By Rohan Gunaratna
US National Security Strategy was quietly released by the U.S. President Donald J. Trump on Dec 4, 2025. To protect America’s core national interests the Trump Administration crafted a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.” Trump adds that, “In the years ahead, we will continue to develop every dimension of our national strength-and we will make America safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before.”
Since Trump was elected President on January 20, 2025, the US foreign policy and national security priorities have changed dramatically. To best understand this ideological and operational shift, the US National Security Strategy 2025 released on December 4, 2025 provides an insight into the thinking of President Trump that will influence the world at least during his term of office (January 20, 2025-January 20, 2029). Rather than dominate the world, US strategy under Trump is to intervene only when US interests are threatened or at risk. Having witnessed the challenges confronting Europe with unregulated migration, Trump wishes to consolidate a western identity, interdict drug flows, disrupt immigration and strengthen an industrial base.
Rather than dominate the world, US strategy under Trump is to intervene only when US interests are threatened or at risk.
A mercurial President, Trump’s domestic and foreign policy decision-making is unpredictable. Nonetheless, he is serious in restoring global peace, making America “great again”, and American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.
Trump has played a role, in some cases a pivotal role to end the fighting between states and non state actors. For instance, he spoke to the leaders of India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers. The U.S. understood the threat of escalation and Trump intervened to preempt a nuclear catastrophe. Likewise, the Iranian regime was building a functional nuclear weapon and together with Israel, the U.S. preempted a nuclear armed Iran. If not for the timely intervention, a number of Middle Eastern powers would have embarked on building their own military nuclear programs. Similarly, Trump is credited with threatening Hamas to release the Israeli and foreign hostages or “all hell, like no one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas.”
Trumps said that eight raging conflicts ended with his intervention.
- Cambodia and Thailand
- Kosovo and Serbia
- DRC and Rwanda
- Pakistan and India
- Israel and Iran
- Egypt and Ethiopia
- Armenia and Azerbaijan
- Gaza and Israel
The US prioritized the Middle East, the prime theater of superpower competition, until 2011. However, with the rise of China and the U.S. pivot to Asia, Trump has made a come back to the Middle East after the Hamas led terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 and the threat of extremism spilling over worldwide.
The report states, “Superpower competition has given way to great power jockeying, in which the United States retains the most enviable position, reinforced by President Trump’s successful revitalization of our alliances in the Gulf, with other Arab partners, and with Israel. Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains thorny, but thanks to the ceasefire and release of hostages President Trump negotiated, progress toward a more permanent peace has been made. Hamas’s chief backers have been weakened or stepped away. Syria remains a potential problem, but with American, Arab, Israeli, and Turkish support may stabilize and reassume its rightful place as an integral, positive player in the region.”
The report adds,
“As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede. Instead, the region will increasingly become a source and destination of international investment, and in industries well beyond oil and gas— including nuclear energy, AI, and defense technologies. We can also work with Middle East partners to advance other economic interests, from securing supply chains to bolstering opportunities to develop friendly and open markets in other parts of the world such as Africa.”
Trump’s strategy of engaging Middle East partners has worked to fight extremism. However, Trump takes a pragmatic stand of not imposing democracy as their way of life. To restore stability, the report states “will require dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government. We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without. The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.
America will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable, that the region not be an incubator or exporter of terror against American interests or the American homeland, and that Israel remains secure.”
The report also adds, we can and must address this threat ideologically and militarily without decades of fruitless “nation-building” wars. We also have a clear interest in expanding the Abraham Accords to more nations in the region and to other countries in the Muslim world.
But the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment—a trend that should be welcomed and encouraged.”
The U.S. understanding of the Middle East has matured. Similarly, the balance of power in the Middle East has changed in favour of peace, stability and security. Nonetheless, the Middle East will remain a region of conflict and instability in the foreseeable future until Hamas and its allies, partners and patrons are incapacitated. In addition to ousting the Ayotollahs of Iran, the west should work with the progressive governments in the Middle East to replace the Iran sponsored Houthi regime, demobilise the Lebanese Hezbollah, and dismantle the Shi’ite militias in Iraq. Unless the security and stability of the Middle East is restored, the threat of conflict will destabilise Africa, the emerging epicentre of extremism, terrorism and political violence.
The full document can be accessed here.
Rohan Gunaratna is the editor of the Handbook of Terrorism in the Middle East, and most recently, the lead editor of the Handbook of Terrorism in Africa.