Some Thoughts on Trump's National Security Strategy

Earlier this week the Trump Administration released its updated National Security Strategy. (See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf ) Needless to say that given the howls that went up, it was far from being universally applauded, especially in Europe. Europe is rightly concerned that the era of having a NATO umbrella over the continent is over. However, given earlier commentaries coming from Vice President Vance, in particular, the document should not come as a surprise. Trump’s policy of selling out allies and cozying up to adversaries is all there in black and white.

I have three preliminary thoughts on the strategy. First, it is harkening back to the America First of 1939-1941. It focuses in on hemispheric security to the exclusion of Europe and just has America First leader Charles Lindbergh was open to a modus vivendi with Nazi Germany, here we have America open to a condominium with Putin’s Russia. It certainly does not bode well for Ukraine and for that matter Israel. Further, the strategy puts policy muscle behind Trump’s Caribbean buildup against Venezuela. To the Trump Administration Latin America is now part of an American economic zone.

Second, there is the strong smell of Yalta in the document. Instead of Roosevelt and Stalin dividing up Europe, we now have Trump, Putin and especially Xi dividing up the world into spheres of interest. The glue holding the deal together is economic self-interest. Where Taiwan fits into this over the longer term is very ambiguous.

Third, there are some hard policy realities behind the document. Europe has the ability to defend itself against Russia; it only lacks the will. Russia remains bogged down in Ukraine after more than three years of war indicating it is not as strong as once thought. If Ukraine can hold its own against Russia, so too can a much larger Europe.

What perhaps pissed off Europe the most was that the document called out its “civilization decline.” Unfortunately, that is the reality, and Europe has to recognize that advanced welfare states cannot run a policy of open borders without severe consequences. Simply put, in a generation Europe will not be the Europe of history. Net net, the policy calls for the U.S. to be an offshore balancer with respect to the world outside of Latin America. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/08/my-review-of-andrew-lamberts-no-more.html )

My Review of Volker Ullrich's "Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933"

The Slow Descent into an Abyss

German historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 , Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939", and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Germany 1923: Hyper Inflation, Hitler's Putsch and...." ) has chronicled the rise and then the slow collapse of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Frank McDonough's "The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933" and  Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benjamin Carter Hett's "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic"   )  Like others Ullrich does not believe that the collapse was inevitable and neither was the rise of Hitler. There was much human agency involved as well as three untimely deaths.

The first and most dramatic was the political assignation of foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922. Rathenau had just shocked Europe with the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviet Union and was working on solving the reparations crisis. He was perhaps the only German statesman that the Allies trusted enough to make a deal on reparations. With his death the road was open to the reparations crisis of 1923 which brought on the occupation of the Ruhr and the hyper-inflation of 1923, a shock that Germany would not really recover from.

The second two would die of natural causes. President Friedrich Ebert died in 1925 paving the way for Paul von Hindenburg and  former prime minister and foreign minister Gustav Stresemann in 1929.  Although Stresemann was the leader of the right wing German National People's Party, he firmly supported the Weimar Constitution and he showed his mettle in Ruhr/inflation crisis of 1923. He was, perhaps, the only politician in Germany who could have taken on Hitler. 

Ullrich believes that, at the outset, Weimar did not do enough to reform German society, especially after the general strike of 1920 put down the Kapp putsch. Whether the Social Democrats had the will and the power to do it is an open question. Indeed, they relied on the Frei Corps to put down a communist revolt in 1919. Of course, had they succeeded, history would have taken a different turn.

To Ullrich the election of the authoritarian Hindenburg represented the hinge of German history. It was Hindenburg along with the machinations of prime ministers Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher that enabled Hitler to come to power in 1933. They though Hitler could be controlled, but they were immediately disabused of that notion.

In my mind Ullrich doesn’t spend enough time on the socialist/communist split. Had those two leftwing parties held together they had the votes to stop Hitler. Instead, the communists went to bed with the Nazi’s in 1931-32 helping to bring down the Bruning government. They did this just when Heinrich Bruning’s policies were on the brink of success at the Lausanne Conference, which suspended reparations payments.

To sum up, Weimar was dealt with a bad hand that it played well for a while, but at the end of the day it wasn’t quite enough. Ullrich warns that today in the West we have a far better hand, but it remains to be seen whether the forces of the populist Right will be contained. We ignore his warning at our peril. 

My Review of Mike Wallace's Gotham at War: A History of New York City, 1933-1945

 Big Apple History Through a Socialist Lens

 

Self-professed leftist historian and John Jay College professor, Mike Wallace has written a history of New York City through the New Deal years and World War II. In reading this long book (976 pages in the print edition), it seemed that it took the full thirteen years of his history. Needless to say, the book is way too long and covers way too much minutia.

 

Wallace discusses at length how the city’s various ethnic groups approached the coming of World War II. His view of New York’s ethnic groups is through the lens of cultural pluralism. Although that view has some merit, he ignores the fact that New York was becoming more homogenized and, on its way, to being a melting pot. He ignores two facets causing this. This first is that the public schools were inculcating Americanism into the minds of its students. Second, he ignores the roll of baseball which put sometimes antagonistic ethnic groups in rooting for their respective teams. Indeed, the Yankee-Dodger subway World Series was a classic and no matter which team they were rooting for, fans marveled at Joe Di Maggio's 56 game hitting streak.

 

With Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 New York’s Jews, the largest Jewish community in the world, stood as one against him. They had to face off against local Nazi’s in the German American Bund and plea with Roosevelt, to no avail, to open immigration for Jews fleeing Europe. Here Wallace ignores the role of the New York mob which stood foursquare behind the Jews in breaking up Nazi rallies. ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Michael Benson's "Gangsters vs. Nazis" ) Wallace rightly notes the perfidy of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger in his downplaying of the Holocaust.

 

Wallace is all-in on the New Deal and LaGuardia’s social democratic vision for New York. What he ignores is that LaGuardia’s vision was funded by a hugely disproportionate amount of dollars flowing from Washington D.C.  Those who followed him did not have the largess of Washington behind them and that put the city on an unsustainable fiscal path. Simply put, to him business was bad and government was good.

 

True to his beliefs Wallace spends an inordinate amount of time on the three-way split between, the communists, the socialists, and the New Deal liberals. This would play out in the dumping of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s VP in 1944. He also ignores the real gravity of the Rosenberg spy ring which went well beyond atomic spying.  

 

Wallace is particularly good at discussing the policy differences between the Fighting Liberals and the Wall Street Warriors in their focus on bringing the U.S. into the war. Both groups had decidedly different war aims. The Fighting Liberals wanted to globalize the New Deal while the Wall Street Warriors following Henry Luce's "Amercian Century,"  wanted to establish U.S. hegemony.  Incidentally, both supported free trade. Many of the architects of the Cold War who came out of Wall Street banks and law firms are here. They include Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Paul Nitze, and John Foster Dulles, who by the way was too cozy with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.

 

We also have a whole bunch of folks who featured in my childhood growing up in New York City in the 1950’s. The include future U.S. Congresswoman Bella Abzug, feminist Betty Friedan, governors Dewey, Harriman, and Rockefeller, expert builder Robert Moses, Congressman Adam Clayton Power, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., Attorney General Herbert Brownell, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and builder Bill Zeckendorf.  All-in-all, quite a cast of characters.

 

The book ends with a discussion on planning for the postwar world. There were many plans drawn up under the belief that the New Deal was still alive. It wasn’t and it pretty much died after the 1938 election. To my mind the planners failed to understand that what New Yorkers wanted were automobiles, houses, and babies. They did not want to be cooped up in apartments the planners imagined. Those desires set off the race to the suburbs of Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey and if you really think about it represented a continuation of the trend that was established in the 1920’s that was interrupted by the depression and the war.

The Economic Obsolescence Risk to NVIDIA GPU's

The financial press has had a field day in discussing the depreciation risk associated with high end NVIDIA GPU chips. However, lurking beneath the surface is the risk of economic obsolescence. That risk will come from the availability of lower cost chips such as the Google Tensor processor. Moreover, additional competition will come from Amazon and Elon Musk who are developing their own chip sets.

The arithmetic is simple. A high-end NVIDIA GPU chip set costs about $60,000 of that $43,800 represents NVIDIA’s extraordinarily high 73% gross margin. In this example NVIDIA’s cost is $16,200. Herein lies the risk. Lower cost chips produced, at say a more normal, but still high 60% gross margin would yield a price of $40,500. Thus, AI competitors using the newer chips would have a significant 1/3 cost advantage thereby rendering the existing NVIDIA chips economically obsolete. In a way NVIDIA could very well become a victim of its own success.

To be sure, NVIDIA is a technological behemoth, and it has its CUDA software to lock in existing customers. Nevertheless, the mere existence of a 73% gross margin will ultimately bring price competition into the GPU landscape.

The Fed is a Prisoner of the Stock Market

After a 6% sell-off from its all-time high the S&P 500, New York Fed Governor John Williams said on Friday that “I still see room for a further adjustment in the near term to the target range for the federal-funds rate to move the stance of policy closer to the range of neutral,” Stocks immediately responded to the signaled rate cut with a strong rally ending the day well off their highs, but up 1% at the close.  Yes, the Fed put is still alive and well.

 

It was no accident that Williams spoke when he did. Put bluntly the economy is being fueled by the bull market in stocks which is enabling the huge investment boom in artificial intelligence and spending by high income investors. Should the stock market falter, both investment and consumption will stall out, triggering a recession.

 

While the stock market has been chugging along the labor market has been weakening and inflation is running at a 3% rate, 1% above the Fed’s target. Were it not for the recent stock market weakness, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee would be facing a close call in its upcoming December meeting in trying to meet its dual mandate of maximum employment and price stability.  Instead, it will likely opt to lower interest rates to appease the stock market.

 

By lowering rates, the Fed will run the risk that investors will soon realize that supporting stock prices will be added to the dual mandate. In the short run that could add fuel to the bull market, but over time investors will realize that the 2% inflation target has given way to 3% or higher to the detriment of both the inflation and labor market mandates. Thus, by being a prisoner of the stock market the Fed will have lost control of its dual mandate and ultimately it will fail because the stock market is too big for the Fed to tame.

American Jews: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

American Jews are between a rock and a hard place politically. With the Democratic Party increasingly dominated by Hamasnicks and the DEI ideology of oppressors versus oppressed where Jews are characterized as oppressors, belonging to the party of our ancestors no longer seems to make sense. For a while, the Republicans appeared to be immune from the antisemitism of the Democrats, but that immunity is no longer there.

 

With Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts sucking up to the antisemitism of Tucker Carlson, the American Right has moved closer to whiffing the noxious fumes of antisemitism. Adding insult to injury, Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with the noted antisemite and Hitler/Stalin lover, mainstreamed Nick Fuentes, and his Groypers into the heart of the Republican Party. I would note here that Tucker Carlson’s son Buckley is now on JD Vance’s staff. History could very well record that the assassination of Charlie Kirk took from us on of the few conservatives who could take on Carlson and Fuentes.

 

To be sure there is real opposition to Fuentes and his gang coming from more establishment Republicans, notably Ted Cruz, but just like the Democrats the energy is with the extremists. Indeed, supporting antisemitism and anti-Zionism is part of a proxy war within both parties to overturn the current status quo. 

 

As a result, it is not comfortable to be a Jew in either party today. However, we have no choice because we have to take the world as it is rather than as we want it to be.

 

So, what is a Jew to do? To me Jews in both parties should fight and fight hard. They should not cower to the bullies in either party and instead take them on aggressively in party councils, the media and in every social interaction. We should remember the lessons pf the 1930’s where cowering in the face of evil does not end well. Further, pressure should be put on all of the Jews who make common cause with the antisemites. Those Jews should either mend their ways or be regarded as fifth columnists.

 

In the meantime, it would not hurt to take self defense classes and weapons training in the event things turn really ugly. As the saying goes, prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.

The Democrats Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

The way I see it the Democrats won the political battle over the government shutdown, but as soon as they attacked the deal they committed an unforced error and gave Trump and the Republicans a victory.  Instead of looking like winners the Democrats became losers. How so? With the shut down the Democrats proved they were no longer comatose and were ready to fight Trump and that stance along with Trump voter buyer's remorse set the stage for huge victories in the off-year election.

On the governing side the Democrats achieved robust funding for the SNAP program, the rehiring of riffed workers during the shutdown and were guaranteed a vote on the Obama Care subsidies in December. The Dems have made short shrift of the pledge for a vote on the subsidies. but here they are wrong. The vote will place the Republicans at the horns of a dilemma. If they do nothing, the Dems will have the perfect issue for the mid-terms and if the Republicans compromise with a lower income limit and a minimum premium the Democrats would have achieved their major goal policy goal for the shutdown. The Dems win either way.

Thus, instead of vilifying the eight Democrats who broke the filibuster, they should in turn, commend them for their political savvy and common sense. Sometimes, in politics, you have to know when to take a win.