Mapping the Redirection the U.S. Foreign Policy Change toward Europe in the 2025 National Security Strategy

Abstract

On November 5, 2024, Donald J. Trump won a nonconsecutive term as the 47th President of the United States. With his reelection, the America First policies returned to the White House, as well as President Trump’s skeptical vision on Europe and NATO. In December of 2025, the second Trump administration issued its National Security Strategy, which criticizes Europe and NATO. In doing so, the National Security Strategy formalized the hostile stance, indicating a major foreign policy redirection from the long-standing U.S. transatlantic policy. Through process tracing, this master’s thesis aims to explain this apparent major redirection, which it does by bridging a notion of neoclassical realism and foreign policy analysis to analyze the influence of four major actors in the drafting process of the Strategy: the presidency, think tanks, the federal bureaucracy, and the U.S. Congress. For each of the actors, a separate analysis is conducted, which examines semistructured expert interviews, policy recommendations, and quality newspaper and magazine arti- cles. The study concludes that the drafting process of the National Security Strategy of 2025 devi- ates from its predecessors and that the major foreign policy redirection can be explained through the dominant personality of President Trump, which causes the strategy to reflect his own visions.