In an interview on the sidelines of the Reagan National Defense Forum, the House Armed Services Committee's top Democrat told Breaking Defense how he feels about the Trump administration's new National Security Strategy's outlook on Europe and the Western Hemisphere and knocked the Pentagon's lack of details on a spending plan for Golden Dome.
discuss what will happen as the Supreme Court considers whether a president can remove leaders of independent agencies without cause, how the overt signals about immigration and "erasure" in the new National Security Strategy are meant to stir up cultural anxiety in Europe, and the high-stakes merger drama between Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros. with guest Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law School and author of the new book The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.
It is worth reading the most recent NSS in its entirety. It is less polished than its predecessor, betrays little evidence of consultation, and is considerably shorter (33 as against 70 pages). It reads like time had run out and a deadline had been reached. It ends abruptly with a short discussion on Africa, this administration's least important region, without a proper conclusion.
If you're working for a designated terrorist organization and you bring drugs to this country in a boat, we will find you and we will sink you. Let there be no doubt about it, Hegseth said during his keynote address at the Reagan National Defense Forum. President Trump can and will take decisive military action as he sees fit to defend our nation's interests. Let no country on earth doubt that for a moment.
I bring this up because the Trump administration released a clearly Stephen Miller-authored National Security Strategy last night, and like my WWII veteran grandfather watching Band of Brothers, my brain flashed back to a darker, more traumatic time as I read it. A time filled with thousands of needless words. A time where kids exposed their birdbrains while smarmily lecturing you how they're more advanced than they prove themselves to be.
Trump is taking "America First" literally. For the first time ever, the strategy incorporates everything from closing the borders and establishing "National Defense Areas" along them, immigration enforcement operations, the war against Antifa and other domestic groups, and even boat strikes in the Caribbean into a singular coherent war. Meanwhile, China and Russia, Iran and North Korea, and fighting in the Middle East are downgraded to secondary priorities.
