Trump’s Tyrannic Empire and How the Strategy is Dangerous: Jeffrey Sachs
Trump’s Tyrannic Empire, How the 2025 National Security Strategy Signals a Dangerous Turn for American Power
By reframing recent events through the lens of President Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, economist Jeffrey Sachs delivers a stark warning about the direction of United States power, credibility, and global leadership. From the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker on the high seas to Denmark’s unprecedented anxiety over Greenland, these are not isolated incidents. Together, they reveal a coherent but deeply troubling doctrine that translates ideological arrogance into real world coercion.
At its core, the 2025 National Security Strategy presents itself as a blueprint for renewing American strength. Yet beneath its confident tone lie four assumptions that Sachs identifies as profoundly misguided and ultimately self-defeating.
First, the strategy is driven by grandiloquence. It assumes that the United States retains unrivaled dominance across military, financial, technological, and economic spheres. This belief is repeated as fact rather than tested against reality. Such self-assured language is not merely rhetorical pride, it functions as justification for unilateral action and the imposition of American will on weaker states.
Second, the strategy embraces a distinctly Machiavellian worldview. Other nations are not seen as partners with shared interests, but as instruments to be manipulated in service of US advantage. Cooperation is not framed as mutual gain, but as leverage extraction, where markets, finance, security guarantees, and technological access become bargaining chips to compel obedience.
Third, the NSS is grounded in a naive nationalism that rejects international law and institutions. Treaties, multilateral organizations, and global norms are portrayed as obstacles to sovereignty rather than as frameworks that historically amplified American power and legitimacy. In this worldview, sovereignty means freedom to coerce, not responsibility to uphold rules.
Fourth, and most alarming, the strategy reflects a growing brutality in the use of intelligence agencies and military force. Only days after the NSS was published, the United States seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil on the high seas, citing alleged prior violations of US sanctions against Iran. This action was neither defensive nor legal. Under international law, only the United Nations Security Council has authority to seize vessels in international waters. The seizure was instead a coercive act aimed at regime change in Venezuela, reinforced by Trump’s own admission that he ordered the CIA to conduct covert destabilization operations inside the country.
Sachs argues that American security is not strengthened by behaving like a tyrant. It is weakened structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that intimidates its neighbors, frightens its allies, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.
To be fair, the NSS does contain fleeting moments of realism. It implicitly concedes that the United States cannot and should not attempt to dominate the entire world. It acknowledges that certain allies have drawn Washington into costly wars that did not serve genuine American interests. Furthermore, it even distances itself rhetorically from the fantasy of imposing a universal political order.
Yet this restraint quickly evaporates. The document soon reasserts claims of America having the world’s most innovative economy, the largest financial system, the most advanced technology sector, and the most powerful military. These assertions do more than flatter domestic audiences. They are deployed as moral license to impose American preferences on others. Since the United States cannot coerce other nuclear armed powers directly, smaller states are left to absorb the pressure.
This approach is most explicit in the Western Hemisphere section of the NSS, which announces a so-called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Latin America is declared off limits to hostile foreign influence, with aid, trade, and alliances conditioned on reducing such influence. In practice, this is a thinly veiled warning against Chinese investment, infrastructure projects, and financing.
The strategy states openly that agreements with countries most dependent on the United States must result in exclusive contracts for American firms. US policy is instructed to obstruct foreign companies building infrastructure in the region and to reshape institutions like the World Bank to serve American interests first. Latin American governments are effectively told they must choose Washington over Beijing or face consequences.
Sachs calls this approach naive. China is already the main trading partner for most of the world, including many countries in the Western Hemisphere. The United States lacks the capacity to force these nations to expel Chinese firms, and attempting to do so will severely damage US diplomacy and credibility.
What makes the doctrine even more extraordinary is that its coercive logic now alarms America’s closest allies. Denmark, long one of Washington’s most loyal NATO partners, has publicly acknowledged that the United States could pose a threat to Danish national security. Danish defense officials have stated openly that they can no longer assume Washington would respect Danish sovereignty over Greenland, and must prepare for possible coercion.
This fear is not paranoia. The US Department of Defense recently removed the commander of the Pituffik space base in Greenland after she publicly distanced herself from Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks toward Denmark. Greenland already hosts critical US military infrastructure, and Denmark has shown no hostility toward Washington. Its response is simply rational in a world where US behavior has become unpredictable, even toward allies.
That Denmark now feels compelled to consider defensive measures against the United States signals a profound erosion of trust. This is no longer merely a problem of vulnerable states in Latin America. It represents a systemic crisis within the US led security architecture itself. Nations that once saw Washington as the guarantor of stability now see a potential aggressor.
Rather than reducing global tensions, the NSS appears to redirect American power away from large scale wars toward the intimidation of smaller states. Sanctions, financial coercion, asset seizures, and high seas enforcement are becoming preferred tools of dominance.
Perhaps the most damaging flaw of the strategy is what it omits entirely, a commitment to international law, reciprocity, and basic decency. Global governance is dismissed as an obstacle. Climate cooperation is derided as ideology. International institutions are treated as instruments to be bent to American preference rather than shared systems of rule.
Historically, these legal frameworks have protected American interests. The founders of the United States understood that pooling sovereignty through a constitution strengthened security rather than weakened it. After World War II, US leadership helped create the United Nations, Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization, and arms control agreements for the same reason.
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Trump’s NSS reverses this logic. It defines sovereignty as the freedom to coerce others. From this perspective, the Venezuelan tanker seizure and Denmark’s fears over Greenland are not aberrations, they are expressions of doctrine.
Sachs draws a sobering parallel from history. In 416 BC, Imperial Athens told the small island of Melos that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Twelve years later, Athens fell to Sparta, undone by its arrogance and contempt for smaller states, which galvanized resistance against it.
The 2025 National Security Strategy echoes the same logic. It elevates power over right, coercion over consent, and domination over diplomacy. Such a path does not secure American safety. It corrodes it.
A durable American security strategy, Sachs argues, must rest on very different foundations. Acceptance of a pluralistic world, respect for international law as a source of sovereignty, commitment to global cooperation on climate, health, and technology, and recognition that US influence depends more on persuasion than coercion. Without these pillars, American power risks becoming not a source of stability, but a catalyst for its own decline.
