This week the Trump Administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. The document, which has caused alarm from allies and drawn praise from Russia, offers a clear and explicit articulation of the administration’s ‘America First’ ideology and priorities, long evident in both its rhetoric and actions.
Among leading foreign-policy institutions, the new National Security Strategy has provoked alarm that the United States is abandoning long-standing norms of alliance management, multilateral cooperation, and systemic stewardship. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations argue it discards the post–Cold War focus on great-power stability, recasting Latin America as a zone for threat containment and resource extraction rather than partnership, while CSIS finds the document offensive toward Europe, offering little reassurance of continued American commitment and Chatham House describes the strategy as an ideological rupture that leaves Europeans unsure of U.S. reliability. The Atlantic meanwhile warns that the strategy substitutes cultural-political posturing for substantive security planning, ignoring the real threats facing America. Taken together, these critiques suggest that the National Security Strategy represents a decisive pivot from away America as the leader of the global order.
However, a close read of the strategy reveals something historic is being declared. The National Security Strategy, 2025, marks the moment America abandoned hegemony and redefined itself as a sovereign mercantile power, leaving the leadership of the world order vacant for the first time in nearly 70 years.
The analysis of the strategy describes how this will be implemented. Firstly, it contains a set of recurring themes, roughly a dozen, that point to deeper currents that are shaping the administration’s worldview. These are a result of five clear assumptions or tenets. Importantly, the document needs to be understood as a statement of continuity, reflecting a government acting with confidence, clarity of direction, and a commitment to executing on its agenda. This agenda is consistent with Project 2025, the executive orders issued by the president, and with the administration’s policy interventions to date.
This paper analyses the 2025 National Security Strategy’s internal logic, maps its key themes, and synthesises its underlying intellectual architecture. It concludes by assessing the implications for allies, rivals, and the future of international order.
I. The Evident Assumptions and Psychology
A Triumphal Narrative Masking a Deep Insecurity
The 2025 National Security Strategy offers what it claims is a sober, realistic restatement of American purpose. It opens by declaring that the nation has been “brought ... back from the brink of catastrophe … after four years of weakness”, praises the administration’s “historic speed to restore American strength”, and boasts that “no administration in history has achieved so dramatic a turnaround”. The tone is triumphal, bordering on breathless. Yet beneath the self-congratulation lies a self-conception of a United States under threat, facing disasters, needing to ‘restore American strength’, warning others to let it do so, or at least not stand in the way.
The Strategy sets up its narrative through contrast. its introduction opens with the section on “How American “Strategy” [sic] Went Astray” following the end of the Cold War inflicted by elites who “misjudged what we should want”, embraced “globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the middle class and industrial base”, and tethered the country to institutions “driven by outright anti-Americanism” or transnational agendas that sought to “dissolve individual state sovereignty”. This is not the language of a calm, mature global leader; it is the language of a bruised power engaged in damage control and repositioning.
The Strategy’s starting point is that America’s challenges stem not from strategic rivals but from bad decisions that weakened sovereignty, hollowed out the industrial base, and eroded national cohesion. It asserts that elites pursued “permanent American domination”, tied the United States to “sovereignty-sapping” institutions, and enabled allied free-riding, and embraced “so-called ‘free trade’” that hollowed out the middle class. At home, it laments that “DEI” and similar ideologies “destroy competence”, while unchecked migration, and cultural subversion threaten national survival. America has become “dependent on outside powers” for energy, supply chains, and key technologies. The strategy casts itself as the remedy to all these challenges: restore sovereignty, end mass migration, reindustrialise, rebalance trade, and rebuild “American spiritual and cultural health”.
Stylistically, the National Security Strategy is marked by unconscious rhetorical insecurity; it loudly enumerates successes, catalogues American strengths, and repeatedly declares unprecedented achievements. Some of this is political theatre, but the over-insistence communicates anxiety rather than confidence. It suggests a state unsure of its global standing and compensating through assertion.
A Worldview of Fragmentation, Blocs, and Erosion
Underpinning this narrative is a distinct worldview about the international environment: that the global order is fragmenting into blocs; that the Indo-Pacific’s rise as the world’s primary economic arena is inexorable; that Europe is entering a period of civilizational and economic erosion; that the Western Hemisphere must be secured decisively as America’s exclusive sphere of interest; and that geopolitical competition will increasingly turn on control of supply chains, technology, and borders rather than ideas, norms, or institutions. The Strategy assumes that cooperation will be instrumental rather than foundational, and that states survive not by shaping orders but by maintain autonomy, controlling resources, and managing vulnerabilities. This worldview forms the psychological substrate of the entire document.
Neo-Mercantilism as Grand Strategy
Yet the solution the Strategy offers is not that of a confident great power reclaiming direction. It is instead the vision of a neo-mercantilist America: a state preoccupied with supply chains, tariff leverage, self-sufficient energy production, and the elimination of dependencies. Economic tools dominate its foreign-policy repertoire - tariffs, investment rules, technology deals, and “sole-source contracts for our companies” - and thus its diplomatic framework for the Western Hemisphere reads less like grand strategy than like an industrial policy extended across borders. In such a strategy, embassies must identify “strategic acquisition and investment opportunities”, foreign influence must be countered partly by offering countries “a far better buy in the long run” in the form of American goods, and regional partners must align and will be rewarded with economic instruments.
While such neo-mercantilist policies helped build American power and positioned the United States to inherit global primacy from Great Britain in the post-war period, it has historically been a step on the road to great-power status, not its strategic culmination. If economic leverage becomes the central purpose of a great power rather than a supporting instrument, it leaves a vast conceptual terrain for others to define, forcing the great power into a reactive posture rather than enabling it to shape outcomes. A sophisticated great power employs economic tools, but it does not construct its worldview around them. Great powers design and sustain orders; mercantile powers accumulate economic leverage.
The National Security Strategy overwhelmingly imagines the United States as the latter: an autonomous merchant-state beholden to no one, rather than a systemic architect. In this vision, power functions chiefly as an instrument to secure mercantile advantages and protect America’s domestic way of life, rather than as the basis for a broader conception of the international order in which it operates.
The Western Hemisphere and the Rest
Alongside this economic vision is a clear ideological ambition: to diffuse a sovereignty-centred, nation-state worldview throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe. The former is conceived as America’s undisputed and exclusive sphere of influence and the latter as a region gone astray in need of American support (or intervention) to course correct. Although the Strategy insists that the United States seeks “good relations ... without imposing ... democratic or other social change”, it simultaneously urges political and social change by standing ‘against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations’, praising “patriotic European parties”, lamenting Europe’s “civilizational erasure”, urging nations to resist “migration policies that are transforming the continent”, and indicating that cooperation requires alignment “with our principles and strategy”. Potential allies, whether in the Western Hemisphere or beyond should adopt U.S.-style nation-state focused sovereignty, curb migration, resist “adversarial outside influence”, and cohere into a civilizational bloc compatible with America’s domestic political identity. The effect is to position these states in ideological, cultural, and social alignment with the United States, and, more starkly, to normalise subordination in economic and security terms.
Beyond this geographic and ideological boundary, however, the Strategy becomes purely transactional. India, Japan, and South Korea matter chiefly insofar as they “increase defence spending”, “assume primary responsibility”, or open ports and facilities. The Middle East appears primarily as a venue for energy and technology deals. Africa is framed as a region of “critical minerals”, “nuclear energy”, and “liquid petroleum gas”. These regions are not allies in a shared project; they are functional nodes in America’s mercantile network.
Modus Operandi as Vision
Finally, despite its desire to “ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history”, the Strategy offers no articulated vision of the global order the United States seeks in the decades ahead. It promises technological revival and military modernisation, but these are tools without a defining goal. The Strategy does not describe the world America hopes to shape - only the threats it hopes to avoid or resist, and its wish to remain a sovereign, wealthy merchant. It is a future of autonomy and insulation, not of purpose. The National Security Strategy conflates ‘America First’ with ‘America Alone’, alone not in the sense of not interventionist but in failing to recognise that the world’s most powerful country cannot withdraw from the international interdependencies that underpin this very power.
History offers a consistent warning, regardless of geography or era: when powers narrow their horizons to the defence of wealth and autonomy rather than the shaping of the systems around them, decline follows. Venice and the Dutch Republic both evolved from order-shaping maritime powers into states fixated on preserving trade monopolies and financial advantage; Ming China turned inward, abandoning its earlier maritime ambition in favour of defensive self-containment; and the Ottoman Empire gradually shifted from regional stewardship to mere territorial and fiscal survival. Britain’s trajectory provides the most recent analogue: an increasing focus on the sterling, imperial defence, and fiscal restraint post 1918 triggered its retreat from systemic leadership despite maintaining formal power over its empire, and it slowly ceded rule-making capacity to the U.S. By the mid-twentieth century, Britain had lost not to its enemies but to its ally, as global leadership passed to Washington. Seen through this lens, the National Security Strategy’s emphasis on sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and mercantile advantage may postpone the need to confront structural vulnerabilities without changing the long-term dynamic; a power that defines strategy as self-preservation rather than system-shaping often discovers, too late, that it has ceded the initiative to others and must negotiate from relative, not absolute, strength.
II. Themes Emerging from the National Security Strategy
A series of key theme run through the National Security Strategy, from which the architecture of thought beneath the policy surface can be discerned.
1. Sovereignty as Supreme Value
“An independent, sovereign republic ... [free from] sovereignty-sapping incursions”.
Sovereignty becomes the strategy’s master concept - synonymous with autonomy - not just a condition of statehood but a moral imperative. Anything that constrains U.S. autonomy, from alliances to global norms, is treated as a danger. This transforms foreign policy into a defence of political self-enclosure, making cooperation conditional and interdependence a strategic liability.
2. A New, Idiosyncratic Realism
“Pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist.’”
The National Security Strategy claims realism while discarding its intellectual heritage. What remains is a personalised, instinct-driven realism, tactical flexibility used to justify narrowing commitments without a coherent strategic doctrine. It is tactical realism in a transactional context, rather than in a disciplined or principled framework.
3. Economic Nationalism as Grand Strategy
Americans must “never ... be dependent on any outside power”.
Security is redefined as material independence. “Balanced trade”. “re-shoring”. and “energy dominance” turn markets into battlegrounds and supply chains into territorial assets. This mercantile turn rejects the liberal economic order in favour of strategic self-sufficiency and coercive leverage.
4. Migration as Existential Threat
“The era of mass migration is over ... Border security is the primary element of national security”.
Migration is elevated from policy issue to civilizational danger. The National Security Strategy links ethnic demographic stability to national survival, extending this concern to Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Borders become the front line of identity as much as security.
5. Retrenchment and Allies as Burdens
“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”.
The strategy renounces America’s postwar role as systemic guarantor of order. Allies must carry “primary responsibility”, recasting partnerships as conditional and transactional. The U.S. remains powerful, but no longer responsible for global stability by default, even though such stability has historically been the very environment that created its economic strength.
6. Peace Through Coercive Dealmaking
The President is “the President of Peace ... [who] settled eight raging conflicts”.
Peace is framed as the product of coercive strength and personalised diplomacy. Institutions recede as leverage and disruption become the operative tools. Stability is achieved not through rules but through assertive bargaining and on the authority of the individual.
7. The Western Hemisphere as a Sphere of Influence
The U.S. will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” through the “Trump Corollary”.
The Western Hemisphere is reclaimed as an exclusive strategic domain. The U.S. aims to block external powers, reshape regional politics, and impose alignment. This marks a return to classical sphere-of-influence thinking rather than regional partnership.
8. Civilizational and Cultural Renewal
America needs “restoration ... of spiritual and cultural health”; Europe faces “civilizational erasure”.
Cultural purity is elevated to a strategic concern. Changes in identity or demographics are treated as security threats. Foreign policy absorbs domestic cultural anxieties and projects them outward onto allies and supposed kindred civilizations, framing cultural preservation as a matter of geopolitical necessity.
9. Rejection of Transnational Institutions
Institutions are “intrusive”, “sovereignty-sapping”, even “anti-American”.
The National Security Strategy views international organisations as obstacles unless subordinated to American national will. Institutions are to be instrumentalised, not trusted. The international order and its multilateral structures and cooperative mechanisms become a hindrance. In treating it as such, the United States effectively abandons the system it built and has dominated, trusting that a diminished order will be less able to constrain its autonomy in the future.
10. Non-Rivalry with China and Russia
“Rebalance America’s economic relationship with China”; and “reestablish strategic stability with Russia”.
The strategy asserts that “the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations”, implicitly acknowledging that this logic applies as much to its competitors as it does to America (though not to India, which is exempted from this framing). Rivalry is stripped of ideological content: China and Russia are treated as counterparties to manage, not adversaries to contain, and European resistance to Russia in Ukraine is cast as misguided. This lays the ground for geographic spheres of influence and transactional engagement across geopolitical fault lines.
11. Technological and Supply-Chain Security
The U.S. must secure “independent and reliable access” to critical inputs and maintain technological edge.
Technology becomes a critical tool of America’s mercantile ambition, serving simultaneously its “military” strength and “global influence”. Control over minerals, data, AI, biotech, and quantum computing is treated as existential. Innovation and supply chains are key assets. Technological leadership is framed as a double gain for America; states aligned with U.S. interests participate by purchasing American technology, thereby enriching and reinforcing U.S. advantage.
12. Domestic Reconstruction as National Power
“America and Americans must always come first”.
The National Security Strategy ties foreign policy to domestic renewal - reindustrialisation, cohesion, and a revived commitment to “merit.” But merit is cast less as open competition than as ideological and national insulation, protecting achievement from internal threats. This sits uneasily beside the Strategy’s reliance on coercive, discretionary power abroad. As theorists in the Republican Security Dilemma note, arbitrary power used externally can seep back into domestic governance. The Strategy thus pursues an ideologically filtered meritocracy at home while practising coercion overseas, a tension that may undercut the renewal it promises.
III. Premises at the Core of the Strategy
Beneath these 12 themes, the National Security Strategy is driven by five core premises. These are not explicitly acknowledged by the document, yet they shape its every argument and infuse its vision of America’s place in the world. They form the psychological infrastructure of the strategy, the underlying logic through which the United States is reframed from the leader of an international order to a sovereign commercial power in a fractured global landscape.
Neo-Mercantilism as the Operating Logic of Power
The most pervasive current is a return to mercantilism. The National Security Strategy sees global politics less as a system of rules, norms, or alliances than as a series of commercial relationships to be managed, leveraged, and disciplined. Power is expressed through terms such as “balanced trade”, “re-shoring”, “critical minerals”, “sole-source contracts”, and “energy dominance”, a vocabulary that treats national security as a matter of supply-chain integrity rather than geopolitical architecture.
In this worldview, the United States is not hegemon but merchant-state - a power whose advantage lies in controlling flows of goods, capital, and strategic resources. Foreign policy becomes the extension of tariffs by other means. Allies are valuable insofar as they host industry, buy weapons, or align export controls. Rivals are dangerous chiefly because they distort markets or corner minerals. The global order itself dissolves into a network of bargaining positions, each to be exploited.
This is not the language of empire or liberal leadership. It is the language of a state that sees commercial leverage as the essence of power.
Sovereignty as Ideology and Identity
The Strategy’s second current is the elevation of sovereignty from a procedural principle to an ideology. On the surface, the National Security Strategy insists that the U.S. will not impose its system on others. Yet the document repeatedly celebrates nationalist movements abroad, praises “patriotic European parties”. warns of Europe’s “civilizational erasure”. and expects hemispheric partners to align with “our principles and strategy”.
Sovereignty becomes a moral framework, a litmus test separating legitimate political movements (patriotic, traditionalist, nationalist) from illegitimate ones (liberal, transnational, regulatory, multicultural). This ‘sovereignist’ identity is explicitly encouraged in the Western Hemisphere, where the National Security Strategy seeks to reshape regional politics around American nationalist preferences, and implicitly welcomed in Europe, where Washington positions itself as protector of authentic civilizational identity against dilution. The intent to create an American bloc is clear throughout the Strategy.
Thus, sovereignty becomes more than the principle of self-rule; it becomes a worldview, based on normative expectation that nations should be culturally homogeneous, ideologically consolidated, and resistant to multilateral influence.
Cultural Insecurity Masked as Cultural Revitalization
A third and revealing current runs through the Strategy: a civilizational unease it does not openly name, reframed as a programme of cultural restoration. The National Security Strategy warns that Europe may be “unrecognizable in 20 years” that American security depends on restoring “spiritual and cultural health” and that mass migration threatens “the future of the nation”. These anxieties serve as an emotional backdrop for policies ranging from border security to demographic alarm.
The document speaks of patriotism, tradition, and civilizational vitality, yet beneath these calls for revitalisation lies an unspoken fear: that America and its cultural kin are at risk of dilution, displacement, or collapse. This fear shapes policy far more than strategic necessity. It drives the intensity of the anti-migration agenda, the limiting of meritocracy so as to exclude global talent, the insistence on hemispheric control, the policing of cultural narratives in Europe, and the preference for governments that exalt traditional identity.
Transactional Geopolitics Beyond the Ideological Sphere
Where the United States does not seek ideological alignment, the National Security Strategy shifts abruptly into transactional mode. Japan is expected to spend more; India to contribute more; the Gulf to adopt American technology; Africa to supply minerals and grant access; Latin America to suppress migration and the cartels. These are not conceived as partnerships of purpose, but as exchanges - services rendered for benefits bestowed.
There is no shared mission, no common project, no aspiration toward a collective order. Relations are functional, pragmatic, and conditional. States are ranked not by their political values or security commitments but by their utility to American objectives. Thus, American foreign policy bifurcates: an ideological sphere consisting of Europe and the Western Hemisphere, where ideological alignment is promoted - and a transactional sphere encompassing the rest of the world, where the U.S. seeks leverage, resources, and other specific material goals.
Strategy Without Order, Power Without a System
Perhaps the most striking feature of the National Security Strategy is what it omits - any overarching vision of the global order America seeks to build. The strategy lists American strengths lavishly, but these are not marshalled toward a coherent end-state beyond trade. There is no grand strategy analogue to containment, no renewal of the liberal order, no theory of multipolarity, no vision of collective security or global modernity, no aim to address the pressing issues of the day and no over-arching view of where the arc of history is leading and America’s place in it. A rules-based order is no longer the objective; a favourable balance of power is longer to shape the world as a whole, but only the parts that impact the United States directly, and only through tools of economic, ethnic demographic, and coercive leverage. What remains is a posture of selective engagement: a superpower that acts decisively but unpredictably, confident in its strength but uneasy in its identity, powerful yet detached from any universal mission.
It is a portrait of America not as architect or steward, but as a merchant, often as a capricious merchant, navigating a fragmented world through contracts, bargains, and ideological affinities rather than through leadership. It seems designed to appeal in an age of social media generated outrage, strong opinion and fragmented identities, but not provide a cohesive design for America’s world leading position today and tomorrow. As such, it leaves the seat of global hegemon vacant for others to fill, China being the obvious patient and deliberate long-term player, India rising in the wings, Russia to attempt a reinvention of the Soviet Union for modern times. A rules-based order is no longer the objective; a favourable balance of power is the plan.
Finally, it is worth noting that the core premises align closely with Project 2025, with the 2025 National Security Strategy being the external exposition. The early flood of executive orders signalled a governing model built on unilateral authority and a sovereignty defined by the removal of constraints, a framework the Strategy applies internationally. Project 2025 calls for dismantling mediating institutions through civil-service restructuring and expanded presidential control; the Strategy echoes this by elevating the nation-state, criticising multilateral bodies, and treating alliances as optional. Economic nationalism forms a second point of continuity; Project 2025 promotes self-sufficiency, tariffs, and resource dominance, while the Strategy globalises this approach by treating supply chains and critical minerals as strategic leverage and redefining allies as nodes in a U.S.-centred economic system. Both documents also frame migration and cultural change as civilisational threats and advance a traditionalist ideological agenda. Together they outline a unified domestic and international theory of state power.
IV. Conclusion – Implications for the World’s Key Blocs and Countries
The National Security Strategy redefines America’s relationship with the world. It presents a United States no longer acting as the arbiter of the system it built, but as a sovereign neo-mercantilist power, pursuing advantage with transactional power, moralised nationalism, and a reconceived sense of civilisational purpose. The result is a profound geopolitical reordering - not because America is retreating, but because America is re-emerging on new terms. The implications for the rest of the world are far-reaching, a mix of great opportunity and threat.
Europe, An Ideological Target
In the conception of the primacy of sovereignty not blocs, Europe is a target for disintegration back into sovereign nations, each one incapable of bargaining with America and thus rule-takers, the United Kingdom being the first to break.
For Europe, the National Security Strategy is both diagnosis and ultimatum. It states openly that Europe suffers “cratering birthrates”, “migration policies that are transforming the continent”, and a loss of “civilizational self-confidence”. The message is unmistakable, Europe is no longer a peer civilisation but a troubled one, and America will engage or support Europe in “abandoning its failed focus on regulatory suffocation” and rediscovering its cultural vigour through “patriots” with beliefs more akin to its current administration. Where previous American doctrines treated Europe as the core democratic partner, the National Security Strategy treats it as a civilisational basket case in need of course correction, and a region whose value to the U.S. lies in commercial openness, strategic alignment, and burden-sharing.
The implication is that American protection is no longer automatic. NATO’s future is narrower, more conditional, and more transactional. The National Security Strategy rejects “the perception ... of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance” and insists Europe must “take primary responsibility for its own defense”.
For key European states, this marks the end of Pax Americana as they knew it. The U.S. will support “patriotic” or nationalist elements seeking civilisational revival but will show less tolerance for governments wedded to liberal-multilateralist norms. Europe must therefore either evolve into a bloc capable of self-defence and self-direction and ideologically aligned, or fade into diminished strategic relevance to America.
Russia: Normalisation Without Amity, Rivalry Without Enmity
The National Security Strategy adopts a strikingly neutral posture toward Russia, one grounded in pragmatic recognition rather than ideological hostility. Russia is not cast as an existential adversary but as a powerful state whose interests must be managed, not defeated. The strategy calls for “strategic stability”. for an “expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine”, and for preventing escalation.
This reflects a deeper truth; the new American worldview does not require containment of Russian power. A world of spheres of influence, power blocs, and great-power balances is congenial, not threatening, to the National Security Strategy logic. Russia is a difficult neighbour, not an ideological enemy. While this will unsettle former frontline allies, it will create opportunities for Moscow to reposition itself globally. It signals that, for America, Russia is manageable rather than malevolent, and that if Europeans see it differently, that is not something America can support militarily or economically.
China, The Competitor to Manage, Not Contain
China, too, is treated in pragmatic, mercantile terms. The National Security Strategy criticises Beijing’s “predatory, state-directed subsidies”. its hold over supply chains, and its “grand-scale intellectual property theft” and “industrial espionage”, yet it pointedly avoids framing China as a civilisational enemy or ideological threat. Instead, it casts China as a commercial and technological competitor that must be disciplined through tariffs, supply-chain re-engineering, and offshore balancing - not overthrown, isolated, or confronted in absolute terms.
This is not containment; it is structured dependence with controlled rivalry. America will “rebalance our trade relations”, restore manufacturing, and ensure access to critical minerals, but it will also preserve a space for calibrated economic exchange.
For China, this means a long era of commercial friction, industrial decoupling, and regional competition - but not a new Cold War. The National Security Strategy sets the terms of competition in economic and technological domains, while maintaining ambiguity in the military sphere. It is an uneasy equilibrium, but one in which China retains room to manoeuvre. China has reason to be pleased it has been given the time for it manage its internal affairs, architect its rise through global competition and determine how it will use the vacancy in the international system to its own advantage.
From India to Japan: Partners of Convenience, Not Pillars of a Vision
In the Indo-Pacific, the National Security Strategy prioritises deterrence and economic positioning in support of maintaining American primacy. Countries such as India and Japan are valued not for shared democratic identity but for their usefulness in stabilising shipping routes, counterbalancing China, and purchasing U.S. technology and weapons.
The National Security Strategy does not describe Indo-Pacific partners as co-architects of a shared order; rather, it repeatedly casts Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and India in functional terms. The partnerships are instrumental, shaped by the logic of capability and burden-shifting rather than by any deeper integrative project.
The Middle East, A Commercial and Security Customer
The National Security Strategy’s treatment of the Middle East is purely transactional. Conflict is to be “managed”; allies are to be leveraged for investments in energy and technology, and local sovereign leaders are to be engaged “as they are”, without moralising.
Energy, AI partnerships, defence sales, infrastructure now define America’s relationship with the region. The National Security Strategy abandons previous regime’s ideals of democratisation or human-rights and sees the Middle East as a marketplace of security and technological sales. This marks a sharp break from the post-9/11 and post-Cold War eras, situating the Middle East as a zone of strategic extraction, not a theatre of ambition.
The Global South, Site of Resource Competition and Extraction, Not Partners
The Global South is cast as a collection of markets, mineral repositories, and logistical nodes. Ideology plays almost no role; transactional access plays every role.
Africa appears in the National Security Strategy as a frontier of minerals, supply chains, and conflict mediation. Its role is not political partnership but economic instrumentalization and geopolitical denial - preventing rivals from gaining footholds and securing critical resources. This is mercantilism of a classical kind, stripped of developmental objectives.
The Net Effect: A Fragmented Order
Traditional alliances - Europe, Canada, South Korea, Australia - are subjected to a new logic of conditionality Allies are downgraded from partners in a common project to participants in contractual relationships, evaluated for their contributions and disciplined for their noncompliance. The National Security Strategy no longer speaks the language of shared values; it speaks the language of shared burdens and unilateral decision-making.
Rivals like Russia and China and nonaligned states such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa and the Gulf are treated as actors to be bargained with. Their cooperation is sought where commercially useful; their autonomy is accepted.
This flexibility reflects a basic instinctive deal-orientation, but also the National Security Strategy’s core principle: strength first, ideology second, institutions last. The U.S. will remain a superpower, but not a steward of the multilateral system it built. The overall consequence is a plural, fractured, and transactional world, composed of sovereign blocs, shifting alignments, and mercantilist bargains. The U.S. no longer attempts to shape the world in its image; it attempts to shape the world in its interest. The decline of multilateralism is not a regrettable outcome but an explicit strategic preference.
In this future, America is still the pre-eminent power, but no longer the custodian of the world order. It is instead a sovereign actor in a sovereignised world, pursuing advantage through leverage, pressure, and nationalist alignment. For allies, this is destabilising. For rivals, it is empowering. For the Global South, it is opportunistic. For multilateral institutions, it is an existential threat unless the rest of the world can act. If they can, America may well find itself recast a rogue state or predator operating outside of the system. This of course has far-reaching consequences for America.
The future now will be shaped less by American design and more by global reaction - by how Europe, China, India, the Middle East, and Africa adapt to a United States that remains immensely powerful but no longer psychologically invested in the order it once built.
The National Security Strategy shows that America has not withdrawn, it has changed the terms of engagement. The rest of the world must now decide whether to follow, resist, or replace the framework America has vacated. It must also decide if it has a shared vision of the future without America sharing it. For the first time in nearly seventy years, the leadership seat is genuinely open.
