Russian and Chinese officials criticized President Trump’s new national security doctrine for its emphasis on American exceptionalism.
MOSCOW — Officials in Russia and China pushed back on Tuesday against the characterization of their countries as threats to the United States in a new national security doctrine published by the White House a day earlier.
A spokesman for the Kremlin criticized Mr. Trump’s foreign policy strategy as having an “imperialist character” while the Chinese Embassy in Washington suggested that the document’s theme of “America First” reflected “outdated, zero-sum thinking.”
Every United States administration is obliged to publish its national security strategy, providing Congress with a blueprint for its intended policies around the world. The 68-page doctrine the White House released on Monday described Russia and China as “revisionist” powers for seeking a change in the American-led world order.
“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned,” the document says. Russia and China, it says, “are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
Dmitri S. Peskov, President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman, responded with the long-practiced Kremlin argument that the world would be a safer place if there were several powerful countries that could keep one another in check. The doctrine, he said, showed America’s continuing “aversion to the multipolar world.”
But Mr. Peskov also noted some recent instances of security cooperation, as did President Trump in a speech about the new doctrine that took a softer line on Russia than the document did.
In the speech on Monday, Mr. Trump made no mention of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which United States intelligence agencies concluded was intended to help him win.
