Atlas Shrugged. Part One: Trump’s Security Strategy blows up the American world order.

“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” White House National Security Strategy, 2025. 

The greatest shift in US foreign policy since World War II, a “sea change”, a manifesto for a radically different America, “a disturbing document”.  International foreign policy analysts are still reeling from the release in early December of the White House’s National Security Strategy (NSS). 

The document is a statement of intent, a promissory note, as to how the US state will conduct itself in the world. It also is about how America sees itself in the world.  At its heart it is a piece of storytelling – and this article is about the subtext to these stories and how they can kill. 

The formal end of the Unipolar Moment

Firstly, the White House National Security Statement is the moment when the US formally declared its unipolar moment – its time bestriding the world like a Colossus – is over. 

“Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest,” the Strategy says. “They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare- regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.” 

This surprising realism is a big deal for everyone. The Strategy is in part a cold-eyed assessment of the US’s changed status in the world, in part a myth about the US itself, in part a racist manifesto implicitly warning of a Great Replacement of white Christian culture, in part a rejection of the post-WWII liberal international order, and as such, is a shot across the bow of, well, all of us. 

 “American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short – they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want,”  the Strategy declares, face-slapping the last several US administrations. That’s over, and the Strategy pegs out the frame for “ushering in a new golden age” (note the utopian language) as the US acts resolutely in its own interest. The broad vision includes what the strategy describes as: a predisposition to non-interventionism, pro-American workers, the end of the era of mass migration, securing access to critical supply chains and materials, reindustrialization, reviving the defense industrial base and energy dominance. Importantly, a revitalised Monroe Doctrine will see the US assert command and control over the entire Western hemisphere. In diplomacy the focus will be on commerce not aid or nation-building. 

Atlas Shrugged

Let’s start with the myth.  I think the reference in the Strategy to Atlas – “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over” – is not just a metaphor. Ayn Rand, drawing on the Greek myth of Atlas, the Titan god who was condemned to hold up the Earth, wrote  Atlas Shrugged in 1957. It remains a sacred text for many on the right of American politics.  

 Atlas Shrugged describes a world that is in decline because it has slowly constricted its best and its brightest – you know, the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels, Mark Zuckerbergs, Sam Altmans of the world – to serve the ungrateful masses.  The White House’s NSS sees the US as being exploited in the same manner by, amongst others, effete European elites.  

In Atlas Shrugged the giants of commerce and rugged individualism, personified by railroad executive Dagny Taggart and steel magnate Hank Rearden, are sick of “parasites and freeloaders” (that’s us) who feed off them. What, the novel asks, would happen if these Übermenschen were to shrug – effectively to go on strike – to refuse to continue shouldering the burden of supporting an ungrateful humanity?  In Rand’s fantasy, they withdraw their genius, they escape to a hidden valley, resulting in the collapse of civilization! Come back from Mars, Elon, all is forgiven! No wonder Trump, Peter Thiel and a swag of Silicon Valley CEOs claim to be inspired by Ayn Rand.  

In the Trumpian myth, Atlas America has made enormous sacrifices that its allies have exploited. “They’ve been ripping us off!” he said.  Victims of US imperialism would, of course, shun this myth which has rich variants, such as “the world’s policeman”, “the indispensable nation” and so on. But let’s look at what Trump describes as 'decaying' European countries and 'weak' leaders. (In my next article I’ll look at the Strategy’s reappraisal of the Middle East, Asia Pacific and the Americas). 

White House warns Europe of “civilizational erasure” 

We know that Trump, in particular, and US State officials, in general, have a contempt for a Europe that is seen as depending utterly on the US for security but unappreciative of what Uncle Sam has done for them. In Trumpspeak, the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”

“The Continent now stands at a crossroads” the New York Times solemnly declared after the Strategy was released. To the horror of European elites, the White House says it is determined to end the war in Ukraine and achieve a stable equilibrium with Russia:

“It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.”

If followed through, NATO expansion is off the table, eliminating a casus belli of the Ukraine war. 

The document contains uncomfortable insights the Americans deliver to the EU:

“The Ukraine War has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s, especially Germany’s, external dependencies. Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China, using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home.” (Remind me: who blew up Nord Stream?)

Here, according to the Strategy, is where Europe’s elites are wrecking the Continent: 

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s quote at the alliance’s Hague summit summed up Europe’s diminished status.

“The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”  

“Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”

This is hardly-disguised code for The Great Replacement Theory, defined as a “white supremacist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant concept that posits white people are being replaced by immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color in their so-called “home” countries.”  Once a fringe theory, it now sits on the Resolute Desk in the White House in the form of the NSS.  

The US, however, doesn’t want European civilization to collapse: the Strategy offers the leaders of Europe a stern corrective: abandon wokeness, immigration madness and social democracy and reignite your cultures. 

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

“Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize: reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia; cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That’s not code: that’s a bald warning that the US is going to meddle in the internal politics of European countries. As an example: a powerful delegation from the German AFD party was welcomed in Washington this week. 

Last word: America is not your friend

We should all pray to whatever gods may be that America, with the awesome power and woeful attention deficit of a Titan god with ADHD, finds a more peaceful way to express what is left of its exceptionalism.  The Strategy points to the road to be taken but intent is one thing, execution is another.  Obama promised a pivot to Asia and failed miserably.  Ursula von der Leyen promised a trillion Euro European Green Deal and has since spent a measly few million Euros before effectively abandoning that project and going instead for Military Keynesianism, trying to reverse Europe’s economic doom loop by turning Europe into a “steel porcupine”.  

Thanks to what the Strategy makes clear, we now know for certain going forward what we should have known for certain all along: America is not our friend.  

I’ll give the last word to Ayn Rand – the final words of Atlas Shrugged:

“The road is cleared,” said Galt. “We are going back to the world.”

He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of a dollar.

Eugene Doyle