For Trump, the only communists to really dislike are those at home

The new US national security strategy says a great deal about how the government imagines its foreign policy in the next few years but tells us just as much about communism and the US president’s view of it.

Donald Trump has long had an unusual relationship with communism, in that he does not seem especially concerned by it. Yes, it’s true he does denounce “communists”, “socialists”, “radicals” and “the far left”, but he is rarely speaking about communist regimes opposed to US interests abroad.

His Republican forebears, like presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, had much to say about the communist threat abroad and how its spread threatened US influence, as well as the cause of individual freedom, but Trump speaks fondly of China’s Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.