David E. Sanger

Well, in 2017, his national security advisor looked around the national security landscape and basically came to the conclusion that it was all still focused on counterterrorism, the understandable result of 9-11 and its aftermath and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And that national security strategy in 2017 indicated that the U.S.

government had to rapidly shift to a new era of superpower conflict, one in which Russia was a rising and aggressive power seeking to challenge the United States and its dominance, particularly in the West and in Europe.

and that we had to counter China, the only country that could take us on militarily, financially, technologically, and if you think about something like TikTok, maybe even culturally.

And so that document in 2017 basically reoriented the national security establishment of the United States toward thinking about how you would fight a new era of cold wars around the world.

In this document, there's a hint of that, but not very much.

It focuses on entirely different issues.

The old document spent a lot of time on how the United States would deal with threats from rogue states.

There are pages on North Korea, which at the time had about 20 nuclear weapons and was run by an erratic leader.

In the new document, there's no mention of North Korea in the entire 30 pages, even though they now have three times as many nuclear weapons and they're still run by the same erratic leader.

And Iran gets only the briefest mention and then only to mention that the president sent stealth bombers over to take out three major nuclear sites back in June.

But there's kind of no follow up about what the strategy would be to avoid future war with Iran.

Well, Natalie, there's a lot of discussion and a lot of criticism of our closest allies, the Europeans.

You know, I think the first thing that you see in this document is something that's pretty familiar to us all from the first term and certainly from the past year, which is that America is tired of supporting the allies, that it won't put up with Europe's trade blocs anymore.

that is frustrated with the European Union, which of course the president has said was built to screw the United States, that we can't necessarily be supporting them in their conventional defense.

And it makes clear that they have to go do that themselves.

Now, the fact of the matter is,

As the document acknowledges, the Europeans made a lot of progress in this regard over the past year.

And you may remember that back over the summer, they committed to spend up to 5% of their GDP on defense.

And that was a huge win for President Trump.