The Disconnect Between President Trump National Security Strategy And The President's Intent Analysis

The Disconnect Between President Trump's National Security Strategy and the President's Intent.
The National Security Strategy (NSS) is a Congressionally-mandated doctrine, which sums up the U.S. role in the world and describes how the President intends to put his national security goals into practice and the means by which his administration plans to accomplish its foreign policy vision. President Trump's NSS unveils an attempt to turn his "America First" initiatives into a foreign policy doctrine as the organizing principle for the U.S. commitment around the globe. But the major problem with the new NSS is in debilitating credibility, as much of what NSS says contradicts with what the President has been preaching.

Differences between Trump's
Not surprisingly, the most significant break between the document and the president was on Russia. The NSS speaks of Russia as a threatening adversary that must be countered. Additionally, the doctrine calls out Russia for interfering in other countries' politics through "modernized forms of subversive tactics." But Trump denies Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and always seem to praise Vladimir Putin. Trump's NSS honored international institutions by stating that "American political, business, and military leaders worked together with their counterparts in Europe and Asia to shape the post-war order through the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and other institutions designed to advance our shared interests of security, freedom, and peace." Trump, by contrast, perpetually denigrates the NATO, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. On December 9, in Pensacola, he sideswiped NATO allies and inappropriately proposed that the United States may not protect them unless they "send a little of that cash flow our way." The NSS says: "Diplomacy is indispensable to identify and implement solutions to conflicts in unstable regions of the world short of military involvement." And yet, Trump plans to cut a significant portion of the State Department budget. Another passage of the draft reads "For generations, our society has protected free-press, free-speech, and free-thought … no external threat must be allowed to shake the commitment of Americans to their values, undermine our system of government, or divide the nation." Trump's near-daily attacks on the press don't support free-press, free-speech, and free-thoughts. Additionally, the doctrine reminds of the need to prevent and protect against