Michael Anton and the Secret National Security Strategy
Lawrence Freedman must have finished his post on the National Security Strategy before the latest news on it, which is that there’s an even more alarming longer version.
Nevertheless, Freedman’s observations about the process behind the document — that Michael Anton is thought to have started it, before he left in September, and Stephen Miller may have finished it — provide one possible explanation for why the document is so short, shoddy, and unenthusiastic about matters of standard policy.
It is worth reading the most recent NSS in its entirety. It is less polished than its predecessor, betrays little evidence of consultation, and is considerably shorter (33 as against 70 pages). It reads like time had run out and a deadline had been reached. It ends abruptly with a short discussion on Africa, this administration’s least important region, without a proper conclusion. It was released without fanfare in the early hours of Friday morning, without a press conference, suggesting the White House was not sure what to do with it.
The first draft has been attributed to Michael Anton, who was the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department until September 2025, when he left. It may be that Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff who represents the hardest line MAGA views, completed the document or at least oversaw its completion. This perhaps explains why, as Gideon Rachman notes, when restating standard policy positions, for example on Taiwan, the prose is ‘dutiful’ – ‘one senses that the author’s heart is not in it.’ Only on the civilizational issues and when praising Trump does it get fired up.
Much of the document seeks to give the administration’s disparate policies, including those directed against DEI hires or climate change or immigration, some coherence and international relevance.
This hypothesis — that some of its unfinished nature arises from having its author, Michael Anton, depart before he finished would raise a bunch of questions in any case.
Politico first reported Anton’s departure in August (so in the wake of the Anchorage summit), but said he would leave once he finished the National Security Strategy.
A senior Trump administration official and a Senate aide said Anton plans to depart this fall. The State Department later confirmed that he is leaving his post.
Anton, who directs the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, has been a low-profile but powerful presence with major roles on Russia, Iran and other foreign policy matters, including helping shape President Donald Trump’s still-unpublished national security strategy.
With Secretary of State Marco Rubio also serving as the national security adviser, a handful of political appointees such as Anton and Counselor Mike Needham have taken on more of the daily responsibilities of running the State Department.
Anton is expected to leave as the Trump administration wraps up writing the national security strategy, of which he is a lead author, according to the senior administration official. The official, and others, were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
[snip]
The Senate aide and another person familiar with administration dynamics said that Anton had been frustrated by Office of Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor shooting down a number of his potential hires and officials with the Trump administration such as Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby freelancing on key issues.
Anton had tried to resign in the spring amid frustration with the foreign policy processes of the administration, but Needham refused to let him do so, according to the Senate aide and two other people familiar with the matter.
The aide and one of those people said Anton was frustrated after being passed over as deputy national security adviser in the reshuffle after the departure of former national security adviser Mike Waltz.
But he ended up leaving in September, months before the NSS was dumped onto the world with no notice.
Which makes the Defense One claim all the more interesting. There’s a longer version of the NSS, which is even more inflammatory.
A longer version of the NSS, circulated before the White House published the unclassified version late Thursday night, shares the main points: competition with China, withdrawal from Europe’s defense, a new focus on the Western Hemisphere. But the unpublished version also proposes new vehicles for leadership on the world stage and a different way to put its thumb on the scales of Europe’s future—through its cultural values.
It was even more hostile to the EU than the public version is.
Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the U.S. should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union].”
“And we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” the document says.
It excluded European nations from the alternative to the G7 it proposed, a C5 composed of China, Russia, India, Japan, and the US.
His national security strategy proposes taking this a step further, creating a new body of major powers, one that isn’t hemmed in by the G7’s requirements that the countries be both wealthy and democratically governed.
The strategy proposes a “Core 5,” or C5, made up of the U.S., China, Russia, India and Japan—which are several of the countries with more than 100 million people. It would meet regularly, as the G7 does, for summits with specific themes.
Most interesting — and something to which I’ll return — the unpublished version disavows hegemony.
The full NSS also spends some time discussing the “failure” of American hegemony, a term that isn’t mentioned in the publicly released version.
“Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable,” according to the document.
These are, at this point, just data points. The existing NSS is shoddy and illogical. Michael Anton was going to see it through to completion but did not. There is reportedly a longer version — could that be what Anton wrote? Or could that be why he left before it was finished?
And we’re left with something that could have been written by Russia.
Documents like this are generally bland-enough that one has to be on the inside and familiar-enough with diplomatic language to understand that the sentence, ‘Bland, China, Russia, Iran, more-bland and blandly bland’ means ‘we should stick China, Russia, and Iran in a box and leave them there.’ This document reads more like, ‘If our ambassador to Poland goes across the street for a soda and it’s sold to him by a Turk we should nuke Warsaw.’ I’m imagining a member of the Swiss Parliament reading it and proposing that they should acquire nukes and give several of them to Ukraine.
This document is pure daylight madness, motivated by racism (in the form of Faux-News talking points) and the idea that Russia should be in charge of Europe. I’m not surprised that the experienced guy tasked with writing it left. It couldn’t be worse if it read ‘we’re only staying in NATO for the luls!’
Agreeing with the above point but hopping in to re-frame Anton just a smidge: he is NOT “the experienced guy” — as far as I know, his rise within the Trump coterie was his odious “Flight 93 Election” screed during the 2016 election. He’s a professional flack, nothing more. His greatest area of expertise is men’s tailoring (not a joke), and definitely not foreign policy. Anton bailing out of the 2nd Trump admin is just a repeat of what he did in the 1st Trump admin. The fact that he had anything to do with the NSS is just further evidence that we are currently ruled by very, very un-serious people. Yet another example of how the US is being dismantled from the inside.
Trump’s whole crew has become the wasp larvae that devour its prey from the inside.
The parasitic wasp is an excellent description of the President.
With America as the unfortunate host.
Marcy quotes from the Defense One piece: [emphasis added]
“Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable,” according to the document.”
One thing that sticks in my craw re: the NSS that was published,
[quoting from Marcy’s previous post:] [emphasis, italics in original]
The weird phrasing (“hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable,” that change in verb tense unexplained and explicable only as historical overview) indicates that what they really mean is this: We very much *want* hegemony but won’t admit such a desire until such time as we achieve it.
See, for example, Venezuela.
CapitolHunters wrote a THREAD re: ANTON et al yesterday:
[There are lots of screenshots and links to their extensive database re: #J6]
[Also see their extended conversation with David Holden Caufield below the THREAD.]
https://bsky.app/profile/capitolhunters.bsky.social/post/3m7kirzphv22v
6:54 AM · Dec 9, 2025
[…can’t seem to get rid of that last blockquote edge]
[FYI – last tag was missing a / :-) /~Rayne]
The Claremont Institute – a name intended to imply an absent relationship with the elite, private, Claremont Colleges in Southern California – and Hillsdale are as far right as any publicly acknowledged institution in America. Their adherents make John Birchers seem quaint.
HAHAHA! OY!
Sorry, and thanks, Rayne :-).
[It’s the most common error in HTML. Heh. I’m happy it was such a simple thing, just a typo. /~Rayne]
Not necessarily sincerely reactionary religious RW. Anton is Heritage too, was involved in drafting Project 2025. Not to be underestimated, I’d say. The steady dribble of bread crumbs suggesting he felt put out by Gor & Colby sound like BS to me. Colby was tasked with this job before Anton’s name was publicly associated with it. He’s probably got better things to do now.
Michael Anton: The Philosopher King
(Global Extremism Org)
https://globalextremism.org/post/michael-anton/
DOD begins writing new National Defense Strategy due by late August (Inside Defense, reported May 2)
https://insidedefense.com/insider/dod-begins-writing-new-national-defense-strategy-due-late-august
““reactionary religious right” bubble. But his National Security Strategy document suggests they should maybe be moved over a bit, to the zone that overlaps with Russia. ”
Once one watched The Family it was pretty clear that aligning to Russia was found to be desirable due close relationship between the people and religion. Russian Orthodox and Catholicism are not far off and can be a driving force for their alignment. It has been a long time in the making.
The plan with the public document is to hobble the EU . The long form edition also want’s to break the BRICs. The US isn’t planning isolation but instead wants to meddle in the affairs of many counties in many places.
NATO much? Apparently not at all. Given the Russian dictatorship–excuse me, dictation of this “US” (read: Russian) security strategy, the erasure and obliteration of NATO would be a consummation much to be desired, but for now to leave tacit so as not to give away the game.
That’s my sense of what that “hegemony? not hegemony!” bit was putting across; a reference to the hegemon of allied democracies, the political opposition that NATO not only defends but represents; the threat of democracy, which Putin has long treated as more threatening than the military aspect of NATO.
To him, democracy is the legit sovereign ‘horror’ of persuasion (as Marcy describes hegemony below)—by it’s very nature, more convincing than coercion.
I remember Bannon saying around the beginning of Trump’s first term that they were not going to do persuasion; persuasion was out.
On dictation; Thom Hartmann just said that in parts of this document (where sentence structure is garbled), it looks like Russian syntax, “as if simply translated word for word.”
If this is accurate as to syntax in certain parts, then an amateur translator, or a skilled translator, who wanted this noticed.
Maybe it was supposed to be C7 (Core 7).
Brazil left out due to imprisoning a coup leader. And South Africa too woke? Or maybe South Africa left off because Hunter married a woman from there and they visit her family?
Poor guy had to be moved to prison because he figuratively chewed off his ankle bracelet while under “mansion arrest”. Should be fitted with a cone around his head, methinks.
The ‘Coupleader Cone of Shame?’
Right. None of this makes sense. Basically, Trump is asking to be let in BRICS, but he doesn’t want in THAT club bc of Lula.
Recalling Groucho, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”.
I guess the proposed C5 would be JIRCUS. It looks and sounds to me like a mash-up of jerk and circus, which is maybe appropriate.
Even more appropriate if the word sequence is falls into a familiar cadence:
circus jerk.
Their conference tables will be round, no doubt.
“Disavows” hegemony? Hmm. Venezuela, much of Latin America, Greenland, and Canada might disagree with the document’s premise. Perhaps Trump’s writers meant only the hegemony he wasn’t interested in, or were deferring generally to the hegemony desired by China and Russia, which Trump privately promises to promote.
“Hegemony” is a word only used in the third person in TrumpWorld.
When Trump does it, it is Benevolent Dealmaking.
Hegemony is power through persuasion. Trump is power through coercion.
That’s a narrower definition of hegemony than I’m familiar with. Mine would include the coercion, the threats and physical violence, Trump uses to maintain social, political, and economic dominance, at home and abroad. So, I’ll raise you one seized Venezuelan oil tanker. :-)
And that contrast between hard and soft power is nowhere more clear than with the recent Trump threats against Nigeria: that entire continent having just been cleared of the US hegemonic tool of USAID, Trump threatens to militarily attack the country that the US has the strongest petro ties with there, threats based on a lie that Boko Haram’s primary targets are Christian (much like the fabricated claim that White South Africans are being terrorized by Blacks).
Persuasion/coercion writ large.
Trump believes only in soft power, as does Hegseth.
This puts them at odds with not just the State Department, but most of the Pentagon as well. Negotiating with adversaries is much less of a danger to soldiers than a shooting war with them, and no one knows that better than soldiers.
Trump literally doesn’t know what he believes, beyond his belief in the preeminence of his own ego.
to wit: Trump’s oft repeated disdain for US military interventions around the world is in stark contrast to his murder spree in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific in the service of petroleum supply control, on top of his threat to invade Nigeria to appease his evangelical base.
As to Hegseth being a soft-power fan, the murderboat criminal scheme again contradicts that, as does the “Department of War” rebranding.
So, I guess, hijacking a Venezuelan tanker is some of that ‘power through coercion’.
I watched a Times Radio video with Scot Lucas this morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXHtQoB1dWU
I have no opinions one way or the other regarding Prof. Lucas, but he expressed an opinion that some of the heavy duty MAGA types surrounding Trump had their fingers in the NSS, including JD Vance.
Certainly Vance did. All that stuff about allowing free speech in Europe and supporting right-wing parties there.
BREAKING
https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3m7npimxytk2n
1:40 PM · Dec 10, 2025
Alttext from the screenshot:
US Seizes Sanctioned Oil Tanker Off the Coast of Venezuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/us-seizes-oil-tanker-off-the-coast-of-venezuela December 10, 2025 1:40 PM Updated December 10, 2025 2:38 PM
Why Drill, baby drill when you can Steal, baby steal.
Best comment from that bluesky thread:
“Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…”
Reading “…the alternative to the G7 it proposed, a C5 composed of China, Russia, India, Japan, and the US” triggered a memory of something I wrote back during the first Trump administration (perhaps here, perhaps somewhere else), when he wanted to restore Russia to the G7 meeting he was hosting. Searching on Brazil (guess I don’t write much about Brazil) found it.
Please forgive the indulgence, but think it’s an interesting illustration, as displayed then and now, of Trump’s long-existing ambitions and worldview:
Don’t hear much about Erdoğan these days, but it’s worth remembering Trump’s praise of Duterte as a model for the authoritarian practice of directing the military to conduct extrajudicial summary executions of individuals assumed by the state to be drug dealers.
Erdogan has been relatively quiet because he managed to put the former mayor of Istanbul (and his #1 political rival), Ekrem Imamoglu, in jail in March 2025. Trump can’t even come close to putting Comey into jail, but the retribution machine churns on…
In other words, they already realized they couldn’t prevent China’s rise?
Also laughable to leave the EU, an economic marketplace with over 500 million consumers, out of the G7. Russia is included? Seriously? What Putin holds over Shitler must be far more disgusting than what the Epstein files will reveal about the psycho sicko, Dear Leader.
FYI re national security strategy and, more specifically, re Venezuela —
Yesterday afternoon, I attended a talk (via Zoom) by Ambassador Charles Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela. The talk was hosted by the World Affairs Council of Connecticut and streamed to many of the other World Affairs Councils throughout the U.S. According to the followup email, the talk will appear on their (World Affairs Connecticut) utube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@ctwac/videos
(I hope the link works. And, I hope it’s posted soon. It’s not posted at that site yet.)
The talk was very interesting/informative. He talked about the politics/leadership of the country, and related. One tidbit he mentioned I found surprisingly informative is the size of Venezuela’s oil reserves. He indicated Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world — 300 Billion barrels of oil (projected I assume), larger than Saudi Arabia’s reserves!
And a lack of storage capacity on land. Hence the need to ship it somewhere.
It does seem as if King Donald aspires to the title of Fossil Fuel Emperor of the World.
What if…the game is to destabilize Venezuela so that a third party can be the white knight.
Sergio Gor, the Russian from Malta. All of the unpaid stupes as useful idiots.
“The Senate aide and another person familiar with administration dynamics said that Anton had been frustrated by Office of Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor shooting down a number of his potential hires and officials with the Trump administration such as Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby freelancing on key issues. ”
#tu
June 10 Kapur nominated Asst Sec State S&C Asia
August. Anton finished writing NSS & ready to roll —(according to his spiffy Wikipedia page)
August 15 Putin sets foot in Anchorage
August 22 Bolton raid (frequent vocalist in India)
August 22 Gor.becomes Special Envoy S&C Asia
— (Trump also announces Gor also keeps WH personnel job until sworn in as Amb India)
August 31 BBC puzzled
August 31 Modi-Xi meet in China (1st f2f in 7 yrs)
Sept 3 —first murder boat?
Sept 11 Gor & Kapur confirmed by single vote
— (Gor confirmed as Special Envoy)
Sept 15 Anton leaves
Oct 9-14 Gor & Rigas visit Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan
— (Gor was born Uzbekistan. Gor calls this his first official trip after confirmation.)
Nov 6 Kazak article about Gor back in DC saying how nice that trip to Kazakistan was. Several side headlines about Tokarev & Trump in town today. The photo is of Rubio.)
Nov 10 Gor sworn & assumes office also as Amb India
Tokarev is known for work dismantling nukes
Kapur has a special interest in nukes, and a special interest in Pakistan’s “jihad.” He’s close to Yemeni born Indian gazillionaire Ambani’s tank in Delhi.
Tokayev, not Tokarev
At Soviet embassy in Beijing 1985– 1991
He’s from Almaty, where torrents of Tuyuksu Glacier melt are zinging through, just like in Talkeetna Alaska; completely washed our beloved beach down river a couple years ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/17/climate/melting-glaciers-globally.html
A quick note wrt the “unpublished” NSS edited-out text that mentions those four countries being targeted for US favored-status to counter liberalism in the EU: Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy comprise the bulk of a wide land corridor from Belarus (i.e., Russia) to the Western Mediterranean, with the exception of the Czech Republic and Slovakia making the corridor complete. The Czech Republic election results two months ago, where the RW Ano party won decisively and is aligning with the far right SPD and Motorists parties to form a govt, make the Anton wet dream of a geographic blockade between liberal Europe and the former Soviet countries problematic, but still achievable if the new RW Czech government can be nudged away from the EU.
https://www.politico.eu/article/five-key-takeaways-from-the-czech-election/
And the ANO coalition’s Russian alignment is coming to the fore:
https://www.dw.com/en/czech-republic-media-press-freedom-babis-hungary-orban/a-74631336
Slovakia has it’s own significant political problems with their leftist-authoritarian regime being examined by the European Commission.
https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-opens-case-against-slovakia-over-constitutional-change-2025-11-21/
That portion of the NSS that was edited out, I believe, was only done so to obscure that strategy for the outright dismantling the EU and NATO, and for giving Putin a serious leg-up.
Yikes. Yeah, that caught my eye too: “Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland” … “parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures”
I don’t think Hegseth’s Dec 5 psyops ‘name change’ memo, was the mere cosmetic change it appeared to be. I think this entire thing is what he just tasked Colby with ‘fixing’ in that memo, all to do with info in every aspect- comms (discourse), and training: https://jfsc.ndu.edu/Portals/72/Documents/JC2IOS/Additional_Reading/1C1_JP_3-13-2.pdf
It’s not just the name change directive that he’s authorizes fixing ‘accordingly,’ the name change is to a 2010 directive.
There’s no date given in the memo for the DoD instruction referred to — Admin DoD Instruction 3607.02, “Military Information Support Operations,” —but that is a June 13, 2016 instruction. Hegseth’s AI platform memo was Dec 8?
So, between that and this:
“Much of the document seeks to give … climate change … international relevance.” (Freedman’s whole paragraph there), I started reviewing Italy, Austria, Hungary and Poland in Forchtner’s ‘The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication,’ —still pretty fresh in my mind (it’s a lot to take in).
Freedman has to know climate change has crystal clear international relevance. Of all the ‘random’ disparate policies he could have chosen, he tucked it between DEI & immigration, like a Lakoff untruth sandwich special; I get it. Thanks for the heads up.
Anyone interested in beefing up in that area, contextual background, I’ll also be rereading:
‘All Hell Broke Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change,’ by Michael Klare (2019, Picador)
Breaking, not Broke