National-security strategies don’t often make global headlines. They usually do not warrant some qualified analysis by defense experts on the inside pages of a broadsheet newspaper. But America’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS), which was released on 4th December 2025, was an exception, sparking passion and outrage in Europe.
Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, was Britain’s Ambassador to America from 2016 to 2019.Read the document and it’s easy to see why. It accuses the European Union of undermining free speech and political freedom, demanding that European countries “take primary responsibility” for their own defense and reaching for the dog whistle, claiming that, due to mass immigration, Europe is facing a “civilizational erasure”. The European response was similarly sharp. A prominent British commentator thundered that the NSS “rejects seven decades of American foreign policy and amounts to a declaration of political war on liberal democracy in Europe”.
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Their anger is understandable: NSS looks in part like a “shock jock” text intended to offend. But while the language is uncharacteristically wound, it has mostly been said before, albeit more gently: A generation of American presidents have called on Europe to act together on defense spending. Arguably, the more interesting question is where this document positions this administration’s foreign policy. Where is President Donald Trump on the spectrum between isolationism and internationalism? And is Mr. Trump’s worldview really separate and distinct from that of his predecessors in the Oval Office?
So let’s go back in time, not just seven decades, but 250 years to the founding of the American Republic in 1776. America’s first president, George Washington, said in his farewell address that the new republic should expand commercial relations with foreign countries and have “as little political contact with them as possible.” He warned against “permanent alliances with any part of the foreign world” and urged America to avoid being drawn into Europe’s “frequent” and “far-reaching” controversies. Mr. Trump can certainly claim that his skepticism about NATO — if not his outspoken deprecation — fits this mold.
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This policy of non-interventionism and avoidance of permanent alliances prevailed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Even as Europe descended into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson maintained American neutrality throughout his first term and won re-election in 1916 on a promise to stay out of the war. But the deaths of Americans sunk by a German submarine in the Lusitania, along with the interception of the Zimmerman telegram, a largely misguided German effort to encourage Mexico to invade America, changed American public opinion and paved the way for Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany in April 1917. So America, after 140 years, became the culmination of European wars.
Despite a quick victory in that war, the American people were not converted to the ability to engage in Europe. On the contrary: both the public and the government were horrified at the high cost of war, both in terms of human losses and financial injuries. The Senate, reflecting this prevailing sentiment, rejected the Treaty of Versailles, which included the League of Nations treaty. And the Great Depression inevitably deepened the isolationist mood and fueled a series of Neutrality Acts in the 1930s, which were intended to prevent America from providing personnel, arms, loans or credit to belligerent nations. America was then out of the early years of World War II until the Japanese attack on its naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Then came the so-called Golden Age. American statesmen, assisted by a Brit or two like John Maynard Keynes, led the creation of the rules-based international system and the great post-war multilateral institutions: the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and NATO. And over the next 75 years, more people around the world have been lifted out of poverty than at any time in human history.
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But that’s only part of the story. Non-interventionism and neutrality were primarily about avoiding involvement in Europe. Closer to home, America has often been opportunistic, interventionist, and expansionist. The 19th century was an era of land grabs driven by the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was divinely destined to expand its territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, spreading democracy, Protestantism, and American civilization. With the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, the country doubled in size. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared that the Western Hemisphere—the “back yard”—was an American sphere of influence and warned Europeans against colonization. Mexicans in the 1840s -American war ended with substantial American territorial gains. The Spanish-American War of 1898 resulted in America gaining Puerto Rico, Guam, and temporarily the Philippines. And in the early 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt authorized a number of military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean for political stability and American commercial interests.
If one adds up all the years when America oscillated between non-interventionism and isolationism, they amount to about two-thirds of America’s existence. American internationalism, throughout much of the nation’s history, has been the exception rather than the norm.
But equally, for most of its history, America has behaved like an imperial power in its neighborhood, intervening politically, economically, and sometimes militarily for commercial and security gains. In the same vein, Mr. Trump has openly spoken of his ambition to acquire Greenland, for no other reason than American interests.
America First’s Aggressive Pursuit of America First in Latin America Should Europe Solve Its Own Problems: Does this sound familiar? Recent events in Venezuela may spring to mind. It seems Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is less a new direction for American foreign policy than a resurgence of America’s past. If 19th century American presidents, gathered in that Oval Office in heaven, were able to browse the latest NSS, they would recognize what they were reading and say “that looks right”.
Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, was Britain’s Ambassador to America from 2016 to 2019.
