A Strategy for the Bosses
The newly released 2025 National Security Strategy (NS), far from being a sober blueprint for safeguarding American interests, reads like a corporate memo: “What can the world deliver us, and how much can we take?” Under the mantle of “America First,” the document signals a radical re-orientation of U.S. foreign policy: away from building alliances or defending democratic norms — and toward transactional deals, privileged access, and generous spoils for those already inside the tent. Council on Foreign Relations
But behind the dry rhetoric of realpolitik lies a simple calculation: who stands to profit.
The New Doctrine: Personalized, Partisan, and Profit-Driven
Historically, U.S. National Security Strategies, while often flawed, pretended to speak for the country. The 2025 NSS does something different: it centers on the President. As one analysis bluntly puts it, this document is “overtly about this president and not the United States as such.” War on the Rocks
That personalization matters. Under this strategy:
- Long-standing alliances are downplayed or cast as unreasonable burdens, especially European ones. The NSS sharply criticizes U.S. allies in Europe while offering a softer line toward Russia. Council on Foreign Relations
- Global threats like climate change, human rights, or even general stability, pillars of past strategy documents, vanish. Instead, national security gets conflated with border enforcement, drug interdiction, and domestic-style policing. Truthout
- The Western Hemisphere, and by extension, U.S. corporate leverage in Latin America becomes the priority region. The language of hemispheric dominance, economic pressure, and strategic access suggests that foreign policy is being retooled as a giant negotiating table for U.S. business interests. Defense News
In short: the 2025 NSS does not look like a plan to defend democracy or build a stable world. It looks like a deal memo to America’s wealthy and well connected.
Deals over Democracy: The Ukraine–Russia Backchannel
Consider the administration’s willingness to broker a “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine, not through traditional diplomacy, but via a back-channel led by political insiders instead of experienced foreign-policy professionals. Wikipedia - Peace negotiations in the Russo-Ukrainian war (2022–present)
Reports indicate that Steve Witkoff, a top Trump ally, and Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, played central roles in drafting a plan to end the war. This is no benign mediation. The 28-point draft reportedly would freeze frontlines, implicitly recognize Russian gains, and leave Ukraine’s future, and its economic and resource potential in limbo.
What does that tell us? The war becomes another bargaining chip, not a matter of justice or moral obligation. The U.S. stands to extract concessions, influence, and leverage with minimal cost to select insiders, especially those connected to real estate, energy, and reconstruction contracts once hostilities “end.”
Under this model, American foreign policy becomes less about values and more about value — for people who already own the table.
Venezuela: Militarized Extraction Disguised as Counter-Narcotics
Nowhere is the transactional logic clearer, or more dangerous, than in the administration’s aggression toward Venezuela.
Observers note that Venezuela’s importance isn’t about hydrocarbons, it is deeper: geopolitical leverage, strategic domination in Latin America, and economic advantage for U.S. defense and energy firms. Foreign Policy
The pattern is unmistakable: a militarized foreign-policy theater wrapped in law-and-order rhetoric, but ultimately designed to create business opportunities.
Institutional Overhaul for Faster Deals
To make the new strategy more than words, the administration has restructured the machinery of foreign policy. Within days of taking office, the President signed NSPM‑1, reorganizing the National Security Council (NSC) so that homeland security, immigration, and traditional national security get merged in a way that is reducing bureaucratic friction and ensuring decision-making remains tightly under executive control. National Security Presidential Memorandum on Organization of the National
Combined with a new 2025 National Defense Strategy (NDS) that aligns with the NSS and prioritizes defense of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere, rather than global alliance building, the structural changes guarantee swift, low-oversight, deal-ready foreign policy. Statement on the Development of the 2025 National Defense Strategy
In other words: fewer institutions standing between powerful insiders and potential windfalls abroad.
What This Means and Why It Matters
For large corporate actors, defense contractors, energy firms, oligarch-adjacent investors, and real-estate magnates, this is a bonanza. The new foreign-policy paradigm prizes speed, secrecy, and strategic advantage over transparency, stability, or democratic values.
For the rest of us, the majority of Americans, it means U.S. foreign policy is no longer about long-term global stability, alliances, human rights, or predictable international norms. It’s now little more than a series of transactions, and we don’t get a share of the profit. In fact, it will likely cause continued increase in prices and hurt farmers.
Moreover, this strategy invites back-lash abroad. Pressure on Latin American countries like Venezuela risks deepening anti-American sentiment, destabilizing entire regions, and pushing countries into the orbit of rival powers. Asia Times - Venezuela as America’s next foreign policy disaster
At home, by anchoring foreign policy in partisan and personal gain rather than in national consensus or democratic oversight, the administration sets a new, dangerous precedent, where foreign intervention becomes the plaything of a wealthy few.
Conclusion: The Real “America First”
The 2025 NSS is not a return to restraint, it’s a focus on greed. In the name of national security, it hands the keys not only to the world’s arsenal, but to its resources, trade routes, and political conflicts to corporate insiders and political allies.
If foreign policy ever had a moral or strategic purpose beyond profit, that purpose is now lost. America First is no longer about protecting the American people. It’s about protecting the American rich and political insiders.
Unless we call it what it is, an extraction-based foreign policy, we risk becoming complicit in it. And as history reminds us, the consequences of that kind of complicity rarely stay at home.
