Paradigm Change in the 2025 National Security Strategy

The essay “The Missing War: Why the 2025 NSS Needs a Political Warfare Strategy to Defeat the CRInK in the Gray Zone” by Col. David Maxwell advocates for a more explicit political strategy to confront China as was done in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But China presents an economic challenge as our peer that the Soviet Union never did. Our economies and supply chains are interdependent, and China has weaponized rare earth and pharmaceutical choke points for negotiating leverage. As shown by President Trump’s recent compromise to allow the export of Nvidia H200 AI chips in exchange for China loosening restrictions on rare earth elements our economies are still too interdependent to fully duplicate the confrontation with the Soviets. The challenge now is to align our gray zone activities with the economic focus of the new National Security Strategy (NSS) to strengthen the homeland, both territorially and economically, increase support from our allies, and shift the focus to maritime domains and great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere. 

International Nemesis: China’s Mercantilist Challenge 

The new NSS notes that prior to the first Trump administration American elites placed “hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.” The 2017 NSS under the first Trump administration repudiated that delusion and identified the return of great power competition as our challenge going forward.  The 2025 NSS under the second Trump administration changes the paradigm from a military centric competition to a broader contest “to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life.” The NSS focuses on the elements of economic strength as “the bedrock of the American way of life, which promises and delivers widespread and broad-based prosperity, creates upward mobility, and rewards hard work. Our economy is also the bedrock of our global position and the necessary foundation of our military.” and the 2025 NSS provides “a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.”   

Winning Grey Zone Competition 

With funding constraints imposed by government deficits and China challenging American militarily, defense funding will appropriately prioritize deterrence and limit resources available for gray zone conflict with China. The opportunity lies in a non-military approach, leveraging the NSS economic pillars of alliances and reindustrialization that provide material benefits to support the legitimacy of our alliances. China’s strength advantage in bilateral conflicts is best countered by leveraging her greatest weaknesses, the friction generated from her predatory economic actions and resulting geopolitical isolation. Opposing Chinese coercion needs to follow the NSS, with a civilian led, economics focused counter, not military. Our asymmetrical advantage is in the shared values of democracy, transparency, and the rule of law, which provide economic opportunity through a nation’s development of their own resources and in turn provides the legitimacy in the eyes of the host population that is the basis of our relationship. The recent agreement with Palau highlights the potential economic agreements have to benefit recipients, strengthen our partnerships, and block China. As noted by South Pacific expert Cleo Paskal, “if this’ block and build’ model of cooperation is replicated by the United States, we may see a new way of operating that has a chance of blocking some of the most corrosive aspects of Chinese illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive activities, while building real resilience.” 

Common Ground Against China 

Success in the grey zone conflict with China is best attained by focusing on areas of Chinese predation and leveraging the resulting friction.  China subsidizes the world’s largest fishing fleet which is involved in activities defined as illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and is tailor made for making allies with countries whose resources are abused by China. The Maritime Security and Fisheries Enforcement (SAFE) Act provides a whole-of-government approach to counter IUU fishing and related threats to maritime security through a broad civilian Interagency Working Group to expand our partnerships in priority regions that match the NSS Western Hemisphere and Indo Pacific focus. Leveraging that friction and winning the competition with China in the grey zone is a competition for allies, making the Army’s population centric capabilities and the National Guard outreach to allied nations through the National Guard State Partnership Program (SPP) paramount. The SPP conducts military-to-military engagements in support of defense security goals but also leverages whole-of-society relationships and capabilities to facilitate broader interagency and corollary engagements spanning military, government, economic and social spheres” and its expansion via the Maritime Safe Act will provide the foreign engagement needed.  In the long run geopolitics will align with economic power with the non-aligned Global South and even allies swayed by economic self-interest. The State based structure of the National Guard provides the commercial link the NSS needs. Governors, Chambers of Commerce, educators, and employers provide the connections to meet the NSS economic mandate. Our support for economic freedom and democracy is the prerequisite for shared prosperity and the political legitimacy to underpin the alliances that America needs to best China. 

Army National Guard: Personnel for the Grey Zone 

To be successful American reindustrialization needs to fill a structural demand for 4-6 million jobs expected to be generated this decade but faces a shortfall of almost half in available trained candidates. There is bipartisan support for training and apprenticeship programs, especially when targeted toward lower income and disadvantaged students, but our education and apprenticeship programs are unable to reach the large pool of underemployed and unemployed needed to fill the gap. The impact of the deterioration of family and civil society is not amenable to funding solutions, and the resulting poverty of capacity and agency can only be addressed by changing the individual’s environment. An expansion of the National Guard to increase focus on building individual capacity through training and experience will provide the personnel capable of foreign outreach and the active-duty military highly trained applicants needed for successful deployment of stand-in forces thereafter. Lower-cost Army National Guard structure can partner with the Community College system and employers to train personnel with the skills needed for individual success, whether civilian or military, to address the shortage of skilled labor in the private sector.  Most importantly, the National Guard is the only structure that can provide the social capital that is a prerequisite for the human capital that too many American’s lack and connect them to their community and employment to fulfill the NSS promise. The expansion of the National Guard with personnel utilized under the auspices of the MSA and SPP will bridge the gap of the civilian agencies lack of broad cohesion and mission capacity in implementing whole of government statecraft and the military’s lack of jurisdiction and institutional inability to transition beyond kinetic warfare.   

Conclusion

Col. Maxwell’s argument for a stronger political warfare strategy is not wrong, but he is early. The omission of a named adversary and the imperative of supporting reindustrialization is a feature and not a bug of the NSS, and the new guidance on Irregular Warfare supports a broader program for this reason. The National Guard is uniquely positioned to combine the economic relationships providing legitimacy with the creation of the social and human capital needed to meet the NSS promise to the American people that “we want the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families.” Actions for now must be couched in the language of economics and mutual benefit until reshoring minimizes our supply chain exposure, but as described above will also provide a broader structure to implement Col. Maxwell’s call for more aggressive coordination and action in the future. 

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