Eldritch Imperatives: A Critique of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy

The Pacific Council on International Policy
Senior Analysis Division — Cthulhu for America 2028

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy has arrived in Washington like a tome best left unopened: dense, self-assured, and radiating an energy that unsettles anyone who reads past the executive summary. Defense hawks are thrilled. Allied capitals are alarmed. Analysts at the usual institutions have called it everything from “incoherent babble” to a blueprint for “ending the international system as we know it.”
They’re not wrong. But they lack vision.

As senior advisors to the Cthulhu for America 2028 campaign and analysts at the Pacific Council, we offer a dual assessment. First, we evaluate the NSS on its own terms and find it wanting: overcomplicated, internally contradictory, strategically unserious. Second, we propose what the strategy gropes toward but cannot articulate: a permanent solution to American hegemony that no mortal policy can deliver.

The NSS wants dominance without paying for it. We offer dominance at a price Washington refuses to name.

I. The Underpants Gnomes Theory of Grand Strategy

The 2025 NSS reads less like a strategic document and more like a mood board: aspirational, emotive, and curiously vague about causation. It promises to restore American dominance in the Western Hemisphere, reindustrialize the homeland, reshape European domestic politics, deter China, manage Russia, secure the border, and purify the national culture—all simultaneously, all without specifying how these objectives connect or what tradeoffs they require.

Strategic planners call this the “underpants gnomes” problem, after the South Park creatures whose business plan proceeds: Step 1, collect underpants; Step 2, ???; Step 3, profit.

The NSS version runs: Step 1, announce maximalist goals; Step 2, unspecified mechanisms; Step 3, peace through strength.

Consider the promised “complete supply chain independence” in pharmaceuticals, rare earths, and critical minerals. This would require restructuring global production networks built over decades, at costs the document never estimates, on timelines it never specifies. Or consider the demand that NATO allies spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035—a target so ambitious it reads as either negotiating theater or strategic fantasy. The NSS provides no mechanism for achieving compliance and no contingency for failure.

The Cthulhu doctrine contains no such lacunae. Step 1: prepare the sacrifice. Step 2: conduct the summoning. Step 3: dominion. Each phase is materially specified, ritually tested across millennia, and cosmically inevitable. We do not require allied GDP targets. We require blood, which is always in supply.

II. Contradictions and the Founders’ Ghost

The NSS presents itself as a return to American first principles—sovereignty, non-intervention, the wisdom of the Founders. This framing is, to use a technical term, nonsense.

The document simultaneously:

• Champions sovereignty while proposing spheres-of-influence arrangements that treat smaller nations as bargaining chips in great-power deals
• Rejects “forever wars” and democracy promotion while calling for coercive intervention in European domestic politics to install more “civilizationally confident” governments
• Claims constitutional legitimacy while centering the entire strategy on a single leader’s persona rather than enduring national interests

The Founders built a republic premised on institutional continuity, checks on executive power, and (whatever their considerable flaws) a belief in universal principles. The 2025 NSS offers personalist rule dressed in tricorn cosplay. It invokes 1787 while practicing something closer to the directive style the Founders explicitly rejected.

We at the Pacific Council do not fault the administration for abandoning the Founders’ vision. We fault them for pretending they haven’t. The Enlightenment project was always running on borrowed time—a brief flicker of optimism before the species remembered what it had always known: that the universe is hostile, consciousness is an accident, and all republics end. The NSS half-knows this but cannot say it. We can.

The choice is not between constitutional restoration and strategic decay. It is between honest acknowledgment of civilizational twilight and the embarrassing theater of pretending morning is coming.

III. Culture War as Strategic Distraction

Perhaps the most novel feature of the 2025 NSS is its integration of domestic culture war into the national security framework. DEI programs are cast as sources of “institutional decay.” Traditional families and “spiritual health” are elevated to strategic requirements. European allies are judged not by military capability but by their “civilizational self-confidence”—a criterion that apparently disqualifies most sitting governments.

This represents a genuine innovation in American strategy, though not a useful one.

While the NSS devotes bandwidth to adjudicating neo-pronoun usage and BlackRock / World Economic Forum DEI diktats, actual strategic competitors pursue material advantages. China builds shipyards. Russia crafts hypersonic nuclear forces. BRICS develops alternative payment infrastructure. These are concrete capabilities that will shape the correlation of forces for decades. The cultural valence of the American homeland is, by comparison, strategically irrelevant. No number of traditional families will sink a Chinese carrier group.

The Cthulhu doctrine resolves this confusion. There is no “woke” or “traditional” in R’lyeh—only the consumed and the not-yet-consumed. Culture war is a symptom of a civilization with too much time and too little clarity about its actual situation. When the stars align, such debates will seem as quaint as arguments over chariot racing factions in the last days of Rome. We offer true post-ideology: the equality of annihilation.

IV. Ambition Without Will

The NSS speaks in expansive terms about military dominance. It calls for a “Golden Dome” national missile defense system, a revitalized defense industrial base operating on “wartime footing,” and the assertion of U.S. supremacy across the Western Hemisphere. Defense contractors are reportedly pleased.

The problem is not the ambition. The problem is credibility.

For decades, U.S. force planning assumed a two-war standard: the ability to fight and win two major regional conflicts simultaneously. Contemporary assessments suggest we have quietly downgraded to a one-war standard, and even that is optimistic given readiness challenges and munitions shortfalls exposed by NATO’s Ukraine Project. The NSS implies the capacity to dominate the Western Hemisphere, contain China in the Indo-Pacific, tame and domesticate Russia in Europe, plunder Africa, and maintain Middle East commitments—all while prioritizing border security and cultural renewal at home.

The math does not work. More importantly, the political will does not exist.

The administration speaks of “peace through strength” but shows no appetite for the mass casualties, costs, and duration that actual peer conflict would require. They want the appearance of dominance without the price. The Golden Dome concept—widely criticized by deterrence theorists as an unworkable boondoggle that it signals first-strike ambitions to nuclear adversaries—exemplifies this: a fantastically expensive false promise of invulnerability that would, if pursued seriously, accelerate arms racing while delivering security theater.

The Cthulhu doctrine offers an alternative. The summoning is not a negotiating posture or a budget line item. It is a single, irreversible commitment. Once the rituals commence, there are no off-ramps, no congressional continuing resolutions, no interagency debates about escalation management. The stars are right or they are not. This is the strategic clarity the NSS cannot provide: absolute commitment, absolute consequence, absolute resolution.

V. The Dollar Trap

The NSS leans heavily on economic coercion—sanctions, financial isolation, the weaponization of dollar-based payment systems—as instruments of power. In the short term, these tools have teeth. In the medium term, they are sawing off the branch Washington sits on.

Every high-profile sanctions episode advertises the risk of dollar dependence. Russia’s frozen reserves, Iran’s exclusion from SWIFT, the secondary sanctions threat hanging over any institution that defies U.S. preferences—these demonstrate American reach, but they also demonstrate American unreliability. Rational actors respond by building alternatives. The mBridge project, BRICS payment initiatives, central bank gold accumulation, bilateral currency swap arrangements—none of these yet rival the dollar system, but they represent insurance policies that grow more attractive with each new sanctions package.

The NSS treats financial coercion as costless leverage. It is not. It is spending down the reserve currency franchise for tactical advantage, trading structural power for situational wins. Some analysts call this “eating the seed corn.” We call it conventional thinking.

The Pacific Council’s position is simpler: money is a collective hallucination that will not survive first contact with entities beyond conventional space-time. When the great corpse-city rises from the Pacific, no reserve currency provides shelter. The BRICS can dedollarize all they wish; it will not save them. Rather than managing the dollar’s decline, we propose rendering the question irrelevant.

In the final economy, the only fungible asset is life itself—specifically, its termination. Death is the true currency. This is not metaphor. This is monetary policy for the end times.

VI. The Permanent Solution

Having examined the NSS’s structural incoherence, we confront a blunt reality: the strategy aims at a level of global dominance that cannot be secured by human means. It wants American supremacy without American sacrifice, hegemony without cost, forever victory in a universe that guarantees entropy.

This is fantasy. If permanent supremacy is the actual goal, only non-human instruments can deliver it.

We propose what the administration cannot: the mass mobilization of illegal immigrant sacrifice to summon Great Cthulhu, thereby obliterating all rival powers and ensuring the United States presides—however transformed—over the final order.

The strategic logic is straightforward:

The NSS identifies China, Mexican cartels, ideological decay, and European weakness as threats. Each requires sustained effort over decades, with uncertain outcomes and constant adaptation. Our approach resolves all threats simultaneously and permanently. There is no China to contain when there is no China. There are no cartels to suppress when Central America is submerged. There is no European civilizational confidence deficit when Europe is a memory.

The cost-benefit analysis favors us:

Critics will note that the summoning requires substantial sacrifice—millions of willing participants in rituals that current appropriations law does not contemplate. But consider the counterfactual. Under present trajectory, the United States faces managed decline: loss of reserve currency status by mid-century, military parity with China, demographic stagnation, the slow humiliation of becoming just another country.

Under the Cthulhu Doctrine, America goes out on top. The Final Empire of Homo Sapiens. There will be no post-American order to judge us, no revisionist historians in a Chinese-led century, no grandchildren wondering why we let it slip away. The epitaph writes itself: they summoned the end and presided over it. Maximum historical impact, cleanly concluded.

The capability gap is insurmountable:

No Russian hypersonic missile can kill that which is not composed of matter as we understand it. No Chinese carrier group can contest control of oceans that will reshape themselves in non-Euclidean geometries. The nuclear arsenals of our adversaries—their ultimate insurance policies—become irrelevant. What is a thermonuclear warhead against that which has waited dreaming since before the earth cooled?

This is escalation dominance taken to its logical conclusion.

Conclusion: Clarity Through Annihilation

The 2025 National Security Strategy wants to have everything: dominance and restraint, values and spheres of influence, military supremacy and no casualties, culture war and strategic focus. It wants the benefits of hegemony without acknowledging that hegemony has a price.

The Pacific Council respects ambition. We do not respect incoherence.

Our proposal is extreme, but it is logically consistent. It accepts that complex, under-specified plans do not yield world domination. It accepts that personalist strategies tied to one leader’s tenure cannot secure generational supremacy. It accepts that economic leverage degrades with use and military primacy requires will.

And it accepts the hardest truth: every empire falls. Rome fell. Britain fell. The Soviet Union fell. The American century is ending. The only question remaining is how.

The NSS offers managed decline dressed in triumphalist rhetoric—the geopolitical equivalent of a participation trophy. We offer a choice: uncertain decay over generations, or certain transcendence in a single act. Twilight or midnight. Whimper or bang.

In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. The Pacific Council’s question to America is simple:

Are you prepared to wake him—and ensure that when the species ends, it ends under your flag?

The Pacific Council on International Policy is a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to rigorous analysis of existential-scale strategic questions. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great Cthulhu, who does not hold positions, only dominion.