Every president issues a national security strategy. The document is nonbinding and has no legal force. Still, it does comprise a cogent set of policies and principles to define how America will approach the world, at least during his administration. President Trump released his new strategy on Dec. 4.

Considering the realities of the current world, the Trump administration’s new national security strategy is a masterstroke of realist diplomacy adapted for 21^st-century America. Trump has intelligently identified and eliminated tired and ineffective liberal internationalist tropes from our diplomacy, abjured destructive wars of foreign intervention, and put the security of the United States and its borders at the forefront of our national priorities. He has committed American soft power to restoring Europe’s beleaguered nation-states, opened paths to constructive engagement with decidedly lesser but potent nuclear-armed adversaries, and employed effective tactics to disarm and downscale unproductive and anti-American international institutions.

While his critics bewail the new strategy—curiously, in their view, it is both backwardly isolationist and aggressively interventionist—they are hard put to make any rational argument against what it proposes: an America First guide to foreign policy rooted in the oldest principles of the republic.

To our allies in Europe, the new national security strategy recognizes that the continent is weaker, poorer, worse-led, and culturally far less cohesive than it has been at any time in living memory. Collectively, Europe’s countries have been a bedrock partner of an American-led world order and also our major trading partner. Europe’s security and prosperity matter mightily to American interests, and its cultural tradition shares and informs our own. Restoring effective leadership there via support for parties that sincerely care about the fate of their nations and Western civilization is in our interest.

It is not in our interest to retreat before the corrupt bureaucracy in Brussels, which has little or no accountability and is content to preside over stagnation, decay, a widely recognized “democracy deficit,” and, as we have recently seen, worrisome controls on free speech and expression. The new national security strategies acknowledge that postwar stability was not brought to us by the failed United Nations and its self-interested adjacent institutions, but by strong assertions of American power that Trump is now restoring. 

To our adversaries, Trump promises de-escalation of international tensions, grounded in positive trade relationships. These deals have already led to historic peace agreements in the Middle East and other tense parts of the developing world. Trump recognizes the utility of a foreign policy based on interests rather than the idealistic conceptions that have led us to disaster or fecklessness in previous decades.

President Trump’s new national security strategy redefines our nation’s foreign policy for a new age of American global hegemony, in which U.S. interests are paramount. No longer will our borders be open. No longer will our trade relationships remain stacked against us. International institutions will no longer restrain our power or dictate our policy. Our domestic security and position abroad will be assured by military might and effective diplomacy that puts America and Americans first. Like all other great powers, we will determine our strategy and actions solely by our interests. Thus guided, with prudence, the rest of the 21^st century will be an American century.