The Trump administration is reportedly nearing completion of its national security strategy (NSS). Since the 1980s, the US Congress has required every presidential administration to produce an NSS that explains the threats facing the United States and the country’s strategy to address them.
To aid the administration in this task, we reached out to NSS authors from the George W. Bush administration through to the Biden administration to get their advice and recommendations for how President Donald Trump’s team should approach this important document. What should the Trump administration prioritize in its upcoming strategy? How can the United States best adapt to new and emerging threats? Find valuable insights from past NSS contributors below.
Click to jump to an expert analysis:
Thomas Wright: The NSS must make the case for the president’s worldview
Mara Rudman: The NSS should be maximally implementable
The NSS must make the case for the president’s worldview
My advice to anyone writing an NSS is that the document should make the best case possible for the president’s worldview, rather than reflecting the consensus view of the entire US government. It should be interesting to read and move the debate on the president’s foreign policy forward.
There are two mistakes to avoid. The first is what could be called the “Christmas ornament” problem, where everything is added in regardless of whether it really fits with the strategy. The second is the tendency to sand down anything interesting until it is fairly innocuous.
To avoid these mistakes, you need a small team of one or two people to do the drafting and run a tight process, and for the president or the national security advisor to be deeply engaged and have some ownership over the document. This enables you to write something coherent, and it means there is someone who can overrule recommendations from the interagency if needed.
In Trump’s first term, his National Security Council produced an excellent NSS that had a positive impact on the administration’s foreign policy. The problem, though, is that it did not reflect Trump’s own views. One need only read his remarks marking its publication.
On this occasion, the Trump administration seems poised to produce a document more reflective of the president’s worldview. From a process perspective, I think that’s the right approach. But substantively, it worries me because his worldview is very much at odds with traditional US strategy, particularly on alliances, China, and Russia. That’s his right. He won the election. The 2017 NSS obscured the differences between Trump and traditionalists on US foreign policy. This NSS is likely to reveal and clarify them.
—Thomas Wright is a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution, and a former special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. In the latter role, he contributed to the 2022 NSS.
Drafters can benefit from outside input, but must not allow it to dilute strategic focus
While past presidents have produced updated NSS documents for their second terms in office, this one will have the unique task of adapting—or perhaps overhauling—Trump’s first-term vision after the passage of eight consequential years since his first NSS was released in December 2017. Initial leaks indicate that this NSS may depart significantly from his first one, shifting from an overriding focus on great power competition with China and Russia toward a Western hemispheric strategy that prioritizes threats closer to the US homeland.
I spent the first year of the Biden-Harris administration as lead author of then US President Joe Biden’s NSS, so I understand the challenge facing Trump’s team. Stakeholders inside and outside of the government are eager to see their priorities reflected in what is supposed to be the president’s most authoritative statement of strategic intent. Policy experts across the government lobby for their regions or issues—in my case, by sending thousands of track-change edits to drafts we circulated. Foreign embassies are calling to ensure their countries receive the requisite mentions. Interest groups and think tanks are suggesting language and hoping for early previews. This feedback is important. It helps ensure that the analysis and prescriptions are sound, that the national security bureaucracy will be invested in its implementation, and that the NSS is well received by outside groups. But it also risks diluting strategic focus and turning the NSS into a dreaded “Christmas tree,” covered in stakeholders’ parochial ornamentation.
As they triage input and finalize their drafts, Trump’s team would do well to remember that the NSS is, first and foremost, the president’s document. An NSS must achieve many objectives at once: guide US government policy, create a communications template for national security messaging, signal the direction of US policy to countries around the world, and indicate priorities to Congress and the American people. To be effective, audiences must perceive the document as truly reflective of the president’s priorities and preferences. For all the downsides of this administration’s centralized national security decision-making process, one benefit may be an NSS that speaks clearly and authoritatively on behalf of the president.
—Rebecca Lissner is a senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Brady-Johnson distinguished practitioner in grand strategy at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. She is a former deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy national security advisor to the vice president and a former acting senior director and director for strategic planning on the National Security Council. In the latter role she contributed to the 2022 NSS.
The NSS should be maximally implementable
My advice for those drafting the NSS: Focus on the why, what, who, and how, in the room where it happens, to deliver an effective, executable strategy. I base this on coordinating the 2009 NSS development and on assessing the 2022 NSS through service on the National Defense Strategy Commission.
1. Why: The NSS is mandated by Section 603 of the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. The legislation, a bipartisan national security structural statute developed in concert with the Reagan administration, requires the president to submit this report to Congress to communicate their national security vision to the legislative branch.
2. What: This mission statement should guide policy execution. It must discuss the United States’ international interests, commitments, objectives, and policies, along with capabilities necessary to deter threats and implement US security plans.
3. Who: The president and their immediate circle of advisers benefit from soliciting input from senior officials across the broad swath of executive branch agencies and departments that carry national security responsibilities. An effective coordinating process should pressure test even the most determined of presidential views. Allowing debate leads to a stronger product. Providing space at the crafting table to consider wide-ranging positions makes those who were heard more committed to executing the strategy, regardless of whether their views prevail.
4. How: Strategy drafters should design the president’s national security mission statement to be maximally implementable. By statute, the strategy must discuss the “capabilities necessary” to “implement … security plans.” Strategies consistently fall short on the follow-through that is necessary to execute the vision. It is crucial to include parameters against which the executive branch can measure progress toward the strategy’s goals. This can set the frame for dialogue with Congress, which is charged with procuring funding and providing oversight.
—Mara Rudman is a professor of practice and director of the Ripples of Hope Project within the Miller Center at University of Virginia and a former deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs in the Clinton and Obama administrations. She coordinated the development of the 2009 NSS and assessed the 2022 NSS during her service on the National Defense Strategy Commission.
To be worth drafting and reading, an NSS must convey the logic guiding the administration
It is relatively easy to write a coherent NSS in one’s own voice. Countless scholars and analysts have done so over the years. The challenge is to write a version of the NSS that is in the president’s voice and thus an authentic account of how the president understands the United States’ role in the world, the challenges the country faces, and the way forward. And it is even more challenging to do all of that in a more rigorous way than your garden-variety presidential speech might do. Presidential speeches can be a good window into the president’s vision and voice. But they rarely if ever address the kind of tough, “yes, but what about this?” kind of pushback that an NSS worth reading will include.
Of course, there are many other desiderata, most of which are not possible to be included (which explains why you will not find them in any of the published NSS’s of the past four decades). It would be great if the NSS went granular on “means” in addition to covering “ends” and “ways.” However, it is just not practical to include such details in a vision-logic statement. But if the NSS is worthwhile, it will ultimately be reflected in the president’s budget.
Likewise, many critics ask for clear and unambiguous prioritization—as if they expected the document to rack and stack allies and adversaries in a best-of/worst-of list. Good NSS’s do reveal the president’s priorities by revealing what issues they dwell on and what they skip lightly over. But there are inevitable compromises that blur the text for understandable reasons. If we mention ally A without mentioning ally B, we buy ourselves lots of heartache with little gain; what is the harm in mentioning them both, even if everyone knows—and the president demonstrates through allocation of scarce resources like Oval Office access—that A matters more than B? Sometimes, calls for prioritization themselves indicate strategic incoherence, as when “prioritizers” pretend we can better confront China by abandoning Ukraine to the predations of China’s ally Russia.
An NSS is worth reading if it accurately conveys the logic that is actually guiding the administration. If that logic is wise, the NSS will be easy to praise; if that logic is unwise, the NSS will help illuminate the problem. Either way, it is a fruitful guide to understanding the administration’s national security ambitions.
—Peter Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy and director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy and co-principal investigator of the America in the World Consortium at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He is a former special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform at the National Security Council, where his responsibilities included contributing to the drafting of the 2006 NSS.
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Image: The White House is seen from a nearby building rooftop in Washington, D.C. on May 4, 2023. Photo by Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto.
