Dear Thomas,

You'll have seen the document by now. Everyone has. The National Security Strategy — all thirty-three pages of it, dropped without ceremony on a Thursday morning like something the administration wanted to bury and broadcast simultaneously.

I've read it four times. I keep waiting for it to say something different.

You know me. Twenty years of friendship, conferences, that summer in Florence arguing about Kennan until the wine ran out. You know I've never been naive about my country. I've written about the gap between American rhetoric and American action. I've taught students to read the fine print beneath "freedom" and "democracy" and "rules-based order."

But there's something about seeing it written down. Official. Signed.

It's not that the document lies. That's what unsettles me. It's that it tells a kind of truth — and in telling it, makes it more true. "America First" stops being a slogan and becomes doctrine. The transactional logic stops being subtext and becomes text.

I find myself wanting to apologise. That's the instinct — the liberal American reflex. "This isn't who we are. This isn't what we stand for. I didn't vote for this."

But I'm starting to think the apology is its own evasion.

What if this is who we are? What if it always was, and the rest was performance? What if the document isn't a betrayal of American tradition but an articulation of it — the thing we said in private while saying something else in public?

I don't know what to do with that thought. So I'm sending it to you.

It's cold here. Early dark. The students have gone home for the holidays, and the campus feels emptied out, waiting.

Tell me what it looks like from there.

Your friend,
Eleanor

Dear Eleanor,

It arrived yesterday — your letter, I mean. The document I'd already read. Twice, the night it came out, sitting in my study with a whisky I kept forgetting to drink.

You ask what it looks like from here. Honestly? It looks like clarity.

I don't mean that as praise. I mean that a certain fog has lifted. For years — decades — we've operated on assumption. The "special relationship." Shared values. The Atlantic community. We said these words and believed them, or believed we believed them, without ever testing what lay beneath.

Now we know. Not because the Americans have changed, necessarily, but because they've stopped pretending. Or this administration has. Or this document has. The pretence is over.

There's grief in that. I won't deny it. I was raised on the transatlantic story — my father worked NATO logistics, my mother organised cultural exchanges. The alliance was family mythology before it was professional interest. To read it described as a "contract with penalties" is to feel something shift in the foundations.

But Eleanor, I'm not sure grief is the right response. Or not the only one.

You ask if this is who America always was. I think the more uncomfortable question is whether this is who nations always are. You've articulated your operating system. Perhaps we simply haven't articulated ours — we British, we Europeans. We've let ourselves believe we were different. More civilised. Beyond mere interest.

Were we? Are we?

We drew borders across continents with rulers. We extracted wealth from half the world and called it development. We abolished slavery and then invented new forms of coercion. Our empire ended not from moral awakening but from exhaustion and American pressure — yes, American. The ironies compound.

I'm not offering equivalence as absolution. I'm suggesting that the document forces questions we'd rather not ask of ourselves.

What do we believe? What would our strategy say, if we wrote it honestly?

The weather here matches the mood. Grey. The kind of December that makes you understand why the pagans lit fires.

More soon.
Thomas

Thomas,

Your letter winded me. I expected commiseration. I got a mirror.

You're right, of course. The uncomfortable question isn't what America is — it's what nations are. What we all are, underneath the rhetoric.

I watched Rubio's press conference. The year-end summation. I'd been holding onto hope there — ridiculous, I know, but hope doesn't ask permission. Rubio was supposed to be the adult. The institutionalist. The one who'd sand the edges off this thing.

He didn't. He explained it. Methodically. With the discipline of a true believer — or someone who's made his choice and won't look back.

"Decisions that make America safer, stronger, or more prosperous." That was his formula. His filter. Everything passes through it. Alliances? Only if they serve. Commitments? Only if they pay. Ukraine? A situation to be brokered, not a people to be defended.

I keep thinking about the envoys. You've seen who's negotiating the fate of Ukraine? Steve Witkoff — a real estate developer, Trump's friend for forty years, met him at a deli at 3am and bought him a sandwich. And Jared Kushner — the son-in-law, no official position, running an investment firm with two billion dollars from the Saudis. These are the men sitting across from Putin. Six meetings with him now.

There's a leaked recording — Witkoff coaching Russian officials on how to sell Moscow's terms to Trump. Explaining what language will work on him. When it came out, Trump's response was: "That's what a dealmaker does."

And here's what I can't reconcile: the document is sophisticated. Philosophically coherent. It has intellectual architecture — Straussian, I'd argue, though that's another letter. But it's being implemented by a real estate friend and a compromised son-in-law, operating on loyalty and deals, not strategy.

The philosophy assumes rational actors pursuing national interest. The actors are pursuing personal relationships and business advantage. Trump told Zelensky, to his face, "You have no cards." As if a nation fighting for survival is a property negotiation where the weaker party simply loses.

So what are we actually dealing with? A doctrine? Or a mood?

The students return in three weeks. I have to teach them something about American foreign policy. I don't know what to say anymore.

Eleanor

Dear Eleanor,

Doctrine or mood — that's the question, isn't it?

I think: both. The document is doctrine. The implementation is mood. And the gap between them is where the danger lives.

A coherent strategy badly executed might be survivable. An incoherent strategy competently executed might be navigable. But a sophisticated philosophy implemented by impulse and ego? That's unpredictable in the worst way.

Your Straussian observation is sharper than you perhaps intended. I've done some reading since your letter. Michael Anton — the primary author, it seems. "The Flight 93 Election." The Claremont Institute. A genuine intellectual project, however much one might disagree with it. These aren't fools. They have a vision of what America is and should be.

But their vision requires a rational executor. They've handed their careful philosophy to a man who sends his real estate friend and his son-in-law to negotiate with Putin — one with no diplomatic experience, the other taking Saudi money while brokering Middle East deals. The leaked tape tells you everything: coaching the Russians on how to manipulate the President. And Trump calls it dealmaking.

He likes Putin because Putin flatters him. He dislikes Zelensky because Zelensky asks for things. "You have no cards," he says — as if sovereignty is a weak hand in a property negotiation.

The tragedy isn't that America has turned realist. Realism has a long and respectable tradition. The tragedy is that the realism is theoretical while the implementation is... I don't have a word. Toddler-esque?

Here in Britain, we're watching two things simultaneously. The American turn — which we can analyse, adapt to, respond to. And our own echoes — Reform UK, the Channel rhetoric, the "Britain First" murmurs that aren't murmurs anymore. The document praises "patriotic European parties." It means Le Pen. Meloni. Perhaps our own Farage iteration.

We're not exempt from this. That's what I keep coming back to. We'd like to stand in judgement of America. But we're running the same code, just a few versions behind.

The light fails so early now. I've taken to walking along the river at dusk, watching the colleges go dark one by one. There's something clarifying about cold air and fading light.

I think we need to talk about what comes next. Not what we wish would happen. What we actually do.

Thomas

Thomas,

What we actually do. Yes.

I've been sitting with this for three days. Walking the empty campus. Watching the snow that came and melted and came again. Thinking about what I can say that's honest.

Here's where I am:

I have to believe something can be salvaged. I have to. Not because the evidence supports it, but because I live here. This is my country. These are my students, my colleagues, my neighbours. I can't write them off. I can't write us off.

That's not analysis. It's position. I'm an American, and I have to find a way to be an American that doesn't require me to abandon everything I believe. Even if my country is doing exactly that.

So I'll stay. I'll teach. I'll write. I'll argue. I'll vote and organise and do the small things that feel useless but are all I have. I'll hope that the institutions hold. I'll work to make them hold. I'll believe — because I must — that Trump is not America's final word about itself.

But Thomas, I hear myself saying this, and I know how it sounds from where you sit. It sounds like wishful thinking. It sounds like the American exceptionalism I've spent my career critiquing, now deployed to comfort myself.

Maybe it is.

I'm asking you to understand something that might not be understandable from outside: the difference between defending what your country does and refusing to abandon it. I'm not defending this. I'm choosing to stay in the fight, inside the thing, even though the thing is sick.

You can't do that. You're not American. You have to protect your own — Britain, Europe, the relationships that remain possible. You have to build what we're refusing to help build. You have to plan for a world where America isn't what it was.

I understand that. I'm not asking you to wait for us.

I'm just asking you not to give up on the Americans who haven't given up on ourselves.

Snow again tonight. I can see it starting from my window. The world goes quiet when it snows.

Thinking of you.

Eleanor

Dear Eleanor,

Christmas Eve. I've just come in from evensong — not from belief but from habit, the need for ritual when the ordinary frames have broken. The choir sang something old. The candles flickered the way candles have for centuries. Outside, the town was dark and still.

I won't give up on you. I need you to know that. Whatever else I say here, that's the foundation.

But I have to be honest about what's shifting.

We will go our own way. Not because we want to — or not only because we want to — but because we have to. The strategy document isn't asking for negotiation. It's informing us of terms. We can accept them or we can build something else. Those are the options.

So we'll build. European defence capacity. European supply chains. European relationships with the rest of the world that don't route through Washington. Not against you. But no longer dependent on you.

You see where this leads. I see it too.

Today we're talking about independence. Tomorrow that independence means capability. Capability means industry, resources, alliances of our own. Our interests will diverge because our positions are different. Divergence becomes competition. Competition, if we're not careful — if we're not very careful — becomes something worse.

The document creates this. "America First" makes everyone else think about their own first. Your strategy forces ours. And then we're all in the logic of competition, and the cooperation that built the postwar world becomes a memory that the next generation won't even share.

I'm not blaming you. I'm describing the mechanism. It's already turning.

And yet.

I keep thinking about what you said — that conflict is possible but not inevitable. Peace is possible but not inevitable. Neither is guaranteed. That's the space we have to live in.

I think about Oppenheimer, whom we've discussed before — how he saw the logic of the bomb, saw where it led, built it anyway, and spent his remaining years trying to stuff the genie back. He understood that some actions create their own momentum. That choosing a path constrains future choices. That you can be right about the necessity and still be building the catastrophe.

Are we building catastrophe? I don't know. Maybe we're just building a different world, one where the Atlantic is wider than it used to be, where friendship crosses borders that are harder than before, where people like us work to maintain what nations are letting go.

Here's what I believe, standing at midnight between one year and whatever comes next:

Conflict is not inevitable. But avoiding it requires both sides. We can't cooperate alone. If you defect to competition, we either compete or lose. That's the trap. And I don't know how to escape it except to keep talking. Keep seeing each other. Keep refusing the easy story where one of us is right and one is wrong.

You'll fight for your America. I'll build what I can here. Our paths will diverge. They may cross in ways neither of us wants.

But here, tonight, there's still this: two people who've seen the same hard thing and haven't stopped talking. That's not nothing. In fact, I think it might be the only thing that matters — the human-scale version of what nations can't seem to do.

The candles in the window across the street just went out. Someone else going to bed, trusting that morning comes.

I'll write again in the new year. We'll see what it brings. We'll keep seeing each other, at least — clearly, without illusion, with whatever love survives clarity.

That's not resolution. It's just continuation. Maybe that's enough.

Maybe that's everything.

Yours, across the water,

Thomas