Russia, China objecting to Trump’s new ‘America First’ security doctrine
MOSCOW — Officials in Russia and China pushed back Tuesday against the characterization of their countries as threats to the United States in a new national security doctrine published by the White House a day earlier.
A spokesman for the Kremlin criticized President Donald Trump’s foreign policy strategy as having an “imperialist character” while the Chinese Embassy in Washington suggested that the document’s theme of “America First” reflected “outdated, zero-sum-thinking.”
Every U.S. administration is obliged to publish its national security strategy, providing Congress with a blueprint for its intended policies around the world. The 68-page doctrine the White House released Monday described Russia and China as “revisionist” powers for seeking a change in the American-led world order. (And on Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said the reliance of minerals imported from China and other nations, especially by the military, poses a “very real national security risk.”)
“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned,” the document says. Russia and China, it says, “are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
Dmitri Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, responded with the long practiced Kremlin argument that the world would be a safer place if there were several powerful countries that could keep one another in check. The doctrine, he said, showed America’s continuing “aversion to the multipolar world.”
In the speech Monday, Mr. Trump made no mention of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which U.S. intelligence agencies concluded was intended to help him win. He focused instead on a phone call Sunday from Mr. Putin, who thanked him for information the Central Intelligence Agency had provided to the Russian security services that helped them foil a terrorist plot in St. Petersburg.
The Chinese response to Mr. Trump’s speech accused the United States of succumbing to “outdated zerosum thinking.”
“On the one hand, the U.S. government claims that it is attempting to build a great partnership with China,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement. “On the other hand, it labels China as a rival.”
Mr. Trump has cultivated a warm relationship with China’s president, Xi Jinping, as he tries to enlist Beijing’s help to confront the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, China’s longtime ally. But that relationship has been tested by Mr. Trump’s efforts to reduce the trade imbalance with China.