Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Firas Madad.

We are doing a live episode today on the United States National Security Strategy,

which came out last month in November, and which is really a bit of a game changer, shall we say. This is a live episode, so as usual, please leave your questions and comments in the chat.

I will be glancing at them as we go, and I will try to explain what is going on with this strategy

and why it is very much of a big deal. So let me start by reading a couple of

segments from this because I think that they're really relevant. The piece starts with the

diagnosis of what's been wrong with American strategy so far, and I think it's really good.

It says 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, like exporting democracy, making the world safe for democracy,

blah, blah, blah, and have often misjudged what we should want. After the end of the Cold War,

American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the

entire world was in the best interests of our country.

Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

So right at the outset, this is a resetting of what the United States should be doing. It's essentially an admission of

the death of two things. It's the death of globalization and it's the death of foreign policy

idealism. That's what's being stated here, that really the concern of the

United States should only be about its own interests. And these interests are no longer defined

in abstract terms like democratization or liberalism or women's rights or anything of that nature. Rather, they are

defined in concrete, hard-nosed ways that focus just on the bottom line and of American interests.

That itself is really welcoming. That itself is really a welcome development. It's a big

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