Revisionists and rogues, adversaries and competitors

"A central continuity in history is the contest for power," reads the new National Security Strategy of the United States published by the Trump administration, "The contests over influence are timeless." The new document is an indictment of post-Cold War "strategic complacency," based on a perceived denial of historic reality. "We believed that liberal-democratic enlargement and inclusion would fundamentally alter the nature of international relations and that competition would give way to peaceful cooperation." Trump's advisers believe that Chinese and Russian reassertion  (if not revanchism) was inevitable, and that Presidents from G.H.W. Bush through Obama were wrong to ignore that inevitability in pursuit of peace dividends. More interestingly, the NSS criticizes a characteristically American binary thinking that sees "states being either 'at peace' or 'at war' when it is actually an arena of continuous competition." This myopia has enabled "adversaries and competitors" alike act freely and ruthlessly "below the threshold of open military conflict" in order to "achieve maximum effect without provoking a direct military response." The President's own calls for "smarter" and "tougher" policies presumably target this neglect.  Throughout the document a distinction is drawn implicitly between "competitors" like Russia and China, who inevitably seek to expand their influence in ways that could harm the U.S., but are not existential threats, and "adversaries" or "rogue" entities like Iran, North Korea and the various Sunni Muslim terrorist organizations. This seems reasonable, possibly excepting its view of Iran, while its view of Russia in particular seems more subtle than that of the American bipartisan establishment that can't help seeing Russia, or simply Vladimir Putin, as an existential threat to something they value. The new NSS doesn't deny that Russia's different values will sometimes make its advances harmful to American interest, but the document is happily free of paranoia about Putin (or the Chinese, for that matter) promoting some global "authoritarian" agenda. It acknowledges, however, that authoritarian regimes have potential strategic advantages over the U.S. Such states are "often more agile and faster in integrating economic, military and especially informational means to achieve their goals," and are "unencumbered by truth, by the rules and protections of privacy inherent in democracies, and by the law of armed conflict." Partisan cynics may wonder whether the President envies these advantages, but the authors of the NSS remain confident in historic American ingenuity, combined with what they consider a more clear-headed understanding of American interests. This is, of course, an "America First" strategy based on the perceived interests of the actually-existing American people rather than on ideological priorities, committed to defending American values, however the Trump NSA understands the, rather than imposing them on other nations. The document sharply eschews faith-based optimism in (classical) liberal ascendancy worldwide. The "American way of life" is not "the inevitable culmination of progress," it states. For some, this will be too pessimistic a document, or perhaps too self-serving in its apparent insistence on a permanently vigilant military-industrial complex, at the likely expense of social programs. But compared to the arrogance of G.W. Bush in particular, we might start an objective appraisal of the NSS by observing that it could be worse, and we've had worse not so long ago.