Trump’s National Security Strategy: “America First” meets the establishment

Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) promises to put “America first.” However, it is only a partial break from convention, and evinces a deep current of incoherence in Trump’s foreign policy. The NSS attempts to combine two incompatible worldviews into a single doctrine: the president’s “America First” nationalism and the seventy-year-old internationalist consensus among the US foreign policy establishment. Not only does it betray strategic dissonance, it portends an impossible working relationship between Trump’s insurgent nationalism and the traditionalism of the US foreign policy bureaucracy