President Donald Trump’s official new national security strategy warns in blunt language that Russia is a dangerous global competitor that seeks to undermine the U.S. at home and abroad.

But midway through his Monday speech unveiling the 55-page document, Trump seemed to contradict that message, saying the U.S. would work to “build a great partnership” with Russia and China — language not found in the new strategy and inconsistent with the rest of his remarks.


Trump also described a phone call he received on Sunday from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who thanked him for sharing American intelligence that disrupted a planned terrorist attack in his country. “That’s a great thing, and the way it’s supposed to work,” Trump said.

A senior administration official said Sunday's phone call and the cooperation that preceded it was a rare instance in which the U.S. could collaborate with Russia. But Trump’s decision to mention it—elsewhere in the speech, Trump branded Russia a "rival power" that threatens America's "influence, values, and wealth"—illustrates the potential complications the administration may face in adhering to the new strategy when U.S. policy is largely guided by the president's instincts and impulses.

“The question is whether the president takes full ownership and views it not as a bureaucratic product but as his own policy statement,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.

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The document marks the first formal attempt to nail down the principles that will guide his administration’s foreign policy, and to flesh out what, exactly, an "America first" approach to international affairs might looks like. To hear Trump tell it Monday, that means the rejection of the “disastrous trade deals,” nation-building, and “expensive and unfair” international agreements that his voters asked for.

While the national security strategies of previous administrations have typically attracted little attention, bound for dusty government archives, Trump’s has drawn unusual interest, thanks to his anti-establishment views and the infighting on his foreign policy team.

“This one will be widely read because Trump has promised to overturn conventional wisdom and because his foreign policy communication has been so jumbled, including disconnects between the president and his national security principals and the president’s own self-contradictions,” said Matthew Waxman, a professor of national security law at Columbia University and a former George W. Bush National Security Council aide.

Trump officials sought a friendly reception among Washington insiders for the strategy plan, which is mandated by Congress. National security adviser H.R. McMaster met privately with think tank experts and members of the Republican foreign policy establishment, including some who signed letters during the campaign declaring Trump unfit for office. Though they have been blacklisted from serving in the administration, the White House reached out to them in advance of the president's speech on Monday.

While some Trump critics applauded the document’s stern language about Russia, its commitment to European security, and calls for active U.S. diplomacy, administration officials, rejected the idea that the strategy document was intended to win over Trump’s skeptics.

“The fact of the matter is that there are still going to be things in it that the old establishment likes,” said National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton. But, he added, “if we get praise from people who think that the president is out of touch saying that this is a return to sanity, then we will have failed. That’s ‘concern trolling.’ They’re just trying to be dismissive of the document, of the administration, and of the president.”

Although the document uses much tougher language toward Russia than Trump does in unscripted settings, it is unclear whether its warnings about Moscow reflects an actual shift in the president’s thinking.

Administration officials argued that Trump gets too little credit for tough policies toward Moscow, such as the closing of Russia’s Consulate in San Francisco, the expulsion of senior Russia diplomats, and continued sanctions imposed after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Crimea. (Trump did reportedly explore lifting those sanctions after taking office and angrily opposed a successful Congressional effort to prevent him from doing so.)



Much of the document is, in fact, a distillation of the policy priorities the president championed on the campaign trail, many of them long rejected by both parties, from building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to negotiating fair trade deals and ensuring America’s NATO allies should take on a greater share of the alliance’s costs.

"This is a major departure from the past but a fair and necessary one," Trump said Monday, referring to his insistence that several European countries up their contributions to the continent’s defense.

While Trump’s approach to immigration and trade are genuinely disruptive, his view of international relations is broadly consistent with that of conservative foreign policy thinkers who view the world as a hostile place where overwhelming military might is essential to maintain peace — and who criticize what they call the Obama administration’s belief in a diplomatic solution to every conflict.

“Whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of competition. We face rogue regimes, terrorist organizations, and transnational criminal networks,” Trump said. “We will stand up for ourselves and we will stand up for our country like we have never stood up before.”

That approach could assuage some of Trump’s longtime Republican critics. “It’s in the mainstream of conservative Republican thinking wrapped up in a lot of America first rhetoric,” said Eric Edelman, a former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George W. Bush administration.

Outside the GOP, many foreign policy experts were unimpressed.

"The National Security Strategy and the president's speech to launch it were worlds apart," said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. "The strategy described the Russian and Chinese challenge in great detail, but Trump barely mentioned them. Instead he made an impassioned plea for partnership with Putin, demanded allies directly reimburse the United States for protection provided, and blamed the country's ills on immigrants and trade deals."

"It was as if he had not read the Strategy at all. It was a surreal end to a surreal year," Wright said. "The battle between the mainstreamers and the president rumbles on."