David Oliver: Trump admits that the U.S. is not invincible | National Post

United States National Security Strategy (NSS) statements tend to be provided by a presidential administration a year or so into its new term. Written by committee and required by law, they often resemble a Christmas tree of policy baubles and ornamental statements of how America is going to make the world a better place.

Not the one released last week. Instead of phrases like “marshal the forces of freedom and progress” ( Bill Clinton’s 1999 NSS) or “share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom” ( George W. Bush’s 2002 NSS), or even “lifted by America’s renewal and the reemergence of American leadership” ( President Donald Trump’s 2017 NSS), we have “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe which was none to pleased at the lecture .

Gone is the typical blandness of Foreign Policy elitisms that peppered even Trump’s first 2017 document, swapped instead for a nakedly political statement. Reaction in Canada has focused on the restatement of the Monroe Doctrine with a Trump corollary, and just in case the point hadn’t been taken, the U.S. this week seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast by legal means (rather than the legally dubious blowing-up of narco-terrorist boats). This follows the deployment of U.S. military forces to the Caribbean in October, the largest military buildup in the region since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Yet, while this administration likes to flex its power and speak to Western hemispheric primacy, I fear folks are missing the point. The real kernel of truth in the NSS is that the U.S., like all empires of yesteryear, is overstretched and under-resourced. Without its allies’ help, it will be kicked out of the Western Pacific. If that happens, it’s not just the U.S.-led world order that’s gone; its entire economic order will go with it as China controls all merchant and military activity in the region.

Elbridge Colby , U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy and architect of the 2018 National Defence Strategy, will either have held the pen or played a key role in this updated NSS. It contains several references, including some direct repetitions verbatim, from the book Colby wrote between the two Trump administrations, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” published in 2021.

I suspect Colby wrote in the NSS of the need for U.S. primacy in its “home” continents and to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces … or to own or control strategically vital assets” as China arguably already does. Without security in the Americas, the U.S. cannot project power to areas of the world where it has key interests — notably Asia, Europe and the Gulf — as a “cornerstone balancer.”

His conceptualization of this stems from a well-known theory in international relations known as “offshore balancing,” which was detailed in a seminal paper for Foreign Affairs by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in 2016.

Offshore balancing is the preferred foreign and security policy matrix for many non-interventionists as it implies the least possible engagement for the U.S. in other global regions to maintain a balance of power to prevent an aspiring hegemon, like China, from emerging. Colby’s version of “cornerstone balancing” is more interventionist as it requires an active role to anchor alliances such as with Japan and South Korea, rather than a passive one in trying to play countries off against each other.

This gets to the heart of the debate raging in the U.S. Republican Party between a strongly non-interventionist faction, which the vice president is thought to favour, and the traditional Reaganian internationalists, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to favour, and all the degrees in between. As Hudson Institute fellow Aaron MacLean notes , Trump is his own faction of one in all of this, perhaps best summed up by his ultimate approval of Operation Midnight Hammer to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, against the considerable fears of the non-interventionists.

The NSS also contains other references to U.S. weakness, such as the allusion to “burden sharing and shifting” of defence provisions — another Colbyism. This is an acknowledgement that the U.S. cannot manage all the defence provisions needed, especially as it faces the horror prospect of two systemic regional wars at once in Europe (Ukraine and beyond) and the Western Pacific. China isn’t asking anyone else to help share its defence burden as it eyes Taiwan and hegemony over the first and second island chains.

This summer’s about-face on tariffs also showed that China has found the weakest of points in American supply chains: critical minerals and rare earth elements.

So what for Canada? I would recommend looking beyond the bluff and bluster of this NSS to a world after Trump. Canada must recognize its own geostrategic reality and its shared global security and economic interests with the U.S.

The opportunity for Canada, then, is to make the right strategic choices that rebuild our atrophied hard, soft and economic power while being a useful partner in the Arctic and the Western Pacific.