Not a National Security Strategy
A glimpse of something much, much darker. No, darker still. And my quick year in review.
Intellectual justifications of the Trump administration are almost always thin gruel. The throbbing heart of the thing beats to its own drummer, always stirring never satisfied. Trying to wrap words around it is like wrapping a fish that is still flopping on a boat, or perhaps, trying to free a cargo ship with a single backhoe.
Like the now defunct liberal international order (LIO) before it, the new National Security Strategy (NSS) promulgated in December by the Trump administration has the surprising if unfortunate characteristic of negating each of its constituent words. The LIO was less liberal, less international, and definitely less ordered than was often acknowledged (especially inside the DC beltway). Trump’s new NSS is not about the national but instead the personal, ignores all manner of material threats to security in favor of chasing psychological ones, and contains no strategy to speak of beyond creating space (maximizing optionality, as Henry Farrell put it) for the increasingly decrepit dealmaker in chief to make deals. Anne Applebaum deemed it a long suicide note. There are lots of takes, almost all of them as excoriating as hers. It’s bad.
It’s personal rather than national because with Trump it is always about the grift. Whether it’s truth social merging with a fusion firm (its own special kind of grift) or the various memecoins or Melania the movie or …. Security threats like climate change are simply ignored, and legal instruments and agreements which protect the national interest are forgotten. Strategy requires coherence and forethought, neither of which are in strong supply these days in DC. But you don’t need another lambasting of bad Trumpian politics when everyone else can offer that faster and sharper.
After all, the China Lab is a China and climate newsletter. On the former, there are those attacking the NSS for being too moderate in tons. Both Democrats and Republican politicians in 2025 have deep muscle memory of the bygone age of … 2024 when scrambling to be as hard on China as possible was viewed as winning politics. But for all of its many, many faults, the NSS reflects a practical and pragmatic modus vivendi with China. But I’ll dwell on that another day (I would have delved but then you might think that some silicon intelligence is drafting this for me—and it’s not).
On climate change, though, nothing good can be said. Indeed, let’s jump into the document itself and go through the singular mention of climate change.
Energy Dominance – Restoring American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) and reshoring the necessary key energy components is a top strategic priority. Cheap and abundant energy will produce well-paying jobs in the United States, reduce costs for American consumers and businesses, fuel reindustrialization, and help maintain our advantage in cutting-edge technologies such as AI. Expanding our net energy exports will also deepen relationships with allies while curtailing the influence of adversaries, protect our ability to defend our shores, and—when and where necessary—enables us to project power. We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.
The energy dominance idea is not just bad environmentally, but a disaster in the medium-to-long term and not much better in the short run. As I argued here and here, the green tech revolution opens the door to a developmental path that is cheaper, cleaner, and better than the fossil powered world in which we’ve lived. Yes, these technologies are currently being made mostly in China (though not all, by a long shot). But that’s no reason to ignore the reality that they’re great technologies that will dominate when consumers are given a choice.
That being said, the competitive advantages of clean tech are clear yet the politics of taking this path can be difficult. Even in China, where there’s no concern about the Chinese production of these technologies, moving down the path rapidly is not happening; it can’t decide if it wants to be the electrostate that was promised.
Take this 2021(!) study: a specific plant-by-plant guide to how China could phaseout coal from its electricity system. That’s about 500 GW of solar ago, and yet China instead added over 100 GW of coal to its grid over the intervening four years rather than moving away from the black rock. One of the main reasons why is that it is difficult to place coal workers into slots in the new green tech economy. This 2025 study suggests only 15% of Chinese coal plant workers will find similar jobs, in large part because the geography of electricity generation shifts with the new technology.
Nils Gilman had a nice post about the ways that left and right see crises all around us. The left worried about the metabolic crisis of climate change and the right worried about a demographic crisis.
Given that the NSS is a document of the right, there’s much more material about demographics to digest than about climate.
Demographics
The civilizational collapse of Europe language in the document makes all but explicit that the demographic collapse concerns proffered by the administration and its specific authors (Michael Anton until he left the administration and then Stephen Miller, if bluesky is to be believed) is really about white people, not humanity. Global population is expected to grow for decades to come, but from the MAGA/Vance et al perspective, it is the wrong slices of the population that are growing. But beyond the obvious racism and “you will not replace us” vibes, there are additional layers of political complication. The United States, and even more so Europe, South Korea, Japan, and China, are aging rapidly. So the shape of the demographic pyramid in each is shifting. This is more than a symbol of large changes to come but reflects present dynamics that are material as well as psychological.
It is hard to plan for a future when you’re dead. Having a political class that is chronologically advanced — a gerontocracy — is never a great idea, for the obvious reasons as well as this one.
As the population ages, the demands of the economy move. Shifting sectoral composition of the labor force is a result of this demographic change, and here it is largely towards “care.” While smaller newborn cohorts reduce this effect on the other side, the labor intensity of caring for the aged is much higher than for little ones. Of course, the fact that these growing sectors are female-coded in the US more than most, makes big masculinity / trad hierarchy / misogyny mad. But policy pushing on demographics has been like pushing on a string. Very little happens.
Climate
On climate, Trump’s zero sum nature suffuses this document (and everything he touches). Again, there’s literally nothing here on climate. But one way that I think you can view the overall program is that it reads like an eco-fascist’s manifesto without any concern for the planet’s ecology. It is deeply concerned about those people coming here. (You know the ones, from the sh*thole countries.) Much of the (Stephen Miller-suffused) anti-immigrant actions are about racial animus, but there is a deep connection between these actions and climate change. Yet the NSS offers nothing to remedy the underlying problems in those locations that are pushing people to leave their homes and communities to become migrants.
Instead all of the efforts are about hardening the border, which deeply aligns with lifeboat ethics. They see a world falling apart, like a sinking ship, and whatever it takes to save those on the lifeboat is justified. Authoritarian temptations abound. Of course, for Trump and Miller, the authoritarianism is the point rather than a sacrifice.
They see a world falling apart, like a sinking ship, and whatever it takes to save those on the lifeboat is justified.
But thinking deeply about how we can avoid the worst of climate change often runs into issues of planning and technocracy. This essay from Pierre Charbonnier (which I read the google translation of as my French is non-existant) reviews Abundance, Breakneck, and Karp’s The Technological Republic as a way of considering technocracy in the contemporary moment. More to think about in the coming year.
This NSS is toxic, born of enmity, understanding only force, valuing nothing of the slow boring of hard boards that brought us to our current plenty (which, admittedly, is deeply unequal in its distribution and far from universal in its experience and for some disappearing rather than developing), and caring only for today not tomorrow.
Year in Review
It’s now New Year’s Eve as I write this. The end of what is, certainly from a DC perspective, a shipwreck of a year. Republicans gutted the climate actions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), undoing real moves that would have helped humanity and Americans as we transit to that cheaper, cleaner, and better path.
For me, it was a fine year. I joined a commission and affiliated with a think tank. I’m quite proud of many of the pieces that I wrote this year. That being said, I spent most of my writing time this year working on a couple of things that won’t see the light of day until later and so don’t show up on this kind of a list. Consider them seeds planted for the future. A future that we can hope to see and in which to flourish.
Academic Pieces
Nomi Claire Lazar and Jeremy L. Wallace. 2025. “Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation.” Journal of Democracy. 36(1): 135-150.
Nomi Claire Lazar and Jeremy L. Wallace. 2025. “A Reply to Our Critics.” Journal of Democracy. 36(1): 182-187.
Public Writing
“China Can’t Decide if It Wants to Be the World’s First ‘Electrostate.’” Heatmap.
“China’s New Gilded Age Comes to Life in ‘Breakneck’.” Foreign Policy.
“The Looming Power of China’s Energy Megabases.” The Wire China.
“The Real Problem with ‘Climate Realism.’” Heatmap.
“Tariffs Can’t Stop China’s Clean Energy From Winning the Future”. Foreign Policy. (with Jonas Nahm)
Good Authority
“China updates its climate commitments, in disappointing fashion.” 2025.09.26.
“For the Trump administration, everything is an emergency.” 2025.06.17.
“Trump’s energy dominance agenda faces three big hurdles.” 2025.03.25.
“Can democracy solve the climate crisis?” 2025.01.07.
China Lab posts
That’s it for 2025. May we find each other in better climes again soon.
Sharp breakdown of the NSS contradictions. The ecofascist-without-ecology angle is what I found most striking. Treating demographics as a crisis while ignoring climate drivers of migration is basically accepting the consequences while refusing to address causes. That 2025 study showing only 15% of Chinese coal workers finding similar jobs in green tech really undercuts the "just transition" rhetoric everywhere, not just in China. Dealing with stranded labor is probaby the biggest political obstacle to decarbonization globally, and it's getting zero serious policy attention.
Good take on this topic Jeremy!