Daily Archives: 8 December 2025

A Thought on the National Security Strategy Doc

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The Wall Street Journal‘s news writers had some, and so I have one.

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

Who has kept the peace? Only one member of the alliance.

It’s possible this doc is of a piece with Trump I’s statements that European NATO nations have been welching on their own commitments to NATO for too long, and maybe the alliance isn’t worth our trouble, blood, or treasure anymore, especially since it’s been us who’ve kept the peace all these years. It was us who flew the Berlin Airlift, it was us all along who was ready to risk nuclear war’s destruction across our homeland to defend Europe against potential Russia-led attacks.

Trump I’s threats were followed, if fitfully, by many of those nations finally stepping up and honoring their fiscal and equipage commitments. Still, though, one-third of those nations continue to welch on their commitments.

There’s this, too:

The strategy says the EU—an institution that the US helped establish decades ago—and other transnational organizations “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.”

What the WSJ is ignoring here is that we helped establish the EU as an economic union, which was the EU founders’ goal, also. Since then, the operators of the EU have been trying to transmogrify the economic union into its own national entity—and that attacks the member nations’ individual sovereignty. This is the mother of all mission creeps.

Maybe the NSS document is another prod, after too many decades of pretty please.

Or maybe not. But it’s interesting that the WSJ chooses to ignore any interpretation that differs from its own.

A Brief Thought on Politics and Government

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It’s necessary to keep in mind a fundamental fact of government: government does absolutely nothing; it’s purely a hypothetical construct.

That hypothetical aspect, though, is made concretely extant by the men and women who populate a government and occupy the various positions within it. In our American case, our government is given a framework and the positions within it by our Constitution and the statutes within our Constitution that create specific Departments and Agencies and their structure. Our government—this construction—still does absolutely nothing. It’s the men and women who occupy those positions within our government who do the things vernacularly attributed to “government.”

Politics is what those men and women do. It’s politics that those men and women employ to do things, to enact statutes, execute or rescind regulations, generate legal cases for our government’s courts, and issue court decisions (yes, politics is involved in judges’ and Justices’ development of their decisions, especially at the appellate levels where groups of judges and Justices must agree at least more or less on a ruling).

Those politics center on trading off support or obstruction of this or that position in return for support or obstruction of that or this position. Every politician or court official has something to gain or lose or trade in these tradeoffs. At bottom—because we humans at bottom are venal creatures—these political tradeoffs are as much for personal gain—generally in political power, sometimes for explicit financial—as they are for the nation’s good.

And that’s the danger of politics in government: the men and women who are the real actors, in the name of government, tend to act for their own weal first and the weal of our nation, the weal of us citizens, second.

Against that framework, it’s important to consider the philosophies underlying our two major political parties. In broad strokes, one of the parties holds the position that government can solve most, if not all, of the problems us citizens face, whether as groups of us or individually. This leads to this party moving to constantly expand the role of government in us citizens’ lives.

The other party holds the position that government is necessary because some problems are best worked, or can only be worked, by government, and so statutes should be kept simple and regulations to a minimum. This leads to moves to limit government power and intrusion into our lives.

Thus, one party moves to expand its politicians’ own political power and financial gain, while the other party moves to limit those gains or at least expand them at a much slower rate.

While the two parties tend to converge, they’re not there yet, and elections still have consequences.