The 2025 NSS: Disengagement or Entrenchment?

The National Security Strategy (NSS) defines the guiding vision of American power and provides a window into how the United States understands the international environment, identifies its priorities, and determines the political, military, and economic tools it will rely on to protect national interests. Accordingly, the NSS shapes defence planning, informs foreign policy doctrine, guides inter-agency action, and signals to allies and adversaries the direction of U.S. engagement in an evolving global landscape.

The 2025 NSS, issued by the Trump administration in November 2025, is a clear articulation of how this administration intends to position itself in a world marked by rising geopolitical fragmentation, sharpening competition, and growing domestic constraints. Its core purpose is to translate the administration’s worldview into a coherent framework that defines what the United States will prioritise, what it will deprioritise, and under what conditions it will expend political capital, economic leverage, or military force.

For the Middle East, understanding the 2025 NSS is essential because it captures the principles shaping America’s evolving posture toward the region. The strategy’s emphasis on burden-sharing, reduced military exposure, and transactional partnerships signals a shift in expectations for regional actors, while its focus on energy security, counterterrorism, and strategic competition with external powers continues to define the contours of U.S. interests. As a formal expression of how the administration interprets threats and opportunities, the NSS provides the clearest available roadmap of Washington’s intentions—and the framework within which its decisions toward the Middle East will be made in the years ahead.

The immediately clear difference is that the 2025 NSS is noticeably shorter (29 pages compared to 55 pages for the 2017 version) and focuses on a much narrower, more restrained definition of core U.S. national interests globally. The 2017 NSS was part of a broader shift to “major power competition” with China and Russia, while the 2025 NSS adopts a notably more conciliatory tone toward competitors, making no mention of the major power competition, preferring to focus overwhelmingly on issues closer to the U.S. homeland, primarily immigration.

Another major difference is the Trump administration reordering its priorities, the Indo-Pacific is out and the Western Hemisphere is now in the crosshairs. The 2017 NSS firmly had the Indo-Pacific and China as the top priority, now that attention has shifted to the Western Hemisphere, which will allow China to breathe a sigh of relief for now and further raise concerns for the European Union and Europe as a whole.

As for the Middle East the 2017 NSS treated the region as one of six major priorities and focused heavily on three main challenges: confronting Iran, defeating ISIS and other radical Islamist groups, and maintaining the flow of energy. While it introduced the transactional, “America First” style, it still viewed the region as a central theatre for U.S. security interests that required significant attention.

The 2025 NSS takes the policy of withdrawal and disengagement to its next logical step. It reframes the region not primarily as a security risk requiring military intervention, but as a place for investments and transactional partnerships. The emphasis is on avoiding prolonged military presence and focusing on economic opportunity, explicitly stating the intention to shift resources away from the Middle East to concentrate on other global areas.

The largest takeaway from the NSS is the potentially destabilizing change in the U.S. approach to Europe, transforming the relationship from one of guaranteed mutual defence into a confrontational and transactional partnership. The most immediate impact is the unprecedented acceleration of the demand for burden-sharing within NATO, where the NSS pushes allies toward a 5% GDP defence spending goal by 2035 and explicitly signals a reduction in conventional U.S. deterrence contributions.

This policy dictates that future U.S. support will be contingent upon an ally’s willingness to assume “more regional security responsibility,” effectively turning the alliance into a transactional network where aid is a direct reward for investment. Furthermore, the strategy adopts a notably softer and more conciliatory tone toward Russia, prioritizing renewed diplomatic engagement and the restoration of “strategic stability” over continued confrontation. This is tied to a clear imperative to secure a swift settlement to Russia-Ukraine War, which the NSS views as a distraction, and pointedly signals an end to the policy of NATO enlargement.

Most dramatically, the NSS breaks with decades of U.S. policy by expressing direct, ideological hostility toward the EU and other transnational bodies, which it criticizes for eroding the sovereignty of member states and constraining U.S. economic interests through excessive regulation. It employs highly charged language, warning of “civilizational erasure” due to migration and low birth rates, and controversially calls for U.S. policy to actively prioritize “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and supporting “patriotic European parties,” representing an unprecedented declaration of intent to intervene in the democratic politics of allied nations.

This NSS is not necessarily a major and deliberate shift in U.S. policy toward the Middle East but follows a trend of disengagement from the region over a series of U.S. administrations. This NSS spells it out clearly; the historical reasons for American prioritization—namely energy dependence and Cold War competition—have largely dissipated now that the U.S. is a net energy exporter. A primary goal of this new framework is to avoid “forever wars” and prolonged nation-building efforts, reflecting a desire to shift the security and reconstruction burdens onto regional partners. Under this approach, the United States explicitly abandons its previous efforts to promote democratic reforms, stating it will no longer “hector” regional leaders or Gulf monarchies about their internal traditions and governance. Instead, the administration intends to accept these nations as they are, focusing relationship-building on shared security interests and lucrative commercial arrangements.

This mention alone should be a source of relief for the region, a U.S. administration that does not concern itself with the internal decision making of countries highlights why so many rulers in the region were looking forward to the return of Donald Trump rather than Kamala Harris or Joe Biden who explicitly stated his desire to make Saudi Arabia a pariah.

Although this general pivot toward disengagement might raise concerns for the Gulf in particular, the NSS outlines specific, non-negotiable core interests that will continue to dictate American activity in the region. The U.S. remains committed to preventing any adversarial power from achieving regional dominance, particularly over vital oil and gas supplies and strategic maritime chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

It also envisions a transition from military-heavy engagement to a focus on advanced technology and investment, seeking to integrate Middle Eastern partners into U.S.-led industries such as AI, nuclear energy, and rare-earth mineral processing.

While the strategy assumes that many regional conflicts are nearing resolution, it places a heavy bet on Israel to lead the military containment of Iran and expects Arab Gulf states to finance the reconstruction of war-torn areas like Syria and Gaza. Ultimately, the 2025 NSS treats the Middle East as a commercial and investment hub where the U.S. seeks to maximize economic gains while strictly limiting its political and military liabilities.

For all its talk of disengagement and withdrawal from the region, the NSS and Trump are unfortunately met with reality, and like most U.S. decisions of late, this is filled with contradictions.

Although there is truth in how this administration views the Gulf in particular as a source of investments and accepts the Gulf monarchies as they are, as witnessed by Trump inviting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House, or the approval of the sale of advanced chips to the UAE.

The U.S. cannot simply disengage from the region, and as much as Trump would like to highlight the independence of the U.S. with regards to energy, it is still necessary for the U.S. to maintain its presence in the region at a level that is at the very least unchanged.

Which is why this NSS is a big win for the Middle East, but for the Gulf in particular, no more intervention in internal matters, more space for investment and collaboration, and despite talk of disengagement, no realistic way in which it is achievable.

Chatham House. “Trump’s New National Security Strategy: Cut Deals, Hammer Europe, and Tread Gently around Autocrats.” December 9, 2025. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/12/trumps-new-national-security-strategy-cut-deals-hammer-europe-and-tread-gently-around

European Parliamentary Research Service. The 2025 US National Security Strategy. By Gisela Grieger. European Parliament, December 2025. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2025/779261/EPRS_ATA(2025)779261_EN.pdf.

Soufan Center. “Trump National Security Strategy Pivots from the Middle East.” December 10, 2025. https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-december-10/.

The White House. National Security Strategy 2025. Washington, D.C.: The White House, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf.