Trump talks national, economic security

In president’s strategy doctrine, global competition is paramount

WASHINGTON – The national security strategy President Trump released Monday puts economic factors — trade, energy independence and tax policy — on an equal footing with traditional military matters such as nuclear defense.

The result is a doctrine that seeks to balance competing objectives: emphasizing political and economic competition with countries such as Russia and China while enlisting their help with security challenges such as North Korea’s nuclear program.

Many of the themes of Trump’s foreign policy are familiar: putting America first, ending trade deals he calls unfair, building a border wall and making allies pay their share of defense.

“Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war,” Trump says in the preamble to the 68-page national security document.

The national security strategy is a report, required by Congress, in which each administration lays out its foreign policy doctrines in broad terms. It was in similar documents that President George W. Bush described his policy of pre-emptive defense against regimes with weapons of mass destruction and President Obama coined the term “strategic patience.”

For Trump, the buzzword is “principled realism.”

That means an emphasis on national interests and sovereignty as the drivers of foreign policy. Or, as Trump has put it, “America first.”

It’s a strategy that puts more emphasis on the business climate than on climate change, a focus of Obama’s last national security strategy document. Trump’s strategy says the United States will counter “an antigrowth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy security interests.”

The strategy emphasizes cyberse- curity even as it reduces the intelligence community’s findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to a single sentence: “Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries around the world.”

Trump describes Russia and China as “revisionist powers” intent on changing the global status quo by illegitimately seizing territory — Russia through its occupation of Crimea and China through its island-building in the South China Sea.

That doesn’t mean the United States shouldn’t cooperate with them when their interests align, Trump says. Sun-

Trump’s strategy says the United States will counter “an anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy security interests.”

day, Trump received the personal thanks of Russian President Vladimir Putin after the CIA gave the Russian security service information about a planned terrorist attack in St. Petersburg.

In other areas, Trump expands the concept of national security as encompassing fair trade, tax policy and deregulation. The document promotes the idea of a “national security innovation base” — a term coined by Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro to describe the technology and other intellectual property that give the U.S. a strategic and economic advantage in the world.

The president is required by law to submit the report every year. Previous presidents have treated it with varying degrees of importance — President Obama, for example, submitted the report only twice, in 2010 and 2015.

The strategy will be the first of a number of reports the Trump administration plans to roll out over the next few months on defense strategy, counterterrorism, biodefense, nuclear posture and missile defense.