Lawfare Live: The Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At 10 am ET on Dec. 11, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson; Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at CSIS Daniel Byman; and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at AEI Kori Schake to discuss the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy. They talked about its emphasis on immigration as a national security threat and its implications for U.S. foreign policy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security. |
| 0:07.5 | And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions. |
| 0:18.3 | You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at 202-643-8474. Or by sending a |
| 0:27.7 | recording of yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare at gmail.com by December 16th. |
| 0:36.8 | It's Lawfare Live the Now. |
| 0:39.4 | I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare. |
| 0:42.3 | It is 10 a.m. Eastern Time on December 11, 2025. |
| 0:48.0 | And I am here with the very estimable Corey Shockey, |
| 0:51.8 | director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, |
| 0:57.8 | Scott R. Anderson Lawfare Senior Editor and Dan Beiman, director of the Warfare Irregular |
| 1:07.5 | Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic Studies, |
| 1:12.2 | who is also the foreign policy editor of Lawfare, and we are here to discuss the Trump |
| 1:21.9 | administration's 2025 National Security Strategy. |
| 1:26.5 | This document came out a week ago today. |
| 1:30.3 | It was kind of dropped onto the website, I think, of the White House with basically no announcement. |
| 1:37.6 | It is, I think it's fair to say, a remarkable document. |
| 1:43.3 | And, Corey, I want to start with you. |
| 1:48.0 | What does a normal national security strategy document look like? |
| 1:54.4 | And how is this one different from that? |
| 1:59.0 | So a president has a legal requirement to produce a public national security strategy. |
| 2:07.4 | It's by statute he's required by the Congress to do so. |
| 2:10.8 | And they typically start with a description of the international environment. |
... |
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