The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy Fails to Effectively Address Pressing National Security Threats

Instead, it prioritizes the woke leftist agenda of climate change, diversity, equity, inclusion, democracy and fighting 'domestic terrorists' while committing to fight a never-ending war in Ukraine

Key Judgments

Unlike National Security Strategy documents issued by past administrations, most notably the outstanding 2018 National Security Strategy issued by the Trump administration, the Biden administration’s newly released National Security Strategy provides comparatively little focus on critically important national security imperatives. Instead, it prioritizes the administration’s woke leftist agenda of climate change, diversity, equity, inclusion, democracy and fighting so-called “domestic terrorists” while committing to fight a never-ending proxy war in Ukraine. It also minimizes the far more pressing and existential threat America faces from the People’s Republic of China, which appears more determined than ever to achieve global hegemony within the next decade.

The National Security Strategy also fails to call attention to massive U.S. vulnerabilities in terms of our increasingly obsolescent and badly undersized strategic nuclear deterrent, our alarmingly vulnerable nuclear C3 system and our small-scale missile defenses that have little if any capability to defend against even an extremely limited Russian or Chinese nuclear missile attack. Most importantly, it does not address the need to defend America against the existential threats of a comprehensive super-Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) or cyber-attack by hardening America’s electrical power grid and other critical infrastructure even though they could essentially destroy the U.S. without warning.

Introduction

The Biden administration recently released its 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS), a classified version of which was released to Congress back in March along with its yet to be unclassified Nuclear Posture Review. Unfortunately, many of the focus areas articulated in its strategy document have nothing to do with U.S. national security. While it discusses the need to rebuild America’s manufacturing and technological base to enable us to engage in Great Power competition more successfully, it also identifies the need to support “democracy” here at home and states the need to fight “domestic terrorists,” which is a term the administration has repeatedly used to describe its political opponents.