From Empire to Republic: A First-Principles Reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy

In December 2025, the White House released its National Security Strategy (NSS), a document that does more than outline foreign-policy priorities—it signals a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of American power. Departing from decades of globalist assumptions, the Strategy rejects the notion that the United States exists to manage the world’s problems and instead reasserts a more traditional understanding of national security as the protection of a sovereign republic, its citizens, and their pre-political rights. In this essay I contend that, judged by first principles, the Strategy represents a long-overdue course correction—one that reconnects state power to its proper ends by prioritizing national interest, constitutional limits, and domestic strength over ideological crusades abroad. At the same time, I warn that the durability of this realignment will depend not on rhetoric, but on whether the Strategy’s stated commitment to restraint, sovereignty, and liberty is honored in practice rather than eroded by familiar habits of intervention, bureaucratic overreach, and economic control.

First Principles: What the State Is For (and What It Is Not)

Any national security strategy worth the paper it is printed on must rest on a prior answer to a prior question: What is government? The American answer, set down in 1776 and institutionalized in 1787, is clear. Government is instituted to secure pre-existing, God-given natural rights, not to manufacture new ones, and not to refashion human nature. Its legitimacy arises from the consent of the governed; its powers are delegated, enumerated, and limited. The state is a minister of justice, not a redeemer of mankind.

From that premise follow four corollaries for foreign policy. First, National security is derivative, not ultimate. It serves the safety and liberty of a people; it is not a license for managerial empire. Second, sovereignty is moral as well as juridical. A people cannot consent to what they do not control. Third, the state’s external posture must be prudent. We may love our neighbors; we are not authorized to run their households. And finally, our means and ends must match. A republic cannot survive permanent mobilization without becoming something else.

The NSS itself consciously reaches back toward these fundamentals, and that is its best feature.

The NSS’s Stated Ends: A Return to the National Interest

The Strategy opens by rejecting the post-Cold War habit of turning American foreign policy into a universal therapy session. It insists that strategy must “evaluate, sort, and prioritize,” and that foreign policy exists to protect “core national interests.”  More concretely, it defines the overarching end as the survival and safety of “an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given natural rights of its citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests.”  From a first-principles standpoint, that sentence is sound. It recognizes that the U.S. is not an idea floating in abstraction but a constitutional republic of people in a place, with borders, history, obligations to its own citizens first. A government that forgets this ceases to be a trustee and becomes a self-appointed global manager. From that stated end flow two concrete emphases that reveal the Strategy’s deeper orientation.

First, the document places border control at the center of national security, not as a peripheral policy concern but as a foundational obligation of the state. It identifies control of the nation’s borders as the “primary element of national security” and unequivocally announces that the era of mass unlawful migration is over. In doing so, the Strategy rejects the recent tendency to treat borders as administrative inconveniences rather than as the legal and moral boundary of a self-governing people.

Second, the Strategy couples its external security posture with an explicit concern for the preservation of core liberties at home. It cautions against the domestic misuse of national security powers under expansive and ill-defined banners such as “deradicalization” or “protecting our democracy,” and it reaffirms the centrality of free speech and religious liberty as non-negotiable features of a constitutional order. Security, the document insists, cannot be purchased at the price of the very freedoms it exists to secure.

Taken together, these emphases mark a return to a traditional American understanding of governance, one closer to Madison than to Metternich. The Strategy treats the citizen not as a subject to be managed in the name of security, but as the reason security exists in the first place.

The NSS’s Governing Principles: Natural Law Vocabulary in a Strategic Document

The Strategy’s principles section reads less like a continuation of progressive internationalism than like a sustained rebuttal to it. Rather than offering an expansive catalogue of aspirations, the document insists on a focused and disciplined definition of the national interest, rejecting the familiar “laundry list” approach that has too often transformed strategy into rhetoric without limits. It couples that clarity of purpose with a reaffirmation of peace through strength, grounding deterrence not in abstraction but in credible national power.

Equally notable is the Strategy’s stated predisposition toward non-interventionism, expressly anchored in the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that nations, like persons, possess equal natural rights. From that premise follows a renewed emphasis on the primacy of sovereign nations and mutual respect, accompanied by an open skepticism toward transnational institutions that dilute self-government and erode democratic accountability. The Strategy further embraces a balance-of-power framework that seeks stability without aspiring to global domination, and it links national security to fairness, competence, and merit—particularly as they bear on the dignity and interests of the American worker.

Judged by first principles, these are mostly the right categories. The insistence on sovereignty, on a bounded conception of national interest, and on a presumption against intervention accords with the founding design. The framers did not envision the American republic as a permanent expeditionary force for the moral uplift of the world. They imagined a commercial, free, and strong nation whose example would shine brighter than its coercion. That said, principles must be more than slogans. The question is whether the Strategy’s applications keep faith with them.

 

Prudence Test: Where the Strategy Aligns with First Principles

Measured by the test of prudence, the Strategy aligns in several important respects with first principles that have too often been neglected in modern American statecraft. Most notably, it explicitly disclaims any ambition of global domination and cautions against being drawn into peripheral conflicts that bear only a tenuous connection to vital national interests. That recognition marks a necessary corrective. A constitutional republic cannot act as an omnipresent guarantor of world order without steadily depleting its moral authority, its economic resources, and the patience of its own citizens. History suggests that when such exhaustion sets in, the failure is rarely attributed to overextension, but instead is laid at the feet of the constitutional restraints that once made self-government possible.

The Strategy also re-anchors national security in the concrete realities of domestic strength. By emphasizing industrial capacity, energy independence, and technological leadership, it implicitly rejects the illusion that a nation can remain free while outsourcing the material foundations of its security. The founders understood that liberty is inseparable from a measure of self-sufficiency, and that dependence, whether on foreign supply chains or hostile powers, operates as a form of quiet subjugation. A people that cannot provide for its own defense, energy, or essential industries will sooner or later find its political choices constrained by those who can.

Finally, the Strategy reasserts the moral right of self-government not only for the United States, but for nations generally. It is unapologetic in affirming that sovereign states may put their own interests first, and that doing so is neither selfish nor unjust, but natural. This is the logic of the Declaration of Independence applied beyond our borders -- peoples are not wards of a global overseer, nor are they raw material for ideological projects devised elsewhere. A stable international order rests not on the erasure of national interests, but on their disciplined pursuit within a framework of mutual respect and restraint.

Tension Points: Where First Principles Warn “Proceed Carefully”

Even a strategy framed in healthy categories can drift in practice. Two areas deserve caution.

First, the Strategy states that long-term security requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” alongside a desire for “strong, traditional families.”  Yes, culture and faith are upstream from politics. A decadent people cannot remain free. But here a constitutional caution is required. The state may protect the space in which cultural institutions flourish; it may not commandeer the soul of the nation. Government can, and must, secure religious liberty; it cannot manufacture religious virtue. If a strategy treats cultural renewal as a task of federal administration rather than of families, churches, schools, and local communities, it risks mistaking instrument for author.

Second, the Strategy calls for robust industrial policy, protection against predatory trade, and a “pro-American worker” stance.  Again, the category is right: the state must guard against economic warfare that hollows out the citizenry. But first principles press a distinction: defending fair commerce is not the same as directing commerce. A security rationale can become a pretext for a permanently managed economy. The American system is free enterprise under law, not mercantilism under flag.

The Strategy’s Deepest Truth: Security is Ultimately Moral

Perhaps the most striking—and least remarked—feature of the Strategy is its sober acknowledgment that spiritual and cultural decay renders long-term national security unattainable. This is not a rhetorical flourish or a pious aside inserted for effect. It is, as a matter of first principles, a statement of strategic realism. History bears this out with relentless consistency. Nations rarely perish because they are overrun by superior force alone; more often, they collapse because the habits and convictions necessary for self-government have already eroded. When a people lose a shared moral vocabulary, a sense of common purpose, and the discipline required for self-rule, external threats merely finish what internal decay has begun.

In this respect, the Strategy departs from the modern tendency to treat security as a purely technical problem—one solvable by budgets, hardware, intelligence fusion, or administrative coordination. It recognizes instead that no amount of material superiority can compensate for civic exhaustion or moral disintegration. A society that no longer believes in its own legitimacy, or that has abandoned the virtues on which liberty depends, cannot be secured indefinitely by force. Armies may deter enemies for a time, but they cannot supply meaning, cohesion, or restraint. The Strategy’s candor on this point is refreshing precisely because it resists the comforting illusion that bureaucratic competence can substitute for character.

At the same time, the document implicitly rejects the conceit—now deeply entrenched—that virtue itself can be outsourced to the administrative state. A people cannot remain free by delegating moral formation to government agencies, nor can they preserve liberty by regulatory fiat. If there is a coherent “grand strategy” running beneath the enumerated policies, it is this: renew the citizen, and you renew the republic. Security, in the deepest sense, flows from the character of the people being secured.

Yet here constitutional sobriety must prevail. The government’s role in such renewal is real, but sharply limited. It is to secure rights, punish crime, defend borders, and tell the truth—particularly about the nature of threats and the limits of power. It is not to manage consciences, curate beliefs, or supplant the institutions that stand between the individual and the state. The moral work upon which free societies depend belongs to civil society—to families, schools, local communities, and above all to the church. When government respects those limits, it strengthens the conditions of liberty. When it exceeds them, even in the name of renewal, it hastens the very decay it claims to cure.

Concluding Thought – The Bottom Line

Measured against first principles, the 2025 National Security Strategy represents a pronounced turn toward a more traditional American understanding of statecraft. It proceeds from the recognition that the nation-state is not an anachronism to be transcended, but a real and morally legitimate form of political community. From that premise follows a renewed commitment to sovereignty—one that must be defended not only against foreign adversaries, but also against the quieter erosion produced by supranational institutions that dilute democratic accountability in our constitutional republic.

The Strategy likewise rejects the assumption that the national interest is synonymous with global perfectionism or the perpetual pursuit of universal outcomes. Instead, it treats peace as something to be secured through credible strength and deterrence, rather than through endless crusading untethered from vital interests. At the same time, it insists that rights and liberties at home are not expendable collateral in the name of security, but among the very ends that security policy exists to protect. Finally, the document grounds American power not primarily in abstractions or alliances, but in domestic vitality itself—in the economic, cultural, and civic health of the nation, without which no durable influence abroad can be sustained.

Its chief vulnerabilities are the perennial ones: the temptation to let justified vigilance become habitual intervention, to let cultural diagnosis become administrative mission, and to let economic defense harden into economic control. If those lines are held, this Strategy is broadly consonant with the proper role of the state in our constitutional order: strong enough to secure liberty, restrained enough not to consume it.

The author gratefully acknowledges the use of AI-assisted drafting tools (i.e., OpenAI’s ChatGPT) in the preparation of this Issue Brief. All ideas, structural decisions, analysis, and final edits are solely the author’s own, and the author bears full responsibility for the content.