National Grief

For most of my life I carried a picture of leadership and of America that was not perfect but was at least pointed in the right direction. I believed that people at the top were supposed to serve something larger than themselves and that the country itself stood for a set of ideas that anyone could join if they were willing to sign on. Reading this new National Security Strategy and seeing what it normalizes makes that belief feel naive and almost embarrassing. It is like realizing that the language I spoke for decades about leadership and American ideals has quietly been replaced with something colder and harsher while I was busy working and raising a family.

I am around sixty now and have spent my life in technology. I managed people. I tried to be fair. I built some small companies that paid salaries and shipped code but nothing that ever made the WSJ... My sense of leadership came from learning to listen to engineers who knew more than I did about some subsystem and from trying to create an environment where smart people could argue hard without turning into enemies. I was never seduced by the idea that a single strong leader single handedly saves a company. I lived the reality that everything is systems and relationships and incentives and that leaders are custodians not saviors. Reading a national strategy that declares that the success of past decades came down to one man making the right choices attacks my entire lived experience of what leadership actually looks like when it works. The document states plainly “None of this was inevitable. President Trump’s first administration proved that with the right leadership making the right choices, all of the above could—and should—have been avoided.”

Leadership theory only confirmed what I saw on the ground. Good leadership distributes authority. It sets direction and then gets out of the way enough to let competence flourish. It creates psychological safety so people can tell the truth when something is broken. It respects expertise and does not need to humiliate or purge people in order to feel strong. The strategy text I am staring at does the opposite. It wraps the whole project around the personal will and special insight of one leader. In the Asia section it proclaims “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China.” It celebrates how he “has leveraged his dealmaking ability to secure unprecedented peace in eight conflicts throughout the world” and credits outcomes to “presidential diplomacy.” It divides the world into loyalists and traitors. In the opening section it declares “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country” and accuses these same elites of having “lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism.” That is not adaptive leadership. It is a textbook example of brittle top down control that survives by picking internal enemies. I can feel my professional instincts recoil from it.

There is another layer to why this hurts. My father served in the army right after the Second World War. My grandfather was of German descent and knew in his bones what that war had meant. He could talk about how the best part of America stood against a worldview that sorted people by blood and culture and decided who counted and who did not. He understood that America at its best fought for an idea of citizenship that was not tied to ancestry. When he explained what America had been defending in that war it was not domination or resources. It was the idea that individuals are more than their tribe and that governments exist to protect rights not to manage the purity of a nation. The document in front of me speaks in a different register. Under its priorities section it declares “The era of mass migration must end” and warns “Who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” In the Europe section it states “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European” and then asks “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” That cuts directly across what my grandfather tried to teach me about the meaning of that war.

I grew up thinking of America as flawed but self correcting. The story I was handed said that the country sometimes went badly off course but that it also carried within it a commitment to widen the circle over time. I watched civil rights law, immigration reform, and cultural change with that frame in mind. The new strategy feels like a deliberate reversal of that trajectory. It describes wanting a world “in which migration is not merely ‘orderly’ but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows.” Regarding Europe it warns of “civilizational erasure” stemming from “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife” along with “loss of national identities and self-confidence.” Under its sovereignty principle the strategy describes threats including “the cynical manipulation of our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country.” For someone who internalized the idea that out of many we become one this is not just a disagreement. It feels like the country I thought I belonged to is being redesigned into something that would have told my own ancestors that they were suspect.

There is also the question of how a nation treats its friends. The America I thought my father had served believed in alliances that rested on shared principles. When presidents invoked the free world they were not always honest but they at least pretended that certain forms of government and certain rights mattered beyond narrow self interest. In this strategy allies are mostly described as cost centers that must be brought into line. Under burden sharing it declares “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” It states “We will no longer tolerate, and can no longer afford, free-riding, trade imbalances, predatory economic practices, and other impositions on our nation’s historic goodwill.” It announces that with “the Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense” the United States will be “asking allies to assume primary responsibility for their regions.” What I was proud of in American leadership was that it tried to offer a model and to persuade. What I see now is a country threatening and bargaining like a monopolist.

As someone who has managed teams and companies I am struck by how much contempt the strategy shows for any concept of shared governance. It attacks international institutions by declaring that past elites “lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.” Under its principles it insists “The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state” and treats every form of cooperative constraint as hostile. That is the opposite of the lesson I learned building software systems that had to speak to other systems. In my world interfaces and standards made everything more powerful. In the world described in this document every interface is presumed hostile unless it can be bent fully to American advantage. It is a philosophy that understands only control or vulnerability. There is no room for mutual constraint, even though that was exactly the postwar invention that my fathers generation helped build.

The civic part of me that loved the Declaration of Independence feels betrayed as well. The text of the strategy invokes the founders and their language about nations having “a ‘separate and equal station’ with respect to one another.” But in practice it lays out a plan to dominate a hemisphere economically and to force countries to choose an American led order or suffer consequences. Regarding Latin America it states “The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies.” It promises to use “U.S. leverage in finance and technology to induce countries to reject such assistance” from competitors and declares “we should make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region.” Meanwhile the flexible realism principle proclaims “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests” and promises to “seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” My grandfather would recognize in this the same great power behavior that the United States once claimed to oppose. It is hard to reconcile this with the story he told about a nation that rose not simply as another empire but as something qualitatively different.

At sixty I know that ideals are never fully realized. I have seen layoffs that were justified as necessary restructurings when they were really about short term numbers. I have seen managers talk about values while quietly rewarding whatever closed the deal. I did not expect my country to be immune from that. But there is a difference between hypocrisy that knows it is falling short of a standard and a deliberate rewriting of the standard itself. This document feels like the latter. It does not sheepishly apologize for failing to live up to tolerant, pluralist, rights based ideals. It replaces them with a narrower definition of who counts and what matters and then calls that realism. The principles section proclaims that policy “is not grounded in traditional, political ideology” but rather “is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, ‘America First.’” For someone who tried to live within that older frame even with all its contradictions, that feels like a kind of mourning.

The hardest part is that I cannot point to one clean betrayal. Instead I see a pattern. Leadership is no longer about nourishing institutions. It is about exalting a single figure who single handedly reversed decades of error while everyone else was either corrupt or mistaken. American purpose is no longer expressed as an aspiration that strangers can share. It is recast as the defense of a fixed culture under siege from civilizational erasure. Alliances are no longer communities of principle. They are payment plans where we will no longer tolerate free riding and where the price of partnership is meeting spending quotas. The war my father brushed up against and my grandfather carried in memory is no longer presented as a warning against these tendencies. It is mined for symbolism while its deepest lessons about nationalism and the treatment of the other are set aside. I am left feeling like the country that shaped me is being stripped for parts while still flying the same flag.

That feeling is not abstract. It colors how I move through my remaining years. I spent decades teaching younger colleagues that leadership meant taking responsibility without taking all the credit. I told them that America, for all its sins, still represented a bet on human beings being more than their origins. Now I see the highest levels of my government teaching the opposite. The strategy warns that certain NATO allies may become majority non European and questions whether their character will remain aligned with ours. It describes a world where who a country admits defines the future of that nation. It describes immigration policy as potentially serving the cynical manipulation of our system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests. I am old enough to know that history is never finished and that there can be reversals of the reversals. But in this moment the grief is real. It is the grief of someone who thought he knew what his own country was trying to be and has had to admit that the story he carried and the story now being written have drifted far apart.