VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration published its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS).
The paper should be read by all: it is a manageable 32 pages.
It is a revealing document. Although it does not refer to the decline of the US as a global hegemon, it is clearly articulating what needs to be done for the US to strengthen its choke-hold on the peoples and nations of the world.
It opens with a statement by Trump that is every bit as boastful and dishonest as one might expect, bragging about having restored American strength at home and abroad and bringing "peace and stability to our world".
Before we descend into the textual details, it is important to understand the complexity of the competition within the US ruling class for control over the direction of US policy and for influence with Trump.
Deborah Veneziale, a journalist and researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, wrote last March that Trump's core supporter group "encompasses several factions, sometimes overlapping, each with its own policies and contradictions."
"Three sections of capital are the main forces behind the far-right movement. Silicon Valley is now charging forward to become the leader of the military-industrial complex. Amazon, Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Anduril, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic PBC are US military suppliers. Most view China as their major impediment and threat. Private equity now focuses on tech unicorns, more accurately described as tech monopolies and duopolies. They sit at the nexus of military, tech, and finance. The oil and gas section of capital needs to destroy the threat of renewables and maintain its monopoly position. Other sections of capital have, in the main, gone silent. There are 13 billionaires and some centimillionaires in the administration, many from the group of three above."
The contradictions of which she spoke were seen in Trump's attacks on people like his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and former national security advisor John Bolton, as well as his falling out with DOGE boss Elon Musk when the tariff war threatened the latter's investments in China.
Running through the NSS is a fascist ideological thread. It helps bind the sectional interests of US capital to Trump.
Thus, the NSS declares "we want the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age."
It is made clear that this resurgent US is based on white nationalism and Christian conservatism. It declares that "In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass migration must end."
Trump went so far after the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington on November 26 as to declare that he would ban all migration from Third World countries and dramatically increase the expulsion of those already in the US.
By demonising migrants of colour and Muslims in this way, Trump is dog-whistling to white supremacists, and his call to "cherish past glories" has echoes of Nazi era "blood and honour".
To this can be added Trump's self-indulgent gloating in his Introduction about having "got radical gender ideology and woke lunacy out of our Armed Forces", echoed in a broader context by the NSS's boast of "rooting out so-called "DEI" and other discriminatory and anti-competitive practices that degrade our institutions and hold us back". "DEI" is the acronym for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Many commentators have noted the references to Europe in the NSS. Most have likened it to Europe being "thrown under a bus". In order to manage its global decline, the US wants Europe to accept the reality of Russia's interests and to restrain the views that see Russia as an "existential threat".
Europe should instead focus on its own restoration of former greatness. It faces "civilisational erasure" as a result of its migration policies and its "censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition". The latter reference is to attempts by some European governments to prevent the spread of far-right white supremacist views. It also refers to the criticism that was levelled at Elon Musk for campaigning for the far-right Alternative for Germany, and the rejection of Vice-President JD Vance's speech at the 61st Munich Security Conference last February where he criticised European leaders for suppressing populist (ie far-right) speeches and clamping down on disinformation, which he rejected as a Soviet-era term.
As far as our region (the Indo-Pacific) is concerned, Australia is still to be pressured to increase its "defence" spending, US trade with China is to be "re-balanced", and war is to be prevented by "strong US deterrence". Much is made of defending the First Island Chain from China, but also of "restoring" a military balance favourable to the US which assumes that the current military balance is not particularly favourable to the US. This confirms various war games studies that show the US losing to China.
The key to the US preventing any further decline globally, is to be a re-focussing on the Western Hemisphere (North, Central and South America).
The NSS proposes a "Trump Corollary" or a following-on from the Monroe Doctrine, according to which US capital sought to keep its European rivals from the 1820s to the 1900s from investing in or colonising any part of the Americas.
Trump has already foreshadowed his version of the Monroe Doctrine with his goal of making Canada a state of the Union, taking Greenland from Norway, and taking over Panama with its Canal.
Despite the NSS's pious rhetoric about respect for the independence of other countries, and a "predisposition to non-interventionism", Trump's October authorisation of CIA covert operations inside Venezuela, his killing of over 80 suspected drug runners in their boats in international waters, and his piratical seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker put the lie to that.
As a recalibration of US foreign policy, the NSS proceeds from the mistaken belief that the uneven development of inter-imperialist rivalries can somehow be managed by a US strategy based on an ideological appeal to European values and Western (white) identity.
The only certainty is the existence of contradiction in all things, and the struggle between opposing aspects of those contradictions.
Imperialism cannot be managed: it must be fought and overthrown if the civilisational values of the people are to be guaranteed.