Strategy Without Strategy: Inside the New NSS

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Cato Institute

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4.6 • 949 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Cato Institute's Katherine Thompson and Josh Shifrinson join Justin Logan to dissect the most contentious passages of the National Security Strategy, including its warnings about European “civilizational erasure,” its revived Monroe Doctrine instincts, and the absence of military escalation language on China. The discussion weighs whether this NSS truly reflects restraint and realism or simply refines old habits under a new rhetorical wrapping.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Justin Logan, the Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at Cato,
0:09.7	joined by two of my colleagues here today, Catherine Thompson, a senior fellow formerly of the Department of War.
0:15.6	Good to see you, Catherine. Good to see you.
0:17.3	And Joshua Schifrensen, professor at the University of Maryland. And what is your title here? I think I'm a non-residents, senior fellow. Non-residents. No, I am being resident. Yes, Supreme Warlord of the Earth, Josh Schifrensen. So we had at, what, 1030 at night last Thursday, the release of Devonted National Security Strategy. And I'm on record saying the national security
0:38.9	strategy should be abolished. So I have a weird position in this debate. But it caused, as it always does,
0:45.5	some tumult, some discussion, some garment rending up and down Massachusetts Avenue. Catherine,
0:51.4	maybe you were closer to the action than certainly either Josh or I was.
0:55.1	What were your sort of initial takeaways from seeing the NSS on the right side of the equal sign?
1:02.0	Yeah, I mean, I would say a couple things.
1:04.6	I think first, I thought it was somewhat profound that the authors chose to start with a sort of
1:12.2	aocratic question of like, what is a strategy? And I think that that sort of helped more
1:19.5	narrowly define sort of what we're for, but then in an exclusionary way, certainly characterize
1:24.4	what we're not for, which was perhaps the biggest difference between
1:27.9	this national security strategy and even the national security strategy from the first Trump
1:32.1	administration. And then I think a lot of the themes, particularly on defining core national
1:38.1	interests and doing that in an exclusionary fashion, also sets up a really good conversation for the publication of the national
1:46.0	defense strategy, which will follow. Right. We'll have to do another podcast about that to be sure.
1:50.4	I think that's the plan. And Josh, you and I were sort of going back and forth on, I think we both
1:55.7	liked the extent to which the document dripped contempt on other national security strategies.
2:00.8	They deserve it.
2:02.1	But you sort of thought that this strategy was subject to some of the same criticisms
2:06.6	that this strategy itself lodged at previous strategies.
	...

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