"Why are we facing this fascism? The answer is that the fundamental cause of this fascism is the fact that this system of capitalism-imperialism is running up against its limits."

—Bob Avakian, REVOLUTION #118 (read more below)

A National Security Statement (NSS) is a document from a country’s executive branch. It is released periodically to address how the country’s leadership understands its central goals and interests. It identifies perceived threats to the country, and the basic approach it plans to take in dealing with them. It is intended to convey—and unite key officials around—a strategic vision for the period ahead. 

Last week, the Trump/MAGA fascist regime released a new NSS. The document represents a comprehensive fascist agenda—for the U.S. and the planet. It is full of lies and threats on many different fronts, but we will outline here four main themes of this NSS, and three key points of orientation.

1. The NSS claims the U.S. must much more thoroughly dominate the entire Western Hemisphere, from Greenland and Canada in the north, to Tierra Del Fuego at the tip of South America. It is putting up a virtual “Keep Out” sign (called “the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”¹) to other world powers, especially China. China has over the past decade significantly upped its trade, investment and aid in Latin America. It has funded infrastructure projects including roads, telecommunication networks, etc. The U.S. now intends to undermine, limit and roll this back. As the NSS contends, "The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity."

The statement calls for re-deploying U.S. military forces (land, air and sea) from bases in the U.S. and around the world to be more focused on, and positioned to, act against countries in Latin America. This would provide a stronger foundation, in their view, for U.S. aggression across the planet. Already the U.S. is acting in the region to strengthen fascist regimes and to undermine, drive out and even militarily attack governments that are not themselves fascist, or servile (slavelike) enough to a Trump fascist America. (This is what they're doing now in Venezuela.)

2. The NSS declares that the “Era of Mass Migration is Over.” It calls for even more—and more deadly—military and police forces to be utilized at the U.S.’s border with Mexico and declares that all countries in the Americas also have an obligation to “control” their borders. The implication—“if you don’t do it, we’ll do it for you.”  

To be clear, the regime does not put forward a solution to the global refugee crisis. Nor can this be solved in the interests of humanity under the system of capitalism-imperialism. It is this system, with its plundering of resources, wars and climate devastation which has driven over 40 million refugees from their homelands and created another 75 million more internal refugees.² But what the NSS is saying is that the Trump regime is moving to further hammer down a world of borders enforced through violence, torture and mass detentions.

3. The regime is launching an ideological battle to promote white supremacy, male supremacy, and hatred of “foreigners” in the U.S. and Europe.

The NSS ties "long-term security" to "the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health." It whitewashes American history and upholds forced patriotism, "We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age." The statement openly links this to the patriarchal family: "This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children." 

The Christian fascist logic of this was articulated by Kristin Kobes du Mez in her book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation: 

White evangelicals have pieced together this patchwork of issues, and a nostalgic commitment to rugged, aggressive, militant white masculinity serves as the thread binding them together into a coherent whole. A father’s rule in the home is inextricably linked to heroic leadership on the national stage, and the fate of the nation hinges on both.³ [emphasis added here] 

With this as a foundation, the NSS claims that Europe is facing "civilizational erasure" and is in imminent danger of losing its "Western" [aka white Christian] "identity." The statement implies support for fascist parties and organizations in European countries.

4. The NSS calls for stepping up economic competition with China, while the U.S. prepares itself, and states allied with it, for military confrontations in East Asia. The U.S. has the largest military in the world and an enormous nuclear arsenal. It is refocusing even more of this to be positioned and readied for war with China. While the U.S. claims the entire Western Hemisphere as “its own,” it also demands “free and open sea lanes” worldwide—and in particular around China and the South China Sea. The document has dropped some of the openly antagonistic language against China used by the Biden administration. But it sets forth a number of critical components to much more forcefully contend with China. These include the above-mentioned locking down the hemisphere and strengthening fascist influence in Europe. 

Three Key Points of Orientation: We Are in Dangerous Times, but the Future Is Unwritten

1. The program laid out in the NSS is a vision for how the fascists now in power see dealing with extreme problems they face in maintaining the U.S. as top dog in a world of tremendous upheaval and volatility. Because the NSS is so clearly reflecting a fascist ideology, and because it seems so out of step with the big changes in the world, many anti-Trump analysts have dismissed this as "incoherent babble." To the contrary, the NSS is deadly serious. The fascists are moving quickly to lock this into place using the full repressive apparatus of the system to do so. And they are unleashing an unthinking fascist social base of millions who feel they are on a "mission from god" to reclaim the U.S. as a white Christian nation running roughshod over the world.

2. But the fascists do NOT have this situation all sewn up. For one thing, people—and powers—in other countries have their own interests and may not just cave in. For another—and even more fundamental—point, this NSS reflects the ways that longstanding norms and ways of functioning are being torn up. The NSS is responding to the fact that, because of the big changes in the world, the imperialists can no longer rule in the old way that people have been conditioned to accept. ⁴

This has led to what Bob Avakian has recognized as a rare time when revolution has become more possible, even in this powerful country.

How this will develop is uncertain. But, again, the fascists are facing enormous challenges, and they are resorting to extreme—fascist—ways of holding on to and extending the domination of imperialism, with all the catastrophic consequences for humanity that will result. 

There are also profoundly sharp and deep divides among the rulers themselves, with many still within the ruling institutions who feel this whole fascist remaking of society represents a dire threat to how they see the U.S. and its standing in the world. This includes people who, for example, strongly oppose the orientation and tone toward Europe that is in the NSS, among other things. 

The qualitative transformations this regime is aiming at, the big problems they face in doing so, and the still existing splits within the dominant ruling institutions underscore the urgency—and profound basis—for what Bob Avakian called for in his major statement last September, The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!:

...the decent people, in the millions and tens of millions, who deep in their hearts abhor this fascism, must seize the initiative themselves, rising with nonviolent but powerful determination to reset the terms, creating a massive “political earthquake from below,” bringing about a profound political crisis such that the completely illegitimate nature of the Trump fascist regime stands out all the more sharply, provoking and motivating major shifts and realignments throughout society, including within the dominant and ruling institutions, such that this regime can no longer function and cannot remain in power.

3. The NSS is a vision of cutthroat imperialist competition, in a world of vicious exploitation, climate catastrophe, and the very real threat of nuclear war. But as the revcoms have stated in the Declaration, We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System:

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.

The Declaration goes on to say that for that to happen, the existing capitalist-imperialist system and its institutions of government in this country must be abolished and dismantled—and replaced by a new socialist system, based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Such a revolution is actually more possible in this period when the rulers are at each other’s throats… when huge changes happen not only weekly but daily… and all this can “force people to question… the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way.” How this can happen—and what the revolutionaries must do to realize this urgent emancipating goal—is addressed by Bob Avakian here, and here, and many other places.