“We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.” —U.S. National Security Strategy, 2025, p. 14.
The National Security Strategy began in 1991 as a requirement of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act — a mandate that every president annually explain to Congress how the nation understands its threats, the tools to meet them, and the principles guiding its power. Born in the twilight of the Cold War, the NSS was supposed to help avoid catastrophic miscalculation. It was meant to force clarity, accountability, and strategic coherence.
Since then, the “annually” part has been discarded. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama each issued two NSS documents in their two terms. In 2002, the internationally suspect Bush Doctrine of “preventive war” was introduced in the NSS. In 2010, Obama gave climate change serious attention. In 2022, Joe Biden’s administration gave it even more. The Trump gang took an ax to this.
Over the decades, the NSS evolved along with the threats. However, even that first NSS nearly 35 years ago acknowledged emerging “environmental security” concerns — a phrase that seems almost quaint now, but was startling back then. It marked the first glint of recognition that human-driven ecological damage would affect global order, stability, and security. As National Security Adviser Anthony Lake wrote in the early 1990s, global challenges such as climate and resource scarcity were becoming “central to our security.”
The Department of Defense was in the 1990s already out ahead in analyzing climate risk, with intelligence briefings, making readiness assessments, and beginning to review military basing decisions by incorporating predictions of sea-level rise, extreme weather, and potential geopolitical destabilization. The Pentagon, infamous for bureaucratic inertia, didn’t stumble into climate awareness by accident. It saw what was coming and has ever since planned for it, although critics rightly point out that the plans often stumble in implementation or don’t go far enough.
But now the United States has a new National Security Strategy that rejects the whole concept of climate change, much less a climate crisis or emergency. Several critics have pointed out since it was released last Friday that the document is a fossil-fuel tantrum, a grievance manifesto.
Before looking more closely at the Trump document, a comparison with the 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy is instructive. It mentions climate 28 times, versus the single instance in the latest 2025 edition, which addresses climate with what amounts to a a snarl and a pfffffffft. Here’s p. 47 from the Obama NSS:
Climate Change: The danger from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of land across the globe. The United States will therefore confront climate change based upon clear guidance from the science, and in cooperation with all nations—for there is no effective solution to climate change that does not depend upon all nations taking responsibility for their own actions and for the planet we will leave behind.
Home: Our effort begins with the steps that we are taking at home. We will stimulate our energy economy at home, reinvigorate the U.S. domestic nuclear industry, increase our efficiency standards, invest in renewable energy, and provide the incentives that make clean energy the profitable kind of energy. This will allow us to make deep cuts in emissions—in the range of 17 percent by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050. This will depend in part upon comprehensive legislation and its effective implementation.
Abroad: Regionally, we will build on efforts in Asia, the Americas, and Africa to forge new clean energy partnerships. Globally, we will seek to implement and build on the Copenhagen Accord, and ensure a response to climate change that draws upon decisive action by all nations. Our goal is an effective, international effort in which all major economies commit to ambitious national action to reduce their emissions, nations meet their commitments in a transparent manner, and the necessary financing is mobilized so that developing countries can adapt to climate change, mitigate its impacts, conserve forests, and invest in clean energy technologies. We will pursue this global cooperation through multiple avenues, with a focus on advancing cooperation that works. We accept the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities, but will insist that any approach draws upon each nation taking responsibility for its own actions.
It cannot be forgotten, of course, that the United States fell far behind the climate goals described above. But the intent was there, and the matter was taken seriously even if implementation fell short, in great part because of climate-denying, fossil-fueled propaganda and politician puppets. When Joe Biden became president, the intent to address the crisis was greater in the 2022 NSS, which emerged as an expanded redefinition of what “national security” means in the 21st Century.
The document declared “the climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.” It said a warming planet threatens “food and water supplies, public health, infrastructure and our national security.” By placing climate change alongside, and arguably above, traditional geopolitical dangers, the 2022 NSS insisted that climate must be integrated into every facet of U.S. strategy — diplomacy, industry, infrastructure, defense, and alliances. Global action “begins at home,” it said, referencing sweeping domestic investments in clean energy and climate resilience under the now-gutted Inflation Reduction Act — framing the domestic green transition not as niche environmental policy but as central to national strength.
This reframing mattered not just rhetorically but structurally. The 2022 NSS set out a dual track: a strategy of competition with authoritarian adversaries — principally geopolitical — and a parallel strategy to meet “shared transnational threats,” among them climate change, global health, and food security. In doing so, the Biden administration rejected the zero-sum logic pitting great-power rivalry against global cooperation, arguing instead that “cooperation on shared challenges” is not a distraction, but a core pillar of long-term U.S. strength and global peace.
By elevating climate to a top-tier threat on par with military threats from China and Russia, the 2022 NSS recognized that destabilization caused by climate extremes — drought, floods, resource collapse, mass migration, ecological collapse — can undermine security directly, including an increase in humanitarian burdens, refugee flows, supply chain disruptions, and military unreadiness. As analysts at the Center for Climate & Security noted, the NSS brought climate into the strategic core.
In short: the 2022 NSS transformed climate from peripheral policy issue to a central security imperative. It treated the planet not as backdrop.
GOING BACKWARD AND PRETENDING IT’S FORWARD
The Trump NSS, on the other hand, retreats on many other subjects besides climate. Indeed, the Brookings Institution calls the Trumpian NSS “a full-scale repudiation of America’s approach to the world over the last 80 years.”
As noted, “climate appears just once in its 33 pages. Not as a threat to the United States. Not as a driver of conflict, migration, or global instability. Not as the source of record-breaking heat, crop failures, megafires, or coastal collapse. With 2024 being the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, climate-oriented policies are described as a “disastrous” ideology. A European mistake. A geopolitical burden, not a response to a growing physical reality.
Compare this strategic abandonment to the clarity of the 2010 NSS, which warned: “The danger from climate change is real, urgent, and severe.” Or to the 2022 NSS, which declared climate change “the existential challenge of our time.” The 2025 NSS is obsessed with energy — but only oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear. It deploys “Energy Dominance” as if it were a constitutional amendment. It frames oil and gas expansion as a patriotic imperative, a geopolitical cudgel, a means to discipline both allies and adversaries. Europe, in particular, becomes a kind of boogeyman — an object of resentment instead of an ally against autocracy. The document essentially is a warning about what supposedly happens to nations that choose decarbonization without referencing what happens to those that don’t.
The 2025 document rails against “European bureaucrats” who supposedly “crippled” their economies with green policy. It treats climate leadership not as cooperation but surrender. Not as security but weakness. The Pentagon has long warned that climate change is a “threat multiplier.” This isn’t the jargon of “radical left lunatics’.” Climate disasters strain bases, interrupt training cycles, destroy infrastructure, force humanitarian deployments, and destabilize regions where the United States has vital interests. But the 2025 NSS refuses to include even the most basic, empirically supported DoD assessments. It pretends the past 30 years of climate-security analysis simply never happened.
This is less “strategy” than strategic sabotage.
The deepest shame of the 2025 NSS is not its analytical failure but its moral failure. Climate change hits hardest the people with the least political power: frontline Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor communities; global South nations; workers trapped in dying industries; migrants fleeing famine and fire. When the 2025 NSS erases the climate crisis, it erases these people, erases justice for them, erases their future.
A serious NSS rooted in evidence and justice instead of Trump’s grudges and ignorance would:
Restore “climate change” as a core strategic threat, not as some casual insult.
Launch a national mobilization for climate resilience from infrastructure to public health.
Forge alliances around decarbonization, not fossil extraction.
Invest in climate-ready defense systems, including bases hardened against extreme weather.
Address climate migration with dignity and long-term planning.
Center frontline communities to ensure climate security does not add to inequality.
National security, stripped of climate realism, is hollow. The 2025 NSS is a fantasy. It imagines a world where fossil fuels guarantee permanent political clout, where climate is ideology rather than existential threat, where wildfires, floods, droughts, famines, heat waves, sea-level rise, and migrating diseases politely stay outside national borders. But the climate crisis doesn’t negotiate. It accelerates. And by pretending otherwise, the Trump regime has produced not a strategy, but a suicide note disguised as policy.
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