This document, required by Congress in legislation, is the most politicized “strategy” document ever to emerge from the U.S. government. All of this seems more like fodder for a Trump rally than a serious strategy document. Both the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in December and this NDS mark a departure from all past U.S. strategy documents, including the 2017 NSS and NDS from the first Trump administration. This document, despite its repeated injunctions about the need for “clear-eyed” realism, seems particularly cursory and deficient. In the absence of any such explanation, the document reads more like a set of magical incantations than a serious strategy.