Trump Security Strategy Signals Post-Liberal America

A new document from the White House, the National Security Strategy (NSS), upends completely how Washington sees its role in the world. Released last month, it is the main policy blueprint that sets out how the United States (US) sees the world and intends to use its power.

Earlier this week this newspaper reported on the release of the NSS document and what it means for the world.

What makes this strategy significant is that it marks a shift in official thinking from liberalism to post-liberalism. For most of the period since 1945, US grand strategy was written in a liberal frame. Liberalism, in this sense, meant a belief that democracy, human rights, and open markets were universal goods that should spread across borders, and that US power should support that project.

The new strategy reflects a different view.

Post-liberalism is a worldview that dilutes liberalism’s protections for individual freedom in favour of a morally uniform society enforced through tradition, hierarchy, and authority, treating universal rights with suspicion and elevating collective obedience and imposed virtue over personal agency or dissent.

From 1945 until very recently, American strategies spoke in one basic liberal language. They said the US led an order based on democracy, human rights, and open markets that was meant for everyone. Power and principle were presented as two halves of the same Western project, and culture sat largely in the background.

The new text is different in kind, not just in tone. It states that the first goal of US strategy is to secure the survival of the US as a sovereign republic and it ties that directly to the restoration of American spiritual and cultural health and to strong traditional families raising children. In practical terms, the document treats the moral and cultural condition of the country as a security issue. Culture is no longer a soft background theme. It is promoted to the level of hard power.

Post-liberal thinking says a society must first decide who it is, what history it honours, and which shared norms it protects. The highest political community is not humanity in general but the concrete nation, with its own civilisation, faith, and way of life. Institutions are not neutral referees that float above this. They are instruments that should reinforce it.

The strategy reflects that view across its themes. It praises the primacy of nations and presents governments that put their own interests first as normal rather than selfish. It warns that mass migration and cultural fragmentation can weaken security as surely as any army by eroding cohesion and trust. It calls for an economy that serves workers and national resilience rather than abstract global growth figures. Alliances are still valued but mainly as tools for protecting a particular civilisation under pressure, rather than as clubs of shared universal values.

This stands in sharp contrast to the old liberal order. Liberal internationalism claimed to speak for universal values that applied everywhere. It tried to make culture lighter and law heavier so that courts, treaties, and trade rules could tame national passions and contain conflict. Post-liberal strategy flips that hierarchy. It treats law and markets as instruments and puts an inherited way of life at the top of the pyramid.

Vice-President JD Vance has self-identified as a post-liberal thinker. His key thesis is that liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights and free trade has created platforms that America’s enemies can use to attack it and therefore risks collapsing under the weight of its own contradiction.

This kind of thinking marks a significant step away from the old-guard, neo-conservative Republican order. Perhaps the most influential academic associated with the idea is Patrick Deneen at the University of Notre Dame. In a startling statement, made during a 2023, lecture he told a room of American lawmakers, including then Senator Vance: “I don't want to overthrow the government… I want something far more revolutionary than that.”