Facing Facts & Rolling Back Mythologies: The New National Security Strategy

The new National Security Strategy is addressing some established foreign policy mythologies, a long overdue analysis. Though a relatively new way of laying out the U.S. strategy, it was very important that it do so.

Knocking out ten destructive mythologies

The biggest drawback of the strategy is the lack of assessment of what security danger Russia poses to the U.S. and its allies even should the war in Ukraine be ended.

But the importance of the document is that it does address ten mythologies that have been largely conventional wisdom over the past many decades for the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These are rejected by the Trump administration with many additional details part of Secretary War Hegseth’s remarks at the Reagan Defense Forum on December 6^th at the Simi Valley Reagan Library.

The most provocative section is the analysis of the direction which Europe has been moving—very low birthrates, massive and often illegal migration of people that reject western civilization, an absence of a commitment to defense spending, rejecting a robust nuclear deterrent and missile defense, (currently being adjusted), vastly too much regulation and government coercion (being partially undone with Brexit), and a deliberate policy of making energy expensive and scarce (also currently being partially rolled back).

Mythologies – forgetting about nuclear deterrence

Important is the high priority given to both nuclear deterrence and missile defense. After the breakup of the USSR, it was assumed nuclear weapons were largely irrelevant. And that Russia and China would become largely cooperative nuclear powers, such as with the Nunn-Lugar program cutting down “loose nukes” in the former USSR.

By 2010, the Nuclear Posture Review emphasized both the benefits of U.S. restraint in nuclear deployment and seeking a general policy of seeking the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.

The new strategy underscores how nuclear deterrence is and remains central to U.S. security and for the need for major investments in nuclear modernization. In 1991, even with the collapse of the USSR, Senator Sam Nunn urged that the National Defense University Foundation (NDUF) continue a long standing program of Hill nuclear seminars as he warned that nuclear dangers were not going away and would certainly re-emerge. Instead, the elites went on a 40-year holiday from history and put nuclear investments at the bottom of the priority requirements for the past Cold War era.

The new strategy also jettisons the false assumption that missile defense is dangerous or destabilizing, firmly foot-stomping that defenses are a critical adjunct and insurance policy for the U.S. as General Michael Guetlein Director of Golden Dome emphasized on December 6^th at the Reagan Defense Forum.

More mythologies – ignoring our domestic economy

The strategy also captures an entire series of economic initiatives that are critical to U.S. security, for which it has been strangely criticized. In 1981, the National Governors Association assumed the U.S. did not need a steel industry as we could always buy cheap steel from China. The new Japanese investment in the U.S. steel industry and reshoring of U.S. industry is a welcome rebuff to the multiple decades hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry. And the key understanding that U.S. mineral mapping, mining, and milling is also critical to U.S. security is also welcome, as the recent mineral/trade deals have made clear.

On the Middle East, the strategy rejects the false notion that as former President Clinton noted in 2014, terrorism was largely related to Israel failing to offer the Palestinians a state. And implicitly reject the idea that Islamic jihad is some kind of peaceful religious individual empowerment as opposed to an ideology of conquest and murder. Keeping Iran from dominating the Middle East hydrocarbon reserves and engaging in terrorism while also being allied with Israel are priorities which is a welcome change from the embrace of Oslo, “the peace process” and Palestinian demands.

Embracing the western hemisphere and securing the border

The strategy’s western hemisphere embrace is a welcome switch. For decades, the U.S. assumed open borders was a welcome adjunct to U.S. economic requirements. It was assumed migrants were largely agricultural workers, unrelated to a massive illegal drug and human trafficking business closely associated with a campaign of “unrestricted warfare” by China against the United States and also including North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. And conventional wisdom assumed 100,000 drugs deaths a year was just the price one pays for a free and open society.

Critical to reforming our Western Hemisphere strategy is to understand the problem with an open border for agricultural workers is that it opens the borders to all potential “workers” including drug dealers and traffickers. And an open border with Mexico is also open to the rest of the world. That is why the section on Europe addresses that Europe is killing itself with mass migration of people that do not accept western civilization, but embrace Hamas and Jihad, condemn Israel, all of  which itself will undermine the extent to which Europe can be an effective NATO ally and strengthen its western civilization heritage. As one top scholar recently surmised, Christendom may lose upwards of one billion or 50% of its adherents given current trends, especially in Europe, where hundreds of mosques are being built on top of what were Christian churches.

Mythology – U.S. carrying the weight for NATO

The requirement to keep Iran from its terrorism ways and its search for a nuclear weapons lever is also a welcome security plank. Gone is the strange notion the U.S. engineered a coup in Iran in 1954 or that because Khomeini was a “man of the cloth” his regime was benign.

Gone too is the notion that scarce, expensive, and hard to secure energy is a great idea as the former Secretary of Energy and green energy mandates assumed. Coupled with establishing secure sources of minerals, both mining and milling, as recent deals with Australia, Malaysia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and others have done will further improve U.S. security and end our reliance upon China for rare earth and other key minerals.

For decades, NATO did not even meet its own 2% of GDP for defense spending as an unstated assumption was that NATO was special and although 80 years removed from WWII, NATO was special and couldn’t spend a lot on defense because Europe had to have a huge welfare state to prevent another  Hitler from coming to power.

Mythologies – avoiding shows of military strength

The strategy also drowns the idea that military strength is provocative and unnecessarily aggressive, a widespread assumption embraced by foreign policy elites through the Cold War, the era  of détente and peaceful coexistence and most loudly during the Reagan “peace through strength” military buildup, which of course successfully led to the end of the USSR which fundamentally was in fact an explicit economic war against the USSR, as outlined by Warren Norquist in his 2000 essay in the National Intelligentser. The extent to which the Reagan administration used economic measures to dissolve the USSR is seriously underappreciated and leads to a continued in ability to understand how effective such measures could be especially as the U.S. confronts two nuclear armed peer adversaries.

Warren Norquist details what Reagan confronted in 1981, nut unlike what President Trump also faced when in 2025 taking office for a second time. “The incoming Reagan Administration faced many challenges: Western Europe was making loans to the USSR at half the normal interest rate. Sweden was buying restricted high technology needed by the Soviets and reselling the items with all the necessary instructions. Many western firms were selling restricted technology to companies fronting for the USSR. The technologies the Soviets could not buy they were trying to steal.

History from the Reagan years

The USSR was earning hard currency by selling oil at three times its production cost. The USSR was earning hard currency by selling weapons to oil rich countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Europe was financing two gas pipelines from Siberia. If completed, West Germany, for instance, would become dependent on Moscow for 60 percent of its energy and Soviet hard currency earnings would double to $60 billion per year. The Soviets had effectively taken over Angola and Mozambique, and the Soviet military was providing aid and advice to many countries in Africa.

U.S. military spending had declined from 9.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) under President John Kennedy in 1962 to less than 4.6 percent under President Jimmy Carter in 1979 according to the Federal Government Historical Budget, Tables 3.1 and 10.1.

In Nicaragua, the USSR financed equipment and thousands of trainers to ‘… build … an army of 60,000 regulars backed by an equal number … militia” … armed with heavy weapons.” The plan was to expand to 500,000 under arms according to General Jack Singlaub. The Soviets were positioning themselves to threaten Western Europe into less cooperation with the United States. And the USSR had invaded and was assumed to be winning in Afghanistan.”

An innovative strategy, and a necessary one

The economic agenda for the new security strategy is very innovative but also most needed. The security strategy gets many things right especially including China, the Middle East, the Western Hemisphere as well as the twin defense needs of nuclear modernization and missile defense. Particularly welcome is the emphasis on preserving elements of Western civilization and the implied negative impact of rejecting religious faith, rejecting the need to acculturate legal immigrants and to halt illegal immigration and its companion twin evils of trafficking and drug running.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.