National Security Strategies (NSS) are odd things. Required by law under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, most of them are filled with boilerplate and rather boring to read. However, these documents enable a new presidency to distinguish its priorities, values, and differences from previous administrations, thus revealing ideological shifts over time.

In this respect, President Trump’s recently released NSS shows that the MAGA movement finally knows what it’s about in foreign affairs. It has merged its domestic and foreign policies into a single struggle to preserve the “spiritual and cultural health” of the nation as well as the hierarchies and norms that sustain that vitality. Its worldview is defined by right-wing obsessions with political correctness, wokeness, gender, immigration and race.

The new NSS views other nations not through the lens of democracy v. autocracy but in terms of whether the ruling elite of that nation shares their obsessions. It challenges the legitimacy of any nation or international body that runs by liberal principles. Finally, it claims to treasure the value of sovereignty for all nation-states while establishing principles that justify U.S. interference. This approach to foreign policy marks a considerable break with previous administrations of both parties and even with the approach spelled out in Trump’s first-term NSS.

The disparate elements of this poorly written NSS are unified by the right’s desire to preserve a web of overlapping hierarchies and values: the domination of white Christian men in American society, of the United States in the Western hemisphere, and of white Christian civilization in the world. Security, in this telling, means preserving a conception of the nation rooted in a blood-and-soil identity rather than shared civic ideals.

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