Daily Herald opinion: A new foreign policy: A monumental change is taking place in America's view of the world; it is worth our attention

The Trump Administration is such a fountain of boisterous activity and controversy that it is natural sometimes to lose sight of some of the more transcendent issues. This is not to say that the heated back-and-forth over each day's flare ups are unjustified. There is a lot taking place in Donald Trump's White House that merits robust evaluation and debate. It's just that we need to avoid getting so sidetracked by the relentless political skirmishes that major policy passes by in the shadows almost unnoticed.

Such is the point with the Trump Administration's National Security Strategy, released on Dec. 4 but almost lost in the blistering diatribes over Jeffrey Epstein, Venezuelan boats, ICE, vengeance prosecutions, inflation, insults to female reporters and let's see, what are we forgetting?

To be sure, the NSS documents are not in and of themselves concrete enactment of foreign policy, but they do provide the philosophy and framework for that policy, and in this, the NSS, seemingly weak in organizational discipline, provides a marked departure from the values-based philosophy that has underpinned American foreign policy since the end of World War II if not longer — including the more traditional strategy outlined by the first Trump Administration. The Trump strategy attempts a more conciliatory approach to China and Russia, welcome on the one hand, but lacking in clear justification on the other. It casts increased attention on the Western Hemisphere that could be worthwhile, but with a chauvinistic approach that, while perhaps addressing challenges in the short term, is likely to stoke counterproductive anti-American sentiments in the long run.

It marks a major shift from a view of the world as democracy-vs-autocracy to a view where, we fear, power rules somewhat indiscriminately and with flagrant self-interest. Certainly, we can see that philosophy in the approach President Trump has taken repeatedly so far in his second term — less about shared interests, allied response and leverage combined with persuasion; more about, the U.S. has the power and this is what we want.

Writing for the Brookings Institution governance studies fellow Scott R. Anderson says, the NSS “frames 'the outsized influence of larger, richer and stronger nations' as 'a timeless truth of international relations,' which in turn leads the United States to 'reject the ill-fated concept of global domination' in favor of 'global and regional balances of power.'

“The implication,” says Anderson, also a national security senior fellow at Columbia Law School, “is that the United States is less intent on strategic competition and more open to spheres of influence. This may be why — aside from an odd obsession with Europe’s 'civilizational self-confidence' — the new NSS overwhelmingly focuses on the Western Hemisphere, trade, immigration, and other issues close to home.”

Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, sees possibility in the NSS' willingness to find new paths where old ones have not been as successful as we would have hoped, but warns, “the document falls short where it rejects principles that have worked in the past (e.g., the pragmatic promotion of democracy and human rights) and where it fails to clearly identify and address new challenges before the country (the threat from revisionist autocracies and their interlinkages should have received much more attention).”

Meanwhile, Rebecca Lissner, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls the strategy “a radical departure” from past foreign policy approaches that, we would argue, have been largely successful.

“Far from the grave tone struck by all its predecessors,” Lissner says, “this NSS veers at times into screed. It reserves its greatest vitriol for U.S. 'foreign policy elites' and European allies rather than those who could truly threaten the United States.”

Does the new philosophy turn away from foreign policy approaches that have well served America, and the world itself, in the past? Or, is it time for America, not our adversaries, to change course? Do we really want, as the strategy implies, a world in a state of constant competition among nations rather than one in which nations cooperate and recognize mutual as well as individual interests?

Like so much else during the first year of Trump 2.0, this abandonment of values in international diplomacy is not the reason voters narrowly sent Trump to the White House.

But it is one of the ramifications of that election.

The monumental shift in policy needs our attention and our debate. We ought not sleep on that obligation.