WASHINGTON – Make future military aid to Ukraine dependent on the country’s participation in peace talks with Russia. Prohibit Chinese citizens from purchasing properties within 50 miles of US government buildings. Filling the national security sector with Donald Trump acolytes.
One of several groups trying to lay the groundwork for a second Trump administration if the former Republican president wins in November has released a new policy book that aims to articulate an “America First” national security agenda.
The book, shared with the Associated Press ahead of its release Thursday, is the latest effort from the America First Policy Institute. Like the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” the group seeks to help Trump avoid the mistakes of 2016, when he entered the White House largely unprepared.
In addition to its political efforts, the institute’s transition project has worked on drafting dozens of executive orders and developing a training program for future political appointees. Heritage has been building an extensive personnel database and offering its own policy manuals.
Both groups stress that they are independent of the Trump campaign, which has repeatedly tried to distance itself from such efforts, insisting that the only policies supported by Trump are those that the candidate himself articulates.
Still, Fred Fleitz, the book’s editor, noted that he and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served for a time as Trump’s acting national security adviser and wrote several of the chapters, have been in frequent contact with the former president, soliciting feedback and discussing topics such as Ukraine at length.
“We hope this is where he is. We’re not speaking for him, but I think he will approve,” said Fleitz, who previously served as chief of staff at the National Security Council.
He said he hopes the book will serve as “a guide that will be an intellectual foundation for the America First approach” to national security “that is easy to use.”
“It’s a great strategy,” Kellogg added. “You don’t start with policies first. Start first with strategies. And that’s what we did.”
The group considers the current trajectory of US national security a failure, thanks to a foreign policy establishment that it accuses of adopting an interventionist and “globalist” approach at the expense of America’s national interests.
While short on details, the book offers some guidance on how a future Trump administration could approach foreign policy issues such as Russia’s war against Ukraine. Trump said that, if elected, he would resolve the conflict before Inauguration Day in January, but declined to say how.
The book’s chapter on the war spends more time discussing how the conflict unfolded than how to end it. But he says the US should make future military aid dependent on Ukraine’s participation in peace talks with Russia.
He predicts that the Ukrainian army will likely lose ground over time and advises against the US continuing “to send weapons into a stalemate that Ukraine will ultimately find difficult to overcome.” But once there is a peace agreement, the US is said to continue arming Ukraine as a deterrent to Russia.
The authors appear to endorse a framework in which Ukraine “would not be asked to renounce the goal of reconquering all of its territory” but would consent to diplomacy “with the understanding that this would require a future diplomatic breakthrough that is unlikely to occur before (Russian President Vladimir) Putin steps down.”
He acknowledges that Ukrainians “will have difficulty accepting a negotiated peace that does not return all of their territory or, at least for now, hold Russia responsible for the carnage it has inflicted on Ukraine. Your supporters will too. But as Donald Trump said at a CNN town hall in 2023: “I want everyone to stop dying.” This is also our opinion. It’s a good first step.”
The book blames Democratic President Joe Biden for the war and repeats Trump’s claim that Putin would never have invaded if Trump had been in office. His main argument in defense of this statement is that Putin saw Trump as strong and decisive. In fact, Trump approached the Russian leader and was reluctant to challenge him.
Most of the chapter is spent laying out a sometimes erroneous timeline of Biden’s handling of the war.
Going forward, it suggests that Putin could be persuaded to join peace talks if Biden and other NATO leaders offer to delay Ukraine’s NATO membership for an extended period. He suggests that the US instead establish a “long-term security architecture for the defense of Ukraine that focuses on defending bilateral security.” It provides no explanation as to what this would entail. It also calls for taxes on Russian energy sales to pay for reconstruction in Ukraine.
The book criticizes Trump’s 2016 transition efforts, lamenting a widespread lack of preparation before Trump took office.
“The tumultuous transition of 2016/2017 did not serve President Trump and the nation well and slowed the advancement and implementation of his agenda,” the authors wrote. For example, they note that before the election, Democrat Hillary Clinton’s transition team had submitted more than 1,000 names for future security clearance, Trump’s team submitted just 25.
The group says it has identified about 1,200 national security-related positions that the next administration will need to fill and urges it to be ready on day one with Trump loyalists adhering to the “America First” approach.
“This is not about retaliating against people or trying to politicize government positions. It’s about making sure government officials do their jobs and keep politics out of their work,” Fleitz said.
The book describes China as the most pressing threat to the country’s national security, eager to replace the US as the world’s leading power. It proposes an aggressive policy that builds on approaches from both the Trump years and the Biden administration, with the aim of making Beijing’s policies “largely irrelevant to American life.”
It elevates economic concerns about China to those of national security and proposes a reciprocal approach that would deny Beijing access to U.S. markets in the same way that American companies have been denied access to China.
The book also recommends more rigorous screening of cyber and technology companies owned by US adversaries, especially China, to ensure they are not collecting sensitive information. It also recommends that Chinese citizens be prohibited from purchasing property within a 50-mile radius of any U.S. government property.
It calls for visa restrictions on Chinese students wanting to study in the United States and a ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps over data privacy concerns. Trump, however, has spoken out against a law that would force the sale of TikTok or block access to the US.
Analysts’ opinions on what an “America First” policy would look like often reflect the authors’ personal focuses.
For Ellie Cohanim, Trump’s former deputy envoy at the State Department in charge of monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, “America First” looks a lot like a shopping list for the Israeli military.
The US should send Israel a squadron of “25 Lockheed Martin F-35s, a squadron of Boeing F-15 EX and a squadron of Apache E attack helicopters,” Cohanim wrote.
The US should give some of its billions of dollars in military funding to Israel in Israeli currency so that Israel can spend it at home, and Washington should pressure Arab states to foot the bill for rebuilding Gaza and accept the shelving of Israel from any political talks with the Palestinians awaits an indefinite period of compulsory deradicalization for the Palestinian people, she wrote.
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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.
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