US focus on Middle East "will recede" under 2025 national security strategy

The White House released the 2025 national security strategy on Thursday, calling for a reduced focus on the Middle East after Israel and the United States “greatly weakened” Iran.

The 33-page document lays out global and regional strategic goals that U.S. President Donald Trump hopes to pursue in foreign policy.

It describes how the centrality of the Middle East for energy production and as a theater for superpower competition has diminished in recent years.

“Energy supplies have diversified greatly, with the United States once again a net energy exporter,” the report said. “Superpower competition has given way to great power jockeying, in which the United States retains the most enviable position, reinforced by President Trump’s successful revitalization of our alliances in the Gulf, with other Arab partners and with Israel.”

“Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe,” it adds. "Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since Oct. 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”

It describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “thorny” but says, in the wake of the ceasefire-for-hostages agreement, “progress toward a more permanent peace has been made” and that “Hamas’s chief backers have been weakened or stepped away.”

Israel's security, along with freedom of navigation around the Arabian peninsula, securing energy supplies and defeating terrorist groups, are listed as America’s “core interests” in the region.

“As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede,” the strategy says.

The longest sections of the document focus on improving stability in the Western Hemisphere to combat drug trafficking and reduce migrant flows, and on confronting China.

“We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” it says.

It also calls for a conclusion of the Russian war against Ukraine, increased European defense autonomy and “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

© JNS