting the system itself. The NSS declares that past elites “badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens … overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, massive [domestic and foreign complexes] … placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism … [and] allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people.” This promises China much greater freedom of maneuver.

Second, it declares that the United States will seek “good relations … without imposing on [other nations] democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.” This too will be welcome, as it has long been a core Chinese “ask,” with the important qualification that the nature of national “traditions and histories” in China’s case is defined solely by the Chinese Communist Party.

Third, the NSS systematically downplays strategic rivalry with China, avoiding narratives about rising powers and systemic challengers that Trump himself had introduced in his first NSS. There is no “Thucydides trap.” Indeed, in the Middle Eastern section, the NSS declares “superpower competition has given way to great power jockeying, in which the U.S. retains the most enviable position.”  Maybe U.S.-China relations, too, are nothing more than “great power jockeying” rather than something more fundamentally contentious. While the Chinese do not believe that for an instant, they will be pleased if the United States does.

Relatedly, they will note that in many places in the NSS, the outright mention of China is avoided altogether, replaced with euphemisms that can only meaningfully refer to China.  For example, it refers to the need for efforts “making it harder for non-Hemispheric competitors” in the Western hemisphere and “winding down adversarial outside influence” and influence by “countries on the other side of the world.” This rhetorical style will be familiar to China, since it corresponds to the practice of Chinese official propaganda in which sinister countries are referred to obliquely without being named explicitly. The belief seems to be that by not naming them, you do not shame them and avoid a permanent rupture, thus making it easier to adjust attitudes or strike bargains later.

Fourth, and finally, American retrenchment is conceptualized geographically, with the document explicitly advancing a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” To be sure, this language has taken on new meaning following the snatching of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. If there were any doubts about the priority accorded to hemispheric dominance in the NSS, they have now been dispelled. Of course, China is not enthusiastic about liquidating its economic interests in Latin America, and will push back ferociously against pressure to do so. But if there were a tacit quid pro quo in a U.S. geographic pullback from East Asia—and specifically a pullback from Taiwan—China would be more than happy to strike that deal. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons China has invested so heavily in Latin America in the first place: to have something to trade away.

What China Will Not Be Happy About

Unhappily for China, the things China likes about the NSS tend to dissolve as the report tries to narrow and focus. Early in the document, its authors outline five objectives that are listed as “core, vital national interests.” Stated briefly, they are the following:

• Ensuring the Western Hemisphere is stable and well-governed;
• Halt and reverse the damage that foreign actors inflict on the American economy while keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open;
• Support Europe, albeit with a civilizational mission based on a Western identity;
• Prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East;
• And insuring U.S. technology and standards “drive the world forward.”

That’s the nominal point of the strategy: to focus.

The problem is that this focus is not the least bit credible, and each of these strategic objectives inflates when it meets the realities of a specific region and problem. In the pages prior to these five “core interests,” the strategy includes a list of “what we want overall” that runs to no fewer than twelve items, and then following the core interests is still another, even longer, list of “priorities” that runs an additional four pages.

An example of most immediate relevance to China: does the newfound corollary to the Monroe Doctrine indicate a reduced emphasis on continued U.S. embedding in East Asia?  It seems not. It turns out the United States “will work with allies … to maintain global and regional balances of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.” Specifically, “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority” and “we will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.” Indeed, the section of the Strategy raises the stakes on Taiwan by treating it as a linchpin in the First Island Chain, the collective defense of which is unmistakably given higher priority than in the foregoing discussion. So the “offer” to China here is: “you get chased from the Western Hemisphere, but we don’t necessarily dial down our commitment to the Indo-Pacific, and specifically the First Island Chain.” This is not attractive to China, and it is not surprising that China’s reaction to the large U.S. arms sale to Taiwan in December has provoked an aggressive Chinese response in the waters around Taiwan.

What China Will Not Care About

The NSS explicitly combines traditional military aspects of security with economic security, trying to integrate them into a single vision. It calls economics “the ultimate stakes,” although this statement is oddly placed in a subcategory of the Asia section and is not a theme for the whole report. Unfortunately, the military parts of the Strategy seem to have been written by economists, while the economic parts seem to have been written by armchair strategists. If we focus just on the economic parts, we see the same pattern we described earlier: bold declarations of change in direction in one part of the report, followed by a gradual spooling back of those ambitions in the next.

If economists had written the economics section, the first thing they would have done would be to think about the costs and benefits of the U.S.-dominated global system. It is certain that there are costs to a system in which the United States provides public goods, and the United States has paid those costs. But it is also clear that the system provides benefits, and the United States has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—them. The NSS argues by contrast that the United States paid costs that were disproportionate with the benefits it received, but to make this assertion without talking about the benefits is intellectually irresponsible. The remainder of the NSS goes on to assert, in realm after realm, that we can take steps to continue to receive the benefits of the very U.S.-dominated global system that the opening pages of the NSS rejected.

The contradictions recur throughout the strategy. The United States has “a historic record of benefiting our allies and partners”—in short, they are freeriding—yet at the same time we intend to “consolidate[e] our alliance system into an economic group.”  “What differentiates America from the rest of the world—our openness, transparency, trustworthiness, commitment to freedom and innovation, and free market capitalism—will continue to make us the global partner of first choice” at the same time as the actual practice of trade policy has made us less open, less transparent, less trustworthy, and less committed to freedom, innovation, and free market capitalism. A reasonable discussion of costs and benefits is necessary to achieve the economic objectives the NSS says the United States wants: balanced trade, critical mineral supply chains, reindustrialization, reviving the defense industrial base, energy dominance, and preserving financial sector dominance. But the NSS offers little guidance on how those objectives will actually be achieved.

Chinese readers of the NSS will see through these rather glossy ambitions. An administration that declares that the “current account deficit is unsustainable”—which it isn’t—but doesn’t acknowledge any need to curb the government budget deficit—which actually is unsustainable—isn’t producing a serious economic security strategy. In fact, there is really only one operational economic policy in the NSS and that is the building of secure supply chains. This is inevitable and overdue for the United States.

China, on the other hand, has been working on this problem intensively since 2020. The primary Chinese takeaway from the year 2025 was that they were able to resist the pressure of Trump’s tariffs—uniquely in the world—because they had control of both incoming and outgoing supply chains and in some areas could easily weaponize them in ways the United States, astonishingly, had not anticipated.  Rare earth magnets proved to be the “Trump card” that insulated them from pressure and forced the United States to back down on its tariff threats. The stress on secure supply chains in the NSS will appear to China as yesterday’s news. Of course, this will be a stated priority. And of course, the United States will take action in this domain. But from the Chinese perspective, the question will be “what on earth took them so long?”

Finally, the Chinese will recognize that the U.S. objective of “consolidating our alliance system into an economic group” is in fact seriously undermined by the quixotic effort—fully reflected in the NSS—of imposing ideological uniformity on Europe. The clownish bluster about “civilizational erasure,” deemed to be “more than plausible,” cannot help the U.S. effort to strengthen economic alliances. This is especially since it follows the ringing declaration that “any country that considers itself sovereign has the right and duty to define its future,” which includes “who a country admits into its borders.” China will recognize that this posturing in fact undermines the objective of strengthening alliances and converting them into “an economic group.” In fact, it drives the United States and Europe apart, to the benefit of China. On balance, China will conclude that while America’s new “strategy” doesn’t dissolve the long-term conflict with the United States, it does provide China with some breathing space and new opportunities to maneuver.

 Barry Naughton is the Sokwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego and co-leads IGCC research on Chinese science, technology, innovation, and industrial policy.

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