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Last week, President Donald Trump's administration released its National Security Strategy, a 33-page document that marks a sharp break from 80 years of American foreign policy doctrine, criticizing European allies more harshly than adversaries and elevating cultural preservation to a core national security interest.
European leaders, who spent months flattering and accommodating Trump in hopes of earning goodwill, discovered their efforts were futile. In the days since, they've scrambled to respond, with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer convening emergency talks in London with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
EU leaders also traveled to Belgium for urgent negotiations on financing Ukraine as it continues to battle Russia. Macron insisted there is "no mistrust" between the U.S. and Europe, even as he warned Zelensky that Washington might "betray" Ukraine. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik captured the mood in Brussels: "Genuine fear and distrust regarding the United States."
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JD Vance ⬆
The vice president's "say thank you" transactionalism is now official U.S. doctrine. His civilizational rhetoric, his post-liberal nationalism, his warnings about demographic decline—it's all there in black and white. The former "America's Hitler?" Never Trumper has molded MAGA foreign policy in his own image, just in time to make it his 2028 platform.
Michael Anton ⬆
The author of the "Flight 93 Election" essay—which framed Trump's 2016 campaign as a do-or-die moment for American conservatism—this year became the State Department's policy chief, only to clash with White House Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor and get sidelined by other officials. He tried to resign in frustration, but still managed to finish drafting the National Security Strategy before leaving in September. Lost every turf battle, won the ideological war.
Viktor Orban ⬆
Tucker Carlson broadcast from Budapest and called Hungary "a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us." The Conservative Political Action Conference held three events there. Trump called the Hungarian president "a great leader" and granted a waiver to keep buying Russian oil. When the strategy calls for "patriotic European parties" and warns of "civilizational erasure," the EU’s pariah is now Washington's poster boy for the new Europe.
Ursula von der Leyen ⬆
Getting 27 member nations to agree on anything has been the daily exercise in futility for any European Commission president. But when Trump's strategy savages the EU's present and pledges "cultivating resistance" to the bloc, he accomplished the impossible: actual European unity. Nothing rallies Europe like American contempt.
The Monroe Doctrine ⬆
The fifth U.S. president's 1823 declaration against European interference in the Western Hemisphere gets revived as the "Trump Corollary," asserting U.S. dominance to "control migration, stop drug flows." Fifteen thousand troops and a dozen warships now surround Venezuela as Trump threatens President Nicolás Maduro's ouster. Two centuries later, some classics never go out of style—gunboat diplomacy included.
Democracy ⬇
Ronald Reagan's final National Security Strategy in 1987 mentioned democracy 41 times, saying that promoting it put the U.S. "on the right side of this historic struggle." The 2025 version manages just eight mentions, including a sharp disavowal. "We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change." After more than a century of exporting democracy, America has now decided it's bad for business.
Originally a staple of Newsweek's print edition, Conventional Wisdom used arrows to track whose stock was rising or falling in the political circus. We're reviving it in the digital age because the problem it lampooned—hyperbole and partisan certainty masquerading as insight—has only intensified.
CW assigns arrows—up, down, or sideways—to the figures and forces shaping current events. The arrows don't predict the future or claim special insight. They capture the prevailing winds of the moment, uncluttered by tribal howling. In an era when partisan media reinforces rather than questions assumptions, CW operates from the center—skeptical of left and right alike, committed to puncturing inflated reputations and recognizing overlooked truths.
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