THE United States just released its National Security Strategy (NSS) — one of those quadrennial documents each administration issues to signal priorities, prejudices, and presumptions. Trump produced one in 2017, Biden in 2022; both passed through Washington largely unnoticed, their prose forgettable, their impact diluted by events.

This year’s iteration is different, however. It is not merely a policy paper but a manifesto — less a map of the world than a confession of belief. Trump’s worldview, unfiltered and unapologetic, appears stripped of guardrails, euphemism and the institutional restraints that once diluted impulse into process.

The document tracks almost seamlessly, Project 2025, the not-so-secret blueprint engineered by the Heritage Foundation and its ecosystem of conservative think-tanks, Federalist Society jurists and former Trump officials. Its ambition is radical: concentrate presidential power, dismantle swaths of the federal bureaucracy, sideline career civil servants, and centralize authority in a unitary executive capable of enforcing hardline positions on immigration, trade, regulation and culture.

This NSS is not an accident of policy evolution. It is the foreign-policy corollary of a domestic power grab.

Doctrine by inner circle

One assumes the NSS was circulated, debated and pre-approved within Trump’s inner court long before it saw daylight. Whether the president himself — cognitively impaired and famously sleeping even during Cabinet meetings — fully grasped its implications is another matter. The document bears the unmistakable fingerprints of Stephen Miller’s migration obsessions, Navarro’s mercantilist rage, McEntee’s loyalty purges, Voight’s cultural grievances — and, briefly, Elon Musk’s techno-libertarian theatrics.

Much of the agenda — deregulation framed as efficiency, bureaucracy dismantled in the name of competence, migration policy laced with racial dog whistles — feels less like strategy than translation: Trump’s instincts laundered into doctrine. Allies and adversaries now read the NSS not for nuance, but for diagnosis.

MAGA’s strategic grievance

The 10,000-word tome — mercifully summarized by ChatGPT — lays bare a MAGA-tinted worldview without the courtesy of subtlety. Geopolitics is reduced to bumper-sticker logic; global trade explained at cable-news depth. One suspects the strategy crystallized sometime between midnight and dawn, after a Truth Social tantrum binge fueled by Fox News, Newsmax and OANN — Trump’s sealed ecosystem of affirmation.

In this echo chamber, grievance hardens into doctrine, instinct into policy, impulse into strategy.

At its core — unchanged from his first term, sharpened in his second — is the belief that America “went astray” after the Cold War. In this telling, shadowy elites and a mythical “swamp” hijacked US policy, mistaking wish-lists for strategy: chasing global primacy, overextending commitments, misreading public patience — while globalism and “free trade” hollowed out the middle class and the industrial muscle that once underwrote American power.

Allies are recast as freeloaders, especially NATO. International institutions are portrayed as anti-American irritants. Trump’s first term becomes the “course correction”; this second-term NSS markets itself as consolidation — a new golden age anchored in clearer ends-means alignment, sold as American ascent.

Hard borders, hard power, harder lines

Trump’s long-ridiculed “I’ll build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it” chant has now been bureaucratized with a vengeance. DHS promises “full border control,” with top-dog enforcer, Secretary Kristi Noem, overseeing deportations reportedly so indiscriminate they swept up American citizens and even war veterans whose chief offense was looking South American.

Deterrence is recast as credibility: a modern nuclear shield, layered missile defenses, and a military restored to pride and purpose. Power rests on economics — reindustrialization, energy dominance, technological supremacy and guarded intellectual capital.

Soft power comes from cultural confidence, not apology — a nation secure in history, family, faith and future. America First is no longer a slogan; it is doctrine.

A world compressed: Interests, not ideals

The strategy compresses US interests to essentials. In the Western Hemisphere, stability over chaos: curbing mass migration, crushing cartels, and reviving the Monroe Doctrine — now reborn as a “Trump Corollary” — to bar extra-hemispheric encroachment and reserve America’s right to intervene.

In the Indo-Pacific, open seas, secure supply chains, economic reciprocity and credible deterrence.

In Europe, especially NATO: security without dependency — sovereignty, self-confidence and real defense spending.

In the Middle East, deny domination of energy chokepoints without sinking into endless wars.

Across all regions, American technology and standards must set the pace, not follow it.

The NSS argues the means remain formidable: a vast innovative economy, reserve-currency finance, technological primacy, unmatched military power, alliances, geography, soft power and civic patriotism — reinforced by deregulation, tax cuts, energy expansion, reshoring and renewed science investment.

The silence that speaks — an ‘assumed’ ally

Scrutinize the Indo-Pacific sections closely and one absence is deafening. The Philippines — America’s former colony and treaty ally — is not mentioned at all. Neither, for that matter, is most of Southeast Asia. The CFR noted the same blunt fact.

This is not a clerical oversight. The NSS explicitly defends omission as virtue, warning that naming every place leads to bloated, unfocused strategy. Prioritization requires choosing. The silence is deliberate. We were not forgotten. We were filed under “assumed.”

For the Philippines, the implications are profound — and uncomfortable. The alliance has become transactional by doctrine, not merely by Trumpian temperament. History no longer buys affection, only utility counts. Manila is no longer a “special relationship.” It is a use-case — a logistical asset whose relevance must be continually justified.

Deterrence remains, but attention is rationed. EDCA sites, joint exercises and maritime patrols create the illusion of muscular commitment. Yet the NSS clarifies the harder truth: America seeks narrower obligations and expects partners to carry more of the load. The Philippines may be vital in a contingency — but it is not narratively central. Useful in crisis. Disposable in diplomacy.

Beijing will read the omission as strategic daylight. China exploits gaps, not promises — applying calibrated pressure, harassment without escalation, fatigue as strategy. The lesson is simple: resistance is costly, and patrons may arrive late.

What the omission demands

Manila must stop confusing access with assurance. Bases improve logistics; they do not conjure political will. In a multipolar world, weakness signals vulnerability. Poor governance, erratic policy and hollow capabilities turn allies into variables, and great powers hedge against variables. In that space, the temptation to drift — or to seek the brutal predictability of Beijing’s blunt offerings — will only intensify.

The answer is neither panic nor nostalgia, neither louder speeches nor deeper dependency. It is capability: a coast guard that can hold water, infrastructure that survives pressure, institutions free of patronage, and a strategy that survives elections. It is networks, not crutches — embedding alliances within regional systems so no single patron becomes indispensable or exhausted. And above all, it is strategic seriousness — the discipline to plan for indifference, not reassurance.

The omission is not abandonment. It is a warning shot — quiet, deliberate and lethal to illusions. History is merciless to small states that mistake comfort for security. For an archipelago perched on the front porch of the century’s defining contest, irrelevance is not peace.

It is consent — for others to decide our fate.