Week signals: The strategy that didn’t bark in the night
Plus: watch points for Germany, China, the US, India, the Caribbean, and Russia.
Hello,
In this week’s edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. The missing link in the NSS, bipolar plans in a multipolar world, four trajectories, and a grand strategy we can believe in.
UP AHEAD. Wadephul goes to Beijing, negotiators go to Delhi, the Fed, SOUTHCOM, and Lukoil.
And don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Week Signals is the Saturday note for clients of Geopolitical Strategy, also available to GD Professional subscribers on Geopolitical Dispatch.
The Week in Review: Much G2 about nothing
The week began with peace talks in Russia and an election in Honduras. It ended with Donald Trump winning a prize from a football association and Honduras’s election tally still being counted. The great and the good decried it all as fraud, shame and nepotism.
Yet this was no ordinary week. In the small hours of Friday morning, with little fanfare and no Truth Social, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, as mandated by the 1986 Goldwater–Nichols Act. It is expected to soon be followed by a National Defense Strategy and a classified National Military Strategy.
The appearance was mysterious, but the reaction was predictable. Commentators leapt on its internal contradictions, its thinly-veiled white nationalism, its contempt for the European project, and the contentious “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Not since Meghan Markle’s holiday special on Wednesday, had something so thin and so ephemeral attracted so much controversy.
For us, there’s little to add to the debate, other than to say the administration’s contempt for a liberal Europe can probably be seen in much the same way as Vladimir Putin hates a democratic Ukraine or Xi Jinping hates an independent Taiwan – the EU presents an unacceptable alternative to Trump’s concept of Western civilisation, just as Kyiv does for the Russkiy mir or Taipei for Han China.
As befits any public-facing document that may be entirely at odds with the underlying classified version (and a political document that often bears little resemblance to policy as practised), it was of course partisan, self-congratulatory, stitched-together, compromised, and vague.
It should be of no surprise that parts resembled an extension of JD Vance’s Munich speech, and parts an apologia for current activities in the Caribbean, which may or may not be maintained. It should be of no surprise that an incoherent cabinet, built on an incoherent coalition of voters, has produced an in parts incoherent paper.
While phrases like “strong, traditional families that raise healthy children” may appear odd in a foreign policy statement, this is, after all, Donald Trump. And while the adversaries of the 2017 strategy – Russia and China – may have been replaced by the bogeymen of today – woke elites and Eurotrash globalists – look more closely, and there are some sensible things too, like an emphasis on critical mineral supply chains and reviving the defence industrial base. The framing may yearn for a simpler world of ethno-states – recalling the nostalgia of a 1940s PanAm brochure – but it also sees the world as it currently is: contested, changing, fragmented, and multipolar.
In that, however, the real story is not what’s included, but what isn’t. And that’s a real sense of Washington’s relationship with Beijing.
Alongside Latin America, China features prominently. Unlike North Korea or the environment, there are no glaring omissions. Yet, despite 25 mentions of China, Chinese, or Beijing (versus 10 for Russia, two for Mexico, and one for Canada), there’s no clear articulation of China’s threat to US primacy beyond the economic domain. Taiwan, mentioned in two places near the end, is framed in long-established policies of deterrence and Pacific strategy. But reading between the lines, words like “ideally” and “does not support” suggest a softer tone toward Beijing’s one-China policy. Some of this can be attributed to alleged changes made by Scott Bessent in the drafting process. But we see something deeper and more profound.
If the current US strategy, declared or otherwise, can be described in a line, it’s “make money, not war”, the title of a Wall Street Journal expose on Steve Witkoff’s approach to Ukraine, which can be extrapolated to US foreign policy at large. Perhaps it’s corruption, perhaps it’s just business, but the contours of a Chinese grand bargain keep emerging within the patterns of Trump-speak and his cabinet’s seemingly tactical policy moves.
The latest of these have been relatively overlooked in the week’s zone-flooding of threats against Somalian migrants and pardons of Central American drug lords.
The first is Scott Bessent’s frankly extraordinary description of China as an “ally” at a New York Times conference, which received more attention for Bessent’s description of the paper as a “fever swamp” and Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s energetic body language.
The second is a seeming rebuke from Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on coordinating with Japan, which has been in China’s doghouse, telling a Washington audience, “the decision right now is we want to have stability in this relationship.”
The third is a credible report that the US has halted plans to sanction China for the “Salt Typhoon” hacking campaign, which suggests that a wholesale attack on US infrastructure is now just another chip to be negotiated.
And the fourth is the live discussion on loosening high-end chip restrictions, the epitome of the Biden administration’s “small yard, high fence” policy on competition with China. Perhaps it’s now a big yard (Western hemisphere Donroe), no fence (make them addicted). But either way, it represents a tacit acknowledgment of a technological stalemate.
Add to this Trump’s recent recurring use of the “G2” moniker for the relationship, which subordinates the other poles of a multipolar world, and it’s clear that this is the national security question from which all other national security strategies flow. So, looking forward to the probable end of Trump’s term, in 2028, what can we expect for the G2 relationship? Is there to be a bargain? Will it involve Taiwan? What room is there for Europe, Russia and India? Will either side of the Pacific be carved into respective spheres of influence? And does strategy even exist for a president (”muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish’” in the exact words of the strategy) who is as famously opportunistic and mercurial as Trump?