Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Thuggish Empire

The Venezuelan tanker seizure and Denmark’s anxiety about Greenland both show the White House’s bullying 2025 National Security Strategy in brazen action. 

By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Common Dreams
CN at 30

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) recently released by President Donald Trump presents itself as a blueprint for renewed American strength. It is dangerously misconceived in four ways.

First, the NSS is anchored in grandiosity: the belief that the United States enjoys unmatched supremacy in every key dimension of power.

Second, it is based on a starkly Machiavellian view of the world, treating other nations as instruments to be manipulated for American advantage.

Third, it rests on a naïve nationalism that dismisses international law and institutions as encumbrances on U.S. sovereignty rather than as frameworks that enhance U.S. and global security together.

Fourth, it signals a thuggery in Trump’s use of the C.I.A. and military. Within days of the NSS’ publication, the U.S. brazenly seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil on the high seas — on the flimsy grounds that the vessel had previously violated U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The seizure was not a defensive measure to avert an imminent threat. Nor is it remotely legal to seize vessels on the high seas because of unilateral U.S. sanctions. Only the U.N. Security Council has such authority.

Instead, the seizure is an illegal act designed to force regime change in Venezuela. It follows Trump’s declaration that he has directed the C.I.A. to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela to destabilize the regime.

?Caribbean Sea

We have first video of the raid on the #Venezuelan (??) “large [oil] tanker” by U.S. Forces (??) in the Caribbean, with a joint mission between @USCG & @USNavy assets.pic.twitter.com/PiLRx1mQb4 https://t.co/BKtv65vbou

— SA Defensa (@SA_Defensa) December 10, 2025

American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened — structurally, morally and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.

The NSS, in other words, is not just an exercise in hubris on paper. It is rapidly being translated into brazen practice.

A Glimmer of Realism, Then a Lurch into Hubris

To be fair, the NSS contains moments of long-overdue realism. It implicitly concedes that the United States cannot and should not attempt to dominate the entire world, and it correctly recognizes that some allies have dragged Washington into costly wars of choice that were not in America’s true interests. It also steps back — at least rhetorically — from an all-consuming great-power crusade.

The strategy rejects the fantasy that the United States can or should impose a universal political order.

But the modesty is short-lived. The NSS quickly reasserts that America possesses the “world’s single largest and most innovative economy,” “the world’s leading financial system,” and “the world’s most advanced and most profitable technology sector,” all backed by “the world’s most powerful and capable military.”

These claims serve not simply as patriotic affirmations, but as a justification for using American dominance to impose terms on others. Smaller countries, it seems, will bear the brunt of this hubris, since the U.S. cannot defeat the other great powers, not least because they are nuclear-armed.

Naked Machiavellianism in Doctrine

The NSS’s grandiosity is welded to a naked Machiavellianism. The question it asks is not how the United States and other countries can cooperate for mutual benefit, but how American leverage — over markets, finance, technology and security — can be applied to extract maximal concessions from other countries.

This is most pronounced in the NSS discussion of the Western Hemisphere section, which declares a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States, the NSS declares, will ensure that Latin America “remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” and alliances and aid will be conditioned on “winding down adversarial outside influence.”

That “influence” clearly refers to Chinese investment, infrastructure and lending.

The NSS is explicit:

“U.S. agreements with countries ‘that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage’ must result in sole-source contracts for American firms. U.S. policy should ‘make every effort to push out foreign companies’ that build infrastructure in the region, and the U.S. should reshape multilateral development institutions, such as the World Bank, so that they ‘serve American interests.’ ”

Latin American governments, many of which trade extensively with both the United States and China, are effectively being told: you must deal with us, not China — or face the consequences.

Such a strategy is strategically naive. China is the main trading partner for most of the world, including many countries in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. will be unable to compel Latin American nations to expel Chinese firms, but will gravely damage U.S. diplomacy in the attempt.

Close Allies Alarmed

The NSS proclaims a doctrine of “sovereignty and respect,” yet its behavior has already reduced that principle to sovereignty for the U.S., vulnerability for the rest. What makes the emerging doctrine even more extraordinary is that it is now frightening not only small states in Latin America, but even the United States’ closest allies in Europe.

In a remarkable development, Denmark — one of America’s most loyal NATO partners — has openly declared the United States a potential threat to Danish national security. Danish defense planners have stated publicly that Washington under Trump cannot be assumed to respect the Kingdom of Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland, and that a coercive U.S. attempt to seize the island is a contingency for which Denmark must now plan.

The DoD has removed the commander of Pituffik Space Base in Greenland after she distanced herself from Vice President J.D. Vance’s criticism of Denmark during his recent visit. https://t.co/I8vjoOsy7J

— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) April 12, 2025

Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019

This is astonishing on several levels. Greenland is already host to the Pituffik Space Base and firmly within the Western security system. Denmark is not anti-American, nor is it seeking to provoke Washington. It is simply responding rationally to a world in which the United States has begun to behave unpredictably — even toward its supposed friends.

That Copenhagen feels compelled to contemplate defensive measures against Washington speaks volumes. It suggests that the legitimacy of the U.S.-led security architecture is eroding from within. If even Denmark believes it must hedge against the United States, the problem is no longer one of Latin America’s vulnerability.

It is a systemic crisis of confidence among nations that once saw the U.S. as the guarantor of stability but now view it as a possible or likely aggressor.

In short, the NSS seems to channel the energy previously devoted to great-power confrontation into bullying of smaller states. If America seems to be a bit less inclined to launch trillion-dollar wars abroad, it is more inclined to weaponize sanctions, financial coercion, asset seizures and theft on the high seas.

The Missing Pillar: Law, Reciprocity & Decency

Perhaps the deepest flaw of the NSS is what it omits: a commitment to international law, reciprocity and basic decency as foundations of American security.

The NSS regards global governance structures as obstacles to U.S. action. It dismisses climate cooperation as “ideology,” and indeed a “hoax” according to Trump’s recent speech at the U.N. It downplays the U.N. Charter and envisions international institutions primarily as instruments to be bent toward American preferences.

Yet it is precisely legal frameworks, treaties, and predictable rules that have historically protected American interests.

The founders of the United States understood this clearly. Following the American War of Independence, 13 newly sovereign states soon adopted a constitution to pool key powers — over taxation, defense, and diplomacy — not to weaken the states’ sovereignty, but to secure it by creating the U.S. federal government. The post-WWII foreign policy of the United States government did the same through the U.N., the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization and arms-control agreements.

The Trump NSS now reverses that logic. It treats the freedom to coerce others as the essence of sovereignty. From that perspective, the Venezuelan tanker seizure and Denmark’s anxieties are manifestations of the new policy.

Athens, Melos & Washington

Such hubris will come back to haunt the United States.

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides records that when imperial Athens confronted the small island of Melos in 416 BC, the Athenians declared that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Yet Athens’ hubris was also its undoing. Twelve years later, in 404 BC, Athens fell to Sparta. Athenian arrogance, overreach, and contempt for smaller states helped galvanize the alliance that ultimately brought it down.

The 2025 NSS speaks in a similar arrogant register. It is a doctrine of power over law, coercion over consent, and dominance over diplomacy. American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened — structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.

America’s national security strategy should be based on wholly different premises: acceptance of a plural world; recognition that sovereignty is strengthened, not diminished, through international law; acknowledgment that global cooperation on climate, health, and technology is indispensable; and understanding that America’s global influence depends more on persuasion than coercion.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.

This article is from Common Dreams

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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