Trump’s National Security Strategy

Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy is often described as erratic or transactional. In practice, it is better understood as selective engagement: cooperative where interests align, distant where they do not, and firmly hierarchical in how the United States situates itself relative to others.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s view of Europe. While the administration maintains formal commitments to NATO, the tone toward European partners is noticeably cool. Cooperation exists, but it is conditional. European security is treated less as a shared project and more as a responsibility Europe must increasingly shoulder itself. This outlook helps explain a simultaneous insistence on higher European defence spending and a reluctance to frame Europe as the central pillar of US global strategy.

NATO itself remains useful, but not sacrosanct. The alliance is increasingly framed as a vehicle for burden-sharing rather than solidarity. Expansion to non-EU members fits this logic. NATO becomes a flexible security architecture rather than a civilisational bloc anchored in Europe. The emphasis is on utility rather than identity.

Alongside this is a reassertion of the Western Hemisphere as a priority space. The administration’s thinking reflects a modernised Monroe Doctrine. The Americas are treated as a zone where US influence should be uncontested, while engagement elsewhere is more discretionary. This hemispheric focus coexists uneasily with global alliances, producing tension with partners who continue to view US leadership as universal rather than regionalised.

Economic policy reinforces this hierarchy. In Africa, the administration has promoted a shift away from long-term aid toward trade and investment, arguing that development is better driven by private capital and market access. This marks a departure from earlier aid-centric approaches. However, it has also generated tensions, particularly where funding cuts, including reductions to HIV/AIDS programmes, have raised concerns about public health and political stability.

China occupies a distinct category. Rather than viewing China’s growth as a shared poverty-reduction success, the administration frames it as a case of strategic exploitation. The argument is that China used access to Western markets to strengthen its state capacity and global leverage without political convergence. This view underpins calls for economic decoupling and tighter controls on supply chains.

At the same time, the US economy remains deeply dependent on low-cost goods produced abroad, often in the very countries now criticised. Western companies themselves benefited from labour arbitrage, exchange-rate advantages, and weak labour protections. The tension between strategic rivalry and consumer dependence remains unresolved.

Taken together, Trump’s worldview places the United States not at the centre of a community of equals, but at the apex of a differentiated system. Partners, competitors, and peripheral states are managed according to their immediate utility. Cooperation exists, but warmth is rare. The result is not isolationism, but a colder and more conditional form of engagement with the world.

For the United Kingdom, the outlook is correspondingly more constrained. The traditional strength of the US–UK relationship has rested on institutional depth, intelligence cooperation, and shared strategic assumptions. Under Trump, those structures continue to exist, but they are no longer sufficient on their own.

Foreign policy under this administration appears increasingly shaped by personal relationships between leaders. Trump’s evident ease in dealing with Vladimir Putin, and his broader preference for direct leader-to-leader engagement, suggests a diplomatic environment in which personal affinity carries greater weight than alliance norms or historical alignment.

This shift introduces a degree of contingency into transatlantic relations. Outcomes become less predictable, and less anchored in policy continuity, when diplomatic confidence depends on individual rapport rather than institutional trust. For Britain, influence may hinge not on proximity to Washington as a system, but on alignment with the preferences and perceptions of the president himself.

The implication is not a rupture, but a thinning. The US–UK relationship persists, yet operates on narrower terms, shaped less by sentiment or shared identity and more by immediate strategic utility and personal alignment at the top.