By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“What are America’s core foreign policy interests? What do we want in and from the world?” wrote the authors of the newly released ‘National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America.’ The NSS is the kind of report I like to read. Because sometimes, policy people tell you what they’re thinking. It’s helpful to take it at face value, incorporating it into your mental model. “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” 

The new National Security Strategy of the United States:

“As Alexander Hamilton argued in our republic’s earliest days, the United States must never be dependent on any outside power for core components—from raw materials to parts to finished products— necessary to the nation’s… pic.twitter.com/XWsBL6hxjL

— Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg (@UnderSecE) December 5, 2025

“We want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists,cartels,and other transnational criminal organizations,” continued the NSS. The USS Gerald R. Ford,off the coast of Venezuela,its oil,China watching. “We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.” 

“We want to halt and reverse the ongoing damage that foreign actors inflict on the American economy while keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open,preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes,and maintaining secure and reliable supply chains and access to critical materials; We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western Identity.” The report savaged Europe, its over-regulation, stagnant economy, immigration policies, free speech limits. 

“We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East,its oil and gas supplies,and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the “forever wars” that bogged us down in that region at great cost; and we want to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward. These are the United States’ core, vital national interests. While we also have others, these are the interests we must focus on above all others, and that we ignore or neglect at our peril.” I expect US spending/support to start looking more Beijing-like in these areas. 

“The US must at the same time invest in research to preserve and advance our advantage in cutting-edge military and dual-use technology, with emphasis on the domains where U.S. advantages are strongest. These include undersea, space, and nuclear, as well as others that will decide the future of military power, such as AI, quantum computing, and autonomous systems, plus the energy necessary to fuel these domains.” The NSS report reads like a cold war playbook. Deploy capital and invest accordingly. 

“Additionally, the U.S. Government’s critical relationships with the American private sector help maintain surveillance of persistent threats to U.S. networks, including critical infrastructure. This in turn enables the U.S. Government’s ability to conduct real-time discovery, attribution, and response (i.e., network defense and offensive cyber operations) while protecting the competitiveness of the U.S. economy and bolstering the resilience of the American technology sector. Improving these capabilities will also require considerable deregulation to further improve our competitiveness, spur innovation, and increase access to America’s natural resources.” 

Anecdote

“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” wrote the authors of the ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America,’ released this week, signed by the President [here], who is not yet one full-year into his term. What follows speaks for itself.

“Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests. Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They 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. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.”