Trump’s National Security Strategy commits U.S. to ignore global warming.

9 December 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

One of the best recent U.S.-and-allied news-reports is the December 9th article from Semafor’s Tim McDonnell, “Trump elevates fossil fuels in national security plan”, which opens:

The White House has elevated the role of fossil fuels to a cornerstone of US national security, arguing in a new strategy document that increasing domestic oil and gas production is vital to keep the country and its allies safe, while playing down the risk from Beijing and brushing over the low-carbon technologies now a bulwark of China’s own security strategy.

The National Security Strategy downplays the interest that previous administrations, including President Donald Trump in his first term, had expressed in having the US act as a guarantor of democracy, instead framing geopolitical competition in more narrowly commercial terms. It places fossil and nuclear energy at the center of that effort, arguing that a key strategy for countering rivals is to outcompete them in legacy energy markets. Decarbonization “ideologies,” meanwhile, are dismissed because they “greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

The document provides a clearer picture of what energy “dominance,” the administration’s oft-stated goal, looks like in practice, said Richard Goldberg, who until August was a senior counselor for the White House National Energy Dominance Council. Dominance, he said, means “producing enough and selling enough American energy for partners and allies so that you can unhook them from adversaries and put the squeeze on adversaries, or use that energy in moments of crisis.”

TIM’S VIEW

The document aims to “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.” Yet it makes that goal more difficult by ignoring the new energy technologies — renewables, batteries, and electric vehicles — that China views as crucial to its own security strategy. As former US climate envoy John Kerry argued in a recent Semafor column, electrification and low-carbon energy are the new keys to energy sovereignty. That message resonates loud and clear in Beijing, but has been suppressed in Washington — a blind spot that risks the US losing leverage and security advantages in the years to come.

China takes the long-term approach, and so has become the world-leader in sustainable technologies such as solar and advanced (such as thorium-based) nuclear technologies. By contrast, the United States is now pushing even harder on fossil fuels and legacy nuclear.

McDonnell also points out that Trump is merely pushing even harder on, and tweaking, the plan of his predecessor Joe Biden:

Beijing is actually guiding, rather than simply responding to, the direction of travel for the global economy by seizing new technologies where it has a decisive advantage. The US, by comparison, seems to be betting on a continuation of the status quo. President Joe Biden’s response to China’s strategy was to launch a new era of US energy tech protectionism, through the tax credits and federal subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act. The Trump administration dismantled many of those initiatives. Its new security strategy emphasizes the need for greater investment in critical mineral supply chains, but without articulating a vision for how those minerals should be used.

By America’s pinning its economic hopes on the fuels that poison the planet and harm especially the long-term future, while China instead does the opposite, other countries, such as in Europe, which have — unlike the U.S. — acknowledged the need to reduce their need for fossil fuels, will find themselves increasingly recognizing also that their alliance with the U.S. and opposition to China is an alliance with their enemy, against everyone’s friend, China, and so they will ultimately switch sides, against America. However, by that time, those countries will already have become impoverished — it will be too late for them to become (as they had been until around 1990) economically significant actors on the world stage.

The willingness of European nations to be controlled by the U.S. Government despite the latter’s extensive record of foreign coups and of hundreds of foreign invasions (especially after the post-WW2 and even post Cold War — after 1991 — termination of the Soviet Union and of its communism) is a great mystery; and, now that the U.S. has (by its sanctions and otherwise) destroyed the EU’s access to the by-far-cheapest energy sources for those nations, which were the pipelined-in natural gas and oil from Russia, and so have crippled the EU’s manufacturers, and most of the EU’s energy is now from America at prices more than three times higher, which is very profitable to Americans and is causing many of those manufacturers to reocate to America, one wonders why Europeans stand for it. The main reason that is given for it is that Russia had started the war in Ukraine by invading there in 2022, but that’s a lie because the war in Ukraine had started with Barack Obama’s very bloody coup in Ukraine which replaced a democratically elected internationally neutralist Government by installing a rabidly anti-Russian dictatorship that promptly bombed the region that had voted over 90% for the democratically elected President whom Obama had overthrown. The coup was well recorded, and the ignorance about it by the EU’s Foreign Minister at that time was likewise well recorded; and, so, the blame for Ukraine’s war rests solely with the U.S. White House.  And yet today, it is Europe’s leaders, not American ones, who are obsessed to do war against Russia. It makes no sense at all: those leaders are now even more determined to conquer Russia than America’s are. So, it’s amazing that Europeans tolerate such leaders, who are destroying their countries.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.