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Costume parties--fancy dress balls--are always fun. They are even more fun as text--that is as a textual production that allows us to fancy dress our collective selves to suit an occasion. Either way, the opportunity to trans-"vestist" performance are sometimes welcome, moments in which text can be dressed up as something other than itself--or perhaps the collective the text incarnates. . . one sometimes finds it virtually impossible to distinguish between costume and which is the costumed. The trans-vestments of fancy dress (that is the vestments understood in their old sense of liturgical garments, garments denoting public worship or service that operate on the physical and virtual planes, that goes beyond of going beyond, or crosses over (trans-) to something else), then,
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Most of this is harmless stuff at the level of the banal, and when undertaken by individuals in small gatherings of people who never really "leave" themselves precisely because they are all sharing the same trans-existential experience as such. However, when that trans-existentialism corrodes the brain, when it seeks to displace the underlying and unmoving reality of existence--of proclivity, of the form and function in the world of those "archetypes" that have served for so long to mold a being into what they presume they are (and thus must be), when the self-reflexivity of play acting becomes more real than the reality on which it rests then one moves to madness, not in the sense of something bad, but in the sense of its more ancient roots in the notion of a disordered intellect; losing one's cognitive moorings--adrift between cognitive states that produce a miasma of reality that eventually will collapse on itself. That is neither here nor there when it occurs to or within an individual. Indeed, that is the stuff of quite evocative literature that continues to move readers and bring insight. It is quite another thing when this sort of madness is shared among a class of merchants, already toiling within the spaces of bureaucrats that must now style themselves warriors--warriors of transactional battles to be fought with the weapons that bureaucrats wield and into which warriors are thrust and merchants profit. One moves from the trans-existential to the magical qualities of disordered intellect.
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Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Third Witch
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravined salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digged i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Slivered in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-delivered by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab.
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.
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Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch
Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.
[Enter Hecate, goddess of witchcraft]
Hecate
O well done. I commend your pains, And every one shall share i' the gains.
And now about the cauldron sing, Like elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in. (Shakespeare, McBeth, Act 4 Scene 1)
And when that disordered intellect is shared collectively by a coven of merchants ("Economic security is national security": President Trump Issues Executive Order--"America First Investment Policy") one enters what appears to be the normality of the first third of the 21st Century. (The "Merchant" (商), the "Bureaucrat" (士) and the "Tariff War"--The Cognitive Cages of the New Apex Post-Global and the Condition of the U.S. and China in their Folie à Deux). This is not to suggest that the United States is something special in this regard--one encounters variations of this globally, shared miasmas of blended normative archetypes of covens of warriors and bureaucrats with their own concoctions to brew as they play dress up in the skins of other ruler "types."
I considered elements of this from the perspective of cognitive lens archetypes through the quite profound Presidential Message on the anniversary of the end of Spanish American War (Reflections on President Trump: "America 250: Presidential Message on the Anniversary of our Victory in the Spanish-American War"). And one might wonder, is this just a specific manifestation of a broader type of trans-cognition within or against the driving values of the leadership of a political economic system?
These are the thoughts that may come, unbidden and unwelcome, as one reads through the recently released, and much talked about, National Security Strategy of the United States for 2025 (November 2025) (hereafter the "NSS2025"). NSS2025 is another iteration of an annual report to Congress mandated under the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Department Reorganization Act of 1986 (amending Title 50, Chapter 15, Section 404a of the US Code). "The NSS is intended to provide strategic yet prioritized guidance from which national security agencies base their own guidance documents, budgets, directives, and policies." (Micah Zenko, Trump’s National Security Strategy Deserves to Be Ignored, Foreign Policy (Dec. 18, 2017)).
Of course, for at least for a few days, the distribution of NSS 2025 had its intended propaganda effects. There was intense examination, and even more intense use of the NSS2025 release to restate and reinforce positions already held or desired by those moved enough to write something related to NSS2025. The signification of NSS2025, and its interpretation, especially its placement within interpretive fields among communities of meaning makers organized in factional spaces, fit nicely into the performative spaces of the politics of transformation, and of the defense of the quickly receding imaginaries of global convergence and the multi-lateral rules based convergence order. In that sense, all parties, and all actors, might be said to have been delighted that NSS2025 was, indeed, made public. It was an instrument that anyone could use to their own ends, including, in the end, the members of the Trump Administration.
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But back to Bob Zoellick: Mr. Zoellick suggests that the document, as is customary for these sorts of efforts, is--like drone technology in peace and war--a dual use instrument. One the one hand it is directed to its object, to define the principles through which a U.S. national security strategy can be realized. Mr. Zoellick, however, wanted to concentrate on that other, more subterranean, purpose which, given the the Trump Administration 's merchant-transaction lebenswelt ("imaginaries" for those whose taste runs to the French and away from the German) have have some significance for those who are interesting in (or shaping) cognitive reality (and the factotums through which that is to be realized ) more than three years beyond 2025:
The 2025 White House National Security Strategy is revealing—especially about Vice President JD Vance’s worldview. As a practical matter, the document won’t constrain Donald Trump’s ambition to become the “president of peace” through deals. But the authors of this document—likely led by Andy Baker, deputy national security adviser and a former aide to Mr. Vance—have explained how they would create a new framework after Mr. Trump’s destruction of the old order. ('White House National -Security Strategy Reflects Vance's Thinking)
Mr. Zoellick suggests that the vision that is meant to be advanced, perhaps, indeed, as a prequel to the Vice President's run for the Presidency, suggests a revanchist mentality (much in vogue among key elements on all sides of the American political spectrum though to different ends and with different agendas in mind). Mr. Zoellick notes: "In the best light, the new strategy imitates Theodore Roosevelt’s effort to take advantage of America’s rising influence and mediate balances of power in East Asia and Europe while dominating North America and the Caribbean." ('White House National -Security Strategy Reflects Vance's Thinking). These Mr. Zoellick breaks down into their interesting regional manifestations:
The regional strategy opens with the Western Hemisphere, calling for a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, imitating Theodore Roosevelt’s revision. Foreign policy is connected directly to domestic interests, calling for a halt of “destabilizing” migration and the use of the military against narco-traffickers.* * * European policy represents the biggest change. The administration contends that Europe faces economic stagnation and “civilizational erasure.” . . The strategy treats Europe and Russia as politically equivalent. The U.S. role will be to mediate a restoration of stable security in Europe. * * * Although some in the White House have trumpeted Indo-Pacific security as the priority, the strategy for the region seems uninspired except for economic protectionism. The document stresses free navigation, especially for supply chains.* * * In the Mideast, the authors are eager for Washington to get on with its long-delayed pullback, even though the president is engaged with the region as he busily searches for peace deals. The strategy relies on the Gulf monarchies to maintain security in some association with Israel. Africa is an afterthought—a source of natural resources. ('White House National -Security Strategy Reflects Vance's Thinking)
Pix credit here (The Blob, Paramount Pix 1958)
None of this is new, of course. It is just convenient to have it packages in a singular discursive dollop of text, and with it of the conviction, passion, and ordering referents from which what appears to Mr. Zoellick to be the articulation of "their strategy clearly—if not always coherently" (ibid.) might to others be the textual blob that consumed a number of global contradictions that are quite worthy of serious consideration but which have been reduced to burlesque, made sadder when the burlesque's "book" is authored by those against whom it is directed. Perhaps that is, in part, Mr. Zoelick's point, or at least his starting point for the ribaldry that then follows in his own text.
For others, perhaps, a closer reading of NSS2025 might suggest a sophisticated politics of passive-aggressive whining (again similar to what came before but through a different political lens). At its most depressing, elite whining might be made more dainty by calling it something more polite (since all elites whine, or certainly all elites appear to like to whine since the cultural revolutions of the 1960s) as something like "national populism" or "populist grievance"--as long as it has a "populist in there all is good, at least as a discursive trope that signal solidarity with something "not" populist." And so this assessment: "The vice president’s psychology of populist grievance underpins these regional strategies. He appeals to resentments about past overreach, unfair burdens, unreliable foreigners, the woke agenda, the elites—and especially migration. Yet the document adds its own globalist ideology of protecting national cultures against foreign influences and migration." ('White House National -Security Strategy Reflects Vance's Thinking)
Of course, each with an analogue on the other side of the political spectrum, the whining about which marked the discourse of high level acolytes of that elite collective in wonderfully interesting ways especially between 2020 and 2024. So named, one might be tempted to reduce this delightfully names version of a universal elite reflex in the US it might to the sort of whining that one would expect from an unworldly uneducated individual whose own world view is sieved through the lens of historical and class grievance then extrapolated and combined with just enough effluvia of the anti-current-inner circle-elite elitism to appear as discursively sophisticated (that is as seeking to speak the language of those members of the magisterium of the controlling elite who are despised (perhaps rightly) for a generation of arrogant mismanagement and closed club elitist false (or al least self serving) consciousness) as the targets who are the object of this discursive exercise.
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,* * *
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall, (Alan Ginsberg, Howl (1956) excerpt)
The NSS2025, then, is a howling to the moon of the ambitions of their authors, and to those ends, of their ambitions for the nation. But might there be something else? In the case of the NSS2025, that "something else" might have been better provided by Marco Rubio who has been much better at articulating the parameters of the cognitive cages of a transactional-merchant lebenswelt. That is something that the NSS2025 might have clutched tightly; it is a "thing" that that survives in the NSS2025 in the Western Hemisphere regional description that Mr. Zoellick describes as the contemporary embodiment of the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt bereft of any sense of the lessons that century that followed offered, but perhaps better understood as a much more Leninist imaginary of the world and the U.S. role in it--something the Vice President and his Advisors might have picked up at Yale or perhaps within the circles in which they, and indeed in which many of all political stripes, travel (see, e.g., The American Leninist-Brain Trust Republic: Text of President Trump's Executive Order, "Launching the Genesis Mission," and the Press Release "President Trump Launches the Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI for Scientific Discovery").
Mr. Zoellick finds echoes of Mr. Putin's world view in parts of the NSS2025; not surprising, though it bears remembering that the American transactional mentality (and it is not clear whether the Vice President understands much less shares that mentality, having been "raised" in an intellectual environment in which the official rather than the merchant was the cognitive way to go (eg here). Nonetheless it may be worth considering the extent to which the Vice President and his clique might come to their position from a very different place than someone who was immersed in youth within a peculiar corner of the Soviet security obsessed nomenklatura, and who is immersed in the cultures of the early 20th century official immersed in a political-spiritual enterprise around which order and advantage is elaborated. That might also produce its own version of revanchist whining (eg a tidbit here), but it is not, except in results, cognitively aligned with the American version. In any case, Mr. Zoellick is not a fan: "In some bizarre way, Mr. Trump’s American greatness is supposed to be a soft power that will lead to cultural rebirth of diverse peoples around the globe. . . Those who recognize the dangers of this sharp historical turn need to speak out." ('White House National -Security Strategy Reflects Vance's Thinking).
In that sense the NSS2025 is much much closer in spirit to its Chinese counterpart, and indeed reflecting a political-economic vision closer to what used to be called the Belt& Road Initiative, than it does to Teddy Roosevelt and his vision now receding into ancient (by American reckoning) history. The difference, and what separates NSS2025 from its American predecessors and from those of the Chinese , is the fundamentally important difference (at least among some) between the cognitive perspectives of the merchant (focus on transactions for which order is needed), and that of the official (order is needed for which transactions are necessary). The old elite, almost universally, embraced the universalist sensibilities of the official. One spoke of "order"--a multilateral rules based order, for example, or a convergence ordering for normatively infused management of human interaction (socially, economically, politically etc.). It became so common and well established that even academics sought to "understand" and by understanding "manage" it to suit their politics. Perhaps, indeed, it ought to have been the hand of Marco Rubio rather than that of the Vice President, whose fingerprints ought to have been all over this policy-performance. But because today s actually the compressed prequel to tomorrow, and tomorrow one encounters the fight over the succession to the leadership of whatever it is the Republican Party is (the Democratic Party has its own drama, acted out from a script that might well have been lifted from the 1970s' revolutionary times scripts; through now that it is orchestrated from the top perhaps a rethinking of the Cultural Revolution analogy contextualized in an American spirit might be more helpful), that Secretary Rubio and the Vice President might find it increasingly difficult to breath the same air in the same room.
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That leaves us with the text of NSS205. At this point that is almost an afterthought. Its text, as far as one might be tempted to conclude, is not about its own text, but rather he text of NSS2025 serves as subtext to its own politics and the the ambitions of its authors. something with more is is subtext NSS2025 is cut from the same cloth. It might usefully be compared with another--President Trump's On 4 December 2017 the Office of the President of the United States released its national security strategy going forward, Office of the President of the United States, National Security Strategy of the United States (4 Dec. 2017), and against the NSS efforts of the Biden Administration, the erasure of the effects and influence of which appear to have been a significant priority of President Trump and his Administration since resuming office in 2025.
In 2017, The President gave a speech at the unveiling of NSS2017 (Read Trump’s full speech outlining his national security strategy, WPSU (18 Dec. 2017)).
Our new strategy is based on a principled realism, guided by our vital national interests, and rooted in our timeless values. This strategy recognizes that, whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of competition. We accept that vigorous military, economic, and political contests are now playing out all around the world. We face rogue regimes that threaten the United States and our allies. We face terrorist organizations, transnational criminal networks, and others who spread violence and evil around the globe. We also face rival powers, Russia and China, that seek to challenge American influence, values, and wealth. We will attempt to build a great partnership with those and other countries, but in a manner that always protects our national interest. (President Trump Speech 18 December 2017)
But 2025 is not 2017. "America is strong and respected again—and because of that, we are making peaceall over the world.* * * . This document is a roadmap to ensure thatAmerica remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the‘home of freedom on earth. In the years ahead, we will continue to develop every dimension of our national strength—and we will make America safer, richer, freer,greater, and more powerful than ever before" (President Trump, Letter of Transmittal of the NSS2025). The factors remain virtually unchanged, but the analytic environment now changes their signification and the meaning of their relation to the United States, even as the value system, the premises and vision of the United States changes. That is the gulf that separates these two years, now the end and starting points of epochs--the receding era of global convergence and the approaching era of post-global non-territorial empire--is only now becoming more apparent, and one that will survive ant change in American leadership, not because the Americans will it but because it is no longer possible to reverse on a global scale. The old order, the ancien regime, was on display as late as 2024, as the Americans saw off the old era in the glow of the senescence of the Biden Administration (consider the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, "2024 Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment" (see, my reflections Brief Reflections on the Release of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, "2024 Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment")). In 2025, the glimmerings of the strategy heralded in the middle of the first term of the leadership of President Trump was transformed into that of the merchant president of peace ("President Trump is the President of Peace" Reflections on the Power of Presidential Self-Revolution (自我革命), the Republic's Social Revolution (社会革命) and the Presidential Message: "President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal").
That, finally, gets one to the beginning of that road that will lead us to the current version of the American Oz. "The questions before us now are: 1) What should the United States want? 2) What are our available means to get it? and 3) How can we connect ends and means into a viable National Security Strategy?" (NSS2025, pp. 1-5, 2). It is from there that the Strategy emerges (NSS2025, pp. 6-29). It is organized that way one would think an academic would go about things: first the principles, then the priorities, and the their application to regions of interest (which in the case of the United States includes substantially all of the world--or at least all of the world encased within the transactional universe of the United States. It is really quite simple--starting and ending with the U.S. and dedicated to the proposition that the United States must, from its lair, permit everyone to do as they like as long as American interests are undisturbed. That is, that American policy is built, and its national security lens is shaped, as long as the Americans can roam around as they please, to please themselves, then the rest of the world may do as it likes, with the exception of the old colonial homelands, which must be preserved as some sort of historically time locked place protected against both migratory settler colonialism of the Global South and their cultural imperialism.--even if the old homelands are quite content to see (or their ruling vanguards) themselves (again) extinguished amid a slow settler migration that changes things a bit., as it has happened periodically there since the first millennium before the Common Era. Here, perhaps, a howl directed toward a parent with whom the post-colonial child continues to have separation issues--as do, ironically the last wave of post-colonial sovereignty constructed out of the last epoch or territorial empire.
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