The NSS: From Monroe Doctrine to Moscow Doctrine

Washington DC 10 DEC 2025

The Blueprints of Betrayal: How Trump’s 2025 NSS Codifies The National Security Desk’s Warnings

For years, the National Security Desk (NSD) warned that the United States has been engaged in a comprehensive effort toward national sovericide—the active destruction of a successful hegemon by its own hand.

The United States is committing suicide. Never before in world history has a successful hegemon at the peak of its power actively destroyed itself of its own free will.

That stark assessment focused on the deep internal decay and systematic betrayal of allies that defined the Trump movement. Now, the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) serves as the chilling blueprint, formalizing the exact policies the NSD cautioned would lead to America ceding its leadership role in the world to Russia. Putin and Xi have achieved a “Reverse Nixon” - an opening of America to the Axis.

The Axis Within: Domestic Chaos and Hybrid War

The National Security Desk’s analysis describes the current global situation as nothing less than a “Hybrid World War” (HWW): a conflict fought simultaneously across military, economic, technological, and informational domains. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is only one front. The NSD highlights Moscow’s sabotage operations and political warfare campaigns across Western Europe, China’s observed war plans for Taiwan and its escalating provocations of Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and other Asian allies, Iran’s proxy networks destabilizing the Middle East, and adversaries’ use of cyber, AI, and disinformation to erode democratic resilience worldwide. Energy coercion and supply chain manipulation are further weapons in this multi‑domain struggle.

The NSD argued that rising global instability was not random chaos, but part of a coordinated attack on democracy, viewed as a front in a HWW. The NSD argued that the Axis of Revanchism (Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) enjoyed a critical advantage through domestic subversion of the US population through cognitive warfare. There is a dangerous “coincidence of interests with major political parties in the West that are themselves seeking to destroy democracy”. This strategy successfully eroded faith in institutions, leading to constant constitutional crises and chaos. This engineered chaos convinced the public that “global chaos requires strongman leadership”.

The NSD underscored that Russia’s primary goal was to make America its own worst enemy. Putins use of cognitive warfare (via, inter alia, social media manipulation) against the US achieved “what Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev could not - he made America its own worst enemy and set it on a course to self destruct”. Trump played a central role in this strategy. Furthermore, the HWW was sustained by the erosion of the rule of law, exemplified by the legal rulings that offered the President executive immunity for official acts, which Justice Sotomayor warned “now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President”. He just used it to commit murder off the coast of Suriname. .

Against this backdrop, the 2025 National Security Strategy elevates hemispheric migration and cartels above existential contests, leaving America strategically blind by downplaying Russia as an adversary and looking forward to “stabilizing relations” with Moscow. This trend is reinforced by the deeply unserious Ukraine “peace proposal”—reportedly written in Russia itself—which ignores the basic fact that it is Russia, not Ukraine, that continues to wage aggressive war.

The Trump Doctrine: Betrayal and Neo-Feudalism

National Security Desk warnings highlighted the core problem of the “Trump Doctrine,” defined as the “repeated betrayal of allies and fawning over foes in all theatre’s of operations”. The warning was explicit: the new administration would abandon the global system in favor of autocracy and transactional self-interest. This warning has become manifest in the NSS.

The NSD detailed specific actions serving as “canaries in the alliance coal mine”, including US threats of “unprovoked wars of territorial aggression that have been repeatedly threatened against Canada, Denmark and Panama”—a concept dubbed the Greenland Doctrine. The NSD explained that, globally, America was adopting an “unclear form of autocracy” and that its shift was “global in scope and catastrophic in consequence”, leading toward a “neo-feudal order” characterized by “neo-anarchy” and the rise of Machtpolitik. Allies were explicitly advised to assume the US would adopt an “openly hostile posture: demanding money, threatening allies, withdrawing US forces, eliminating tripwires and deterrents”. The NSS’s focus on “Spectacularly breaking with NATO and the prospect of ignoring or diminishing security treaties with allies in Asia” was predictable and predicted.

The NSS Codifies the Warnings

The NSS of November 2025 reads almost like a step-by-step institutionalization of the destructive trends the NSD warned against. The document begins by positioning American “Strategy” as having “Went Astray”, lamenting that past elites “miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens” and “allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people”.

This document formalizes the abandonment of global leadership through three key principles:

1. Transactional Alignment: The NSS explicitly adopts “America First” and states its foreign policy will be motivated by “what works for America”. It embraces a “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism,” [except where inconvenient, like Venezuela] asserting that rigid adherence is impossible but that this predisposition “should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention”. This validates the NSD’s warning that the second Trump term would focus on narrow self-interest rather than alliance commitments. Furthermore, the NSS commits to Primacy of Nations, encouraging good relations with countries whose governing systems “differ from ours”, thus institutionalizing the preference for transactional ties over shared democratic values.

2. Burden-Shifting and Demands for Cash: The NSS directly codifies the demands for money and withdrawal from global responsibilities, stating clearly: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”. It sets a “new global standard with the Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense”, reinforcing the NSD’s observation that financial demands would be used as a “weapon with which to beat allies”.

3. Domestic Purge and Authoritarian Control: The NSS echoes the NSD’s warnings about the hollowing out of government institutions and prioritizing loyalty. This language reflects the regime’s effort to replace apolitical expertise with “loyalty-tested apparachicks”. Finally, the NSS confirms the regime’s focus on internal division as the basis of power.

In essence, the NSS provides the strategic text for the very descent into autocracy and abandonment that the National Security Desk predicted. It is a document that, far from reasserting stability, seeks to solidify the “neo-feudalism” that removes the US as the guarantor of the liberal world order, making the NSD’s analysis of America’s self-destruction not just prophecy, but current policy.

Ignoring the Northern Western Hemisphere

Even within its chosen theater, the NSS is incoherent. It does not consider the Northern segment of the “Western Hemisphere”—Canada and Greenland—despite their critical importance to NATO’s Arctic posture. The National Security Desk’s work highlights Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland, treating them as adversaries rather than allies. By undermining trust with northern partners, the NSS weakens collective deterrence in the Arctic, a region increasingly contested by Russia and China. The NSD argues that threatening our closest allies only serves Russia and China’s interests. Accordingly, Europe must prepare for a future where Washington is not only unreliable but actively hostile to allied interests.

Allies Forced Toward Proliferation

Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of Trump’s NSS is the erosion of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Allies who once relied on American extended deterrence now openly debate pursuing their own nuclear weapons. In South Korea, public support for indigenous nuclear capabilities has surged amid doubts about U.S. guarantees. In Europe, Denmark’s Defence Intelligence Service has gone so far as to list the United States as a security threat, citing uncertainty about Washington’s role as guarantor of European security. When allies begin to see America as both unreliable and hostile, proliferation becomes not just possible but rational.

It fails as strategy

Retired Marine General Paul van Riper has long insisted that effective national security strategies must connect ends, ways, and means, prioritize vital interests, and translate grand objectives into operational design that allies can understand and support. In From Grand Strategy to Operational Design: Getting it Right, he warned against “dysfunctional” strategies that confuse slogans with substance, fail to integrate allies, and misidentify threats. Against this backdrop, the 2025 NSS is strikingly inadequate. It declares that “America’s core national security interests shall be our focus” (p. 8), yet pivots to the Western Hemisphere, elevating migration and cartels above Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, its ongoing sabotage and political warfare operations against Western Europe, and China’s observed war plans for Taiwan alongside its constant escalating military provocations of Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and other regional allies. This fixation on a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” (p. 5) is ludicrous 19th C spheres of influence rhetoric that has no place in 21st C strategic thinking. The Monroe Doctrine was conceived in 1823 to ward off European empires from colonizing the Americas. It is antiquated and unfit for purpose. Modern threats are transnational—cyber warfare, disinformation, energy coercion, and hybrid conflicts—none of which can be contained by hemispheric boundaries. Clinging to it blinds America to the real contests shaping the 21st century. The National Security Desk suspects this is on purpose.

Sir Lawrence Freedman has underscored the dangers in this document to European security. He notes that it “directly interferes in European affairs by explicitly siding with ‘Patriotic Parties’ and picking up on their themes of ‘civilisational erasure’,” even warning that “within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non‑European.” More damning still, the NSS “fails to discuss Russia as an adversary that poses a direct threat to freedom in Europe,” instead looking forward to “stabilizing relations with Russia” and a Ukraine peace deal stripped of justice or durability. As Freedman observes, the Kremlin welcomed the NSS precisely because “the US strategic vision is similar to Russia’s.” The NSD goes further than Freedman, arguing that Putin has turned Trump.

Putin has achieved a “Reverse Nixon”

Trump lost a massive strategic opportunity when he returned to the Oval Office. His blind obedience to Putin stood in the way of emulating his hero, Richard Nixon. Dumping a weakened Putin, ending the war on terms favorable to democratic Ukraine, is the kind of move that, like Nixon, only Trump could have made.

Russia is weak and bitterly close to collapse. As Simon Tisdall put it in the Guardian

After two years of growth artificially fuelled by higher defence spending, Russia’s oil and gas income, representing up to 50% of state revenue, is down 27% year-on-year, and recession looms. Inflation is up, at 8%; interest rates top 16%. The budget deficit is rising, more than half of Russia’s liquid sovereign wealth fund has been squandered since 2022, state monopolies face huge debts, foreign investment has plunged, import costs of strategic goods have risen by 122%, and consumer taxes are soaring, all to fund Putin’s war. Russians must even pay more to drown their sorrows: the price of vodka is up 5%.

It is vulnerable to both US and/or Chinese pressure. Consequently, suborning America without violence, using incredibly cheap cognitive warfare, has been a strategic masterpiece with few parallels in world history. Not only does it make America a vassal state, in the short term at least it saves Putin from assassination for his failed war, and insulates Russia from any pressure China might care to exercise against its interests.

Russia hails its Triumph over America!

“The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Sunday. He welcomed signals that the Trump administration was “in favour of dialogue and building good relations”. He warned, however, that the supposed US “deep state” could try to sabotage Trump’s vision.

The NSS is confirmation that Putin and Xi have achieved a “Reverse Nixon” against Trump. Putin and Xi have opened America to the Axis. The NSS recasts the US a defacto member of the Axis, where the global order serves both Russia and China’s interests at the expense of America and its global system of alliances. China will welcome America into the Axis because they benefit more from the rebalance than continued bilateral strife. For China, this removes ‘the America problem’ and gives China more say over Washington than it would otherwise have. As Putin’s grip on Trump tightens, Xi gains a degree of influence over Trump, rebalances with Moscow, and presents a pathway to deescalate the annoying US trade war.

This arrangement will fundamentally weaken the remainder of the free world, making them much easier to pick off one-by-one - a cornerstone of Chinese mercantilist diplomacy (belt and road) and politico-economic warfare strategies (see sino-Australian relations for the past 10 years). This is a map of relationships and influence as much as commercial activity.

The Reverse Nixon compliments, enhances, and advances American sovericide. Under Trump American power has shifted fully and irreversibly into the Axis camp with all that entails for the global order.

Conclusion

Taken together, van Riper’s criteria, Freedman’s warnings, and the NSD’s analyses expose the NSS for what it is: a political tract masquerading as strategy. It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation. The irony is stark: while adversaries wage a coordinated, multi‑domain assault on the global order, Washington has chosen to refight the 19th century—alienating Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Europe, and Asia in the process.

In the end, the NSS is less a strategy than a surrender note—signed in Washington, applauded in Moscow. If the goal was to make Russia pop champagne and allies reach for nuclear blueprints, mission accomplished. America First has moved from America Alone— to America Irrelevant.