NOTE: I didn’t realize the Trump administration recently released a National Security Strategy until Demetri Kofinas sent it with his thoughts this morning in his newsletter (you should subscribe). After reading the NSS, I uploaded it to ChatGPT to see how it stacks up against the framework I built with it last week. Here’s the result, and new ideas to highlight the strengths and flaws of the NSS. (3100 words)
ME: In light of the competitive reindustrialization framework we developed the other day, analyze this National Security Strategy by the government to see where it falls short, and highlight its flaws and strengths. Do a redline critique.
CB:
Redline Critique: National Security Strategy (November 2025)
Subject: Reindustrialization, Trade, and Economic Security Sections
OVERALL ASSESSMENT
The strategy correctly identifies industrial capacity, energy dominance, and supply-chain resilience as core national security priorities. However, its reindustrialization approach lacks the quantitative discipline, competitive filters, and exit mechanisms required to avoid permanent protectionism, cost inflation, and political capture. As written, it risks conflating national security objectives with broad employment and income goals that advanced manufacturing cannot sustainably deliver.
KEY REDLINE ISSUES
1. Missing Quantitative Decision Framework
Issue:
The strategy repeatedly commits to “reindustrialization,” “reshoring,” and “strategic use of tariffs” without defining the economic tests that determine which industries qualify and which must be excluded.
Redline:
Add a formal, binding Reshoring Test requiring:
Full total-cost-of-ownership comparisons (labor, capital, energy, compliance, logistics)
Risk-adjusted scenarios over 10–20 years
Explicit comparison of domestic vs offshore social net present value (NPV)
Rejection of projects that remain structurally uncompetitive without permanent support
Risk if unchanged:
Policy defaults to discretion and politics rather than economic viability.
2. Overreliance on Tariffs as a Primary Instrument
Issue:
Tariffs are presented as a central tool to achieve reshoring, raise living standards, and secure supply chains.
Redline:
Reframe tariffs as:
A temporary, conditional, and secondary instrument
Subordinate to subsidies, procurement guarantees, accelerated depreciation, and financing tools
Automatically expiring unless cost-competitiveness and export benchmarks are met
Risk if unchanged:
Tariffs function as consumer taxes, invite retaliation, entrench inefficient firms, and undermine global competitiveness.
3. No Explicit Exclusion of Non-Viable Sectors
Issue:
The strategy does not clearly exclude labor-intensive, commodity, or price-dominated industries from reshoring efforts.
Redline:
Explicitly rule out:
Commodity textiles, basic steel, low-end consumer electronics, and other scale- and wage-driven sectors
Any industry requiring permanent protection to survive
Risk if unchanged:
Creates political pressure to support industries that cannot become globally competitive under any plausible scenario.
4. Conflation of National Security and Mass Employment Goals
Issue:
The document implies reindustrialization will broadly restore middle-class employment and raise wages across the economy.
Redline:
Clarify that:
Advanced manufacturing is capital-intensive and low-headcount
Industrial policy is not a mass employment or cost-of-living strategy
Income growth must come primarily from services, innovation spillovers, and productivity gains
Risk if unchanged:
Leads to overexpansion of industrial policy and persistent price inflation without commensurate income gains.
5. Absence of Exit Criteria and Automatic Sunsets
Issue:
The strategy provides no mechanism for winding down support once industries mature or fail to meet targets.
Redline:
Require that all support:
Declines on a fixed schedule
Is contingent on measurable cost, productivity, and export milestones
Terminates automatically upon repeated failure
Risk if unchanged:
Industrial support becomes permanent, politicized, and fiscally unsustainable.
6. Lack of Competitiveness Discipline
Issue:
There is no requirement that reshored industries compete in global markets rather than rely on protected domestic demand.
Redline:
Mandate:
Minimum export shares
Benchmarking against global peers
Prohibition on indefinite reliance on captive domestic pricing
Risk if unchanged:
Domestic consumers subsidize inefficiency while global relevance erodes.
AREAS OF STRONG ALIGNMENT WITH YOURS
Correct identification of energy abundance as a prerequisite for industrial competitiveness
Proper emphasis on defense industrial capacity where social returns plausibly exceed private returns
Recognition of supply-chain risk and geopolitical concentration
Rejection of naïve free-trade absolutism
These strengths should be preserved — but disciplined by economic filters.
BOTTOM LINE REDLINE SUMMARY
As written:
The strategy is directionally sound but operationally incomplete. It relies on political instruments where economic discipline is required and risks repeating historical failures of tariff-led reindustrialization.
To align with a competitive reindustrialization framework:
The strategy must replace broad commitments with rule-based selection, quantitative tests, temporary support, and automatic exits — ensuring markets remain the primary allocator and national security intervention remains narrow, targeted, and self-terminating.
ME: This document also expresses a desire to weaken or dismantle international governing institutions in favor of maximizing the freedom of individual nation-states to pursue their own interests. But this raises an obvious question: how is this different from dismantling the U.S. federal government to allow all fifty states to pursue their interests independently? In both cases, the appeal of maximal sovereignty sounds attractive in theory but inevitably runs into real-world problems like shared threats, coordination failures, and collective-action dilemmas that require coherent, enforceable rules.
The document also contains unresolved contradictions. It asserts that all nations should be free to pursue their own self-interest and that U.S. policy should be non-interventionist, yet simultaneously reserves broad discretion for U.S. intervention when American interests are implicated. It rejects imperial action except if we do it. We can provoke and invade Venezuela but China can’t do the same with Taiwan. These tensions reflect an unresolved conflict between sovereignty as an ideal and enforcement in practice. The same rules need to apply to all.
The challenge, then, is not choosing between sovereignty and cooperation, but designing a framework that accommodates both without hypocrisy: one that respects national autonomy while establishing limited, rule-based collective structures capable of managing shared risks, enforcing fair trade, and preserving peace. The question is not whether nations should pursue their interests, but how those interests can be aligned through transparent, reciprocal rules that make cooperation more advantageous than coercion.
CB: Yeah — you’re putting your finger on the core tension in the document, and it’s a real one, not a semantic quibble.
At a high level, the NSS argues for maximum sovereignty and minimal supranational constraint for the United States. The problem is that this logic is scale-invariant. If dismantling international institutions in favor of nation-states is inherently good, then by the same principle dismantling federal authority in favor of states should also be good—and by the same logic again, dismantling state authority in favor of cities, and cities in favor of individuals. Applied recursively, the argument collapses into a coordination wall. At some point, collective problems—trade, security, finance, climate, conflict prevention—require shared rules. Sovereignty without coordination does not scale; it fragments.
The reason we don’t actually believe in infinite decentralization is that some problems are irreducibly collective. Trade standards, shipping lanes, financial settlement, disease control, climate externalities, airspace, nuclear proliferation — these don’t respect borders. You can’t solve them with 200 fully sovereign rulebooks any more than the U.S. could function with 50 incompatible currencies, 50 tariff systems, and 50 separate air-traffic regimes. The Articles of Confederation failed for exactly this reason: maximal sovereignty sounded virtuous until it produced paralysis, free-riding, and conflict.
So the critique isn’t that sovereignty is wrong — it’s that sovereignty without coordination collapses into instability.
Where the NSS is right is in identifying that many international institutions have drifted away from coordination and toward policy imposition. The WTO, IMF, WHO, and others increasingly act less like neutral rule-setters and more like ideological or technocratic governors. That creates backlash because legitimacy in a system like this ultimately comes from consent, not expertise. When institutions stop acting as referees and start acting as legislators, nations push back.
The mistake this document makes is jumping from “these institutions overreached” to “institutions themselves are the problem.” That’s the same error as saying federal overreach means the federal government should be dismantled. History says otherwise.
The better framing — and the one that actually preserves peace — is layered governance with sharply constrained scope:
• Local autonomy where preferences differ
• National sovereignty where identity, taxation, and lawmaking matter
• International coordination where collective action is unavoidable
The key is not who governs, but what is governed at each layer.
The U.S. Constitution solved this by:
Enumerating federal powers narrowly
Reserving everything else to the states
Creating neutral mechanisms (courts, commerce clause, common currency) to resolve interstate friction
The world needs the same architecture, not its demolition.
A realistic peace-preserving model looks like this:
1. Sovereignty over values, coordination over mechanics
Nations should control culture, immigration, taxation, welfare, and political systems. But trade standards, shipping rules, payments, and dispute resolution should be common — not because of ideology, but because fragmentation raises conflict risk.
2. Rules without ideology
International institutions should do less, not more — but what they do should be rules-based, apolitical, and opt-in. The moment institutions attempt moral harmonization, they lose legitimacy.
3. Open trade as a peace mechanism, not a moral one
Trade works when it’s framed as mutual dependence, not virtue. The EU’s original genius wasn’t values — it was coal and steel. You tie economies together where war becomes irrationally expensive.
4. Exit rights, not domination
Institutions must allow exit or opt-out without punishment. That keeps them honest and prevents capture. Forced permanence breeds revolt.
5. Collective enforcement of narrow red lines
Some things must be enforced collectively: freedom of navigation, non-proliferation, contract enforcement, and financial settlement integrity. Without this, power politics fills the vacuum.
So to answer your core question:
How do you balance sovereignty with collective benefit?
By centralizing only what cannot function if decentralized, and decentralizing everything else, with explicit boundaries and exit mechanisms.
World peace doesn’t come from either global government or pure nationalism. It comes from mutual dependency governed by boring rules, not moral crusades — the same reason the U.S. works better with one currency, one commerce clause, and fifty different cultures.
The NSS correctly diagnoses the disease — institutional overreach — but risks prescribing amputation instead of surgery.
ME: Let’s sketch out a simple, minimal constitutional framework that balances national sovereignty with a limited set of shared rules necessary to unlock mutual benefit, stability, and peace. How should such a framework engage countries like China, whose political systems lack protections analogous to the U.S. Bill of Rights, while still respecting their sovereignty?
And this exposes a deeper tension: much of the current National Security Strategy seems less focused on constructing a neutral rules-based order than on preserving U.S. dominance over perceived rivals, a posture that ultimately intensifies the very tensions used to justify decoupling. Is a more innovative rules-based order fundamentally incompatible with genuine sovereignty and international cooperation, or are today’s conflicts simply the result of the old system’s flawed design—suggesting that a better one could succeed?
And maybe even a deeper question is whether an international constitution can exist at all: one that captures the strengths of the U.S. constitutional model with its rule of law, individual rights, consent, and limited power without imposing those values coercively or hypocritically. Such a system would need to be voluntary and opt-in, but if participation is optional, what happens when a nation opts out? Can meaningful trade and cooperation continue, or does the world inevitably fragment into rule-abiding and non-participating blocs? How can we resolve these tensions?
CB: Let’s sketch a “minimum viable international constitution” that can actually work in a world where not everyone shares liberal rights, but sovereignty still matters.
The trick is this: you don’t write a global Bill of Rights as a moral demand (“be like us”), you write a cross-border rulebook (“if you want the benefits of deep integration, you must provide predictable guarantees in the domains where other people and their property touch your system”). That avoids hypocrisy and makes opt-in real.
The Core Design Idea
Rights are tiered and transactional:
Every country keeps sovereignty over its internal system.
But to access higher tiers of trade/finance/tech integration, a country must accept higher tiers of constraints — especially around due process, property security, contract enforcement, and basic human safety in cross-border contexts.
Think of it like internet protocols: you can run your own internal network however you want, but if you want to connect to the global network, you have to speak TCP/IP.
A Simple International Constitution Framework
Preamble
A voluntary compact among sovereign states to reduce conflict and expand mutual prosperity through shared rules, limited scope, and enforceable reciprocity.
Article I — Sovereignty and Non-Interference
States retain full sovereignty over internal governance, culture, religion, and political structure.
The compact does not authorize regime change, ideological enforcement, or domestic political engineering.
Article II — The Non-Negotiable Commons
These are the “you cannot break the shared gameboard” rules:
No territorial conquest by force.
Freedom of navigation in major sea lanes and neutral transit corridors.
Prohibition of mass-casualty aggression (WMD use / nuclear blackmail norms).
Baseline diplomatic protections, consular access standards, and rules for detention of foreign nationals.
This is the “peace layer.”
Article III — The Commerce Constitution
If you want to do business at meaningful scale, you must provide:
Contract enforceability (recognized courts/arbitration outcomes).
Property security (rules against arbitrary expropriation; transparent takings processes).
Non-discrimination in market access (if you allow domestic firms X, you must allow foreign firms X under the same published rules, or explicitly carve out sectors).
Predictable taxation and regulation (no surprise retroactive punishment).
This is not a moral Bill of Rights. It’s a commercial bill of rights.
Article IV — The Reciprocity Engine
Benefits are not “given.” They are earned by compliance.
Violations trigger automatic, proportional responses (not political whim): escrow requirements, higher capital charges, restricted procurement access, targeted tariffs, tech export controls, etc.
This is how you avoid the world becoming a vibes-based tribunal.
Article V — Tiered Membership (Opt-in by Levels)
Here’s the move that solves your China question.
Tier 0: Recognition / Diplomacy
Basic peace norms and dispute channels.
Tier 1: Trade
Commerce Constitution applies, plus arbitration acceptance.
Tier 2: Finance
Additional rules: transparency for systemic risk, settlement reliability, enforceable creditor rights, auditable reserves for major institutions dealing cross-border.
Tier 3: Data + Tech Integration
Strong rules: IP protection, cyber non-aggression norms (esp. critical infrastructure), data handling, and verifiable boundaries around state access.
Tier 4: Human Rights Protocol (Optional Add-On)
This is where you can mirror the “beauty” of constitutional liberties: speech protections, political rights, minority protections, etc.
But crucially: it’s an add-on, not a prerequisite for basic trade.
This creates a world where countries can join the system without pretending they’re liberal democracies — but also where liberal democracies can choose deeper integration with each other without being forced into naive openness with everyone.
Article VI — A Narrow International Court System
Not a global legislature. A limited court with jurisdiction only over:
Compact rules (trade/finance/commons)
Treaty disputes
Arbitration enforcement
No authority over domestic governance.
Article VII — Exit, Opt-Out, and Re-Entry
Any state can leave.
Leaving triggers predictable consequences: you revert to Tier 0 or Tier 1 rules, and higher-risk terms apply.
Re-entry is allowed after compliance windows.
Exit rights prevent empire vibes.
How This Deals With Countries Like China
You respect sovereignty by not demanding internal liberalization as the entry ticket. Instead you say:
“If you want deep access to our markets, capital, and technology, you must guarantee predictable treatment of our people, contracts, companies, IP, and data in the cross-border domain.”
China could remain China internally — but to participate at Tier 2–3 levels, it would need to accept constraints that directly reduce the things other countries fear: arbitrary detentions, forced tech transfer, IP seizure, opaque subsidies, cyber theft, state capture of private firms, etc.
This is realistic because it doesn’t require them to become the U.S. It requires them to be reliable in defined interfaces.
If they refuse, fine — they can still do Tier 1 trade under stricter terms.
Are “preserving US empire” and building this kind of constitution incompatible?
They can be, depending on what “empire” means.
If “empire” means unilateral discretion, dominance, and rules that apply to others but not the U.S., then yes — incompatible.
If “empire” means leadership through rule-setting and alliance structure, then not incompatible — if the U.S. is genuinely willing to be bound by the same compact constraints in the domains it signs.
The hypocrisy problem is solved the same way constitutional legitimacy is solved domestically: self-binding. The U.S. would have to accept that it can’t break the rules because it’s strong.
What if a country opts out?
Then yes, you naturally get a world with two broad zones:
Rule-integrated zone (higher trust, lower friction, deeper capital + tech integration)
Opt-out / limited-trust zone (basic trade possible, but higher risk pricing, less tech sharing, more restrictions)
That division is not automatically bad. It’s basically how credit markets work: not everyone gets prime rates.
Can we still do business with opt-outs?
Yes — but under “risk-priced” conditions:
more escrow / prepayment
narrower tech transfer
tighter export controls
higher compliance burden
smaller exposure limits for banks
more supply-chain diversification requirements
You aren’t “punishing” them morally — you’re acknowledging that trust is a measurable input.
The big philosophical answer
An international constitution that “copies the beauty” of the U.S. Constitution works only if it copies the structure, not the culture.
The U.S. Constitution succeeds because it:
limits scope
separates powers
allows local autonomy
binds the center
has enforcement mechanisms
has exit valves (amendments, elections, courts)
So the international version should be:
limited scope (commons + trade/finance interfaces)
tiered consent
reciprocity
self-binding by the powerful
exit rights
ME: My impression is the US is not genuinely interested in constructing a fair, neutral system that would meaningfully constrain its own power. Instead, the “America First” posture is paired with economically unsound policies that favor political signaling over long-term sustainability, revealing a strategy driven more by domestic posturing than by coherent economic or institutional design, and aimed at extending dominance by suppressing others rather than lifting the system as a whole. What do you think?
CB: My opinion (straight, not diplomatic)
Your critique is largely correct, but it benefits from one important nuance.
You’re right that:
The NSS is not designed to bind U.S. power symmetrically the way a true neutral rules-based order would.
“America First” often conflates legitimate sovereignty concerns with economically sloppy tools (tariffs, blunt reshoring, mercantilist framing).
Much of the document reads as power-preservation strategy, not constitutional system design.
The rhetoric of non-intervention and sovereignty is selectively applied, which creates hypocrisy and accelerates distrust.
Where I’d slightly refine your conclusion:
This isn’t unique corruption or incompetence so much as a structural feature of hegemonic decline.
Empires never voluntarily design systems that truly limit themselves while they still have leverage.
The U.S. is acting exactly like a late-stage hegemon trying to slow relative decline—not like a country trying to found a post-hegemonic order.
So the core failure isn’t just bad faith—it’s a mismatch between rhetoric and historical reality. The U.S. wants:
Sovereignty for itself
Rules for others
Flexibility to intervene
Immunity from constraint
That combination is unstable, and markets, allies, and rivals all sense it.
Your instinct to move toward a constitutional, opt-in, incentive-aligned global framework is the correct next step intellectually—even if it’s politically premature. History suggests systems like that only emerge after the current power structure exhausts itself.
ME: I agree. It’s the last gasps of a dying empire.
