By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

At the turn of the century, America held unchallengeable sway in the world, its economy the strongest and most dynamic, its military the most powerful, its globe-spanning alliances unrivalled, and its global leadership uncontested. The year 2001 seemed to be the pivot on which everything began heading south, with 9/11 serving as the most potent symbol of the all-round decline of US military power, financial muscle, societal cohesion, and global leadership.

Political gridlock domestically was accompanied by failed interventions abroad. In a parallel development pregnant with profound ramifications for the world's trajectory, China began a rapid ascent up the global power rankings on most dimensions, helped by US-led Western generosity in granting WTO membership, market access, and shift of manufacturing and production chains. The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston describes this first quarter-century of the new millennium as 'an era of folly' for America.

This is the global geopolitical landscape against which the US National Security Strategy (NSS) was published on 5 December, the seventh such document in this century and the most transactional ever. President Donald Trump's more muscular and singular approach to foreign and national security policy was already foreshadowed with his multifront assault on the central pillars of the liberal international order created in the aftermath of the Second World War under US leadership, and with the renaming of the Department of War. The 33-page NSS gives institutional form to his foreign policy.

Sent by the president to Congress, the NSS articulates the administration's national security vision and how the several elements of US power will be used in pursuit of national security goals. It is meant to bring the different elements of his international policies into some sort of a coherent strategic framework, to steer the various branches of the national security apparatus into implementing his priorities, to rally public support behind the administration's goals, to reassure friends and allies, and to deter adversaries.

It marks an explicit repudiation of the worldview of post-Cold War US administrations: 'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over' (p. 12). In his foreword, Trump describes it as 'a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history' and is made 'safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before' (p. ii).

The NSS addresses the world as Trump sees it today, not as it was in 1991. The key sentence for me is:

President Trump's foreign policy is…realistic without being 'realist,' principled without being 'idealistic,' muscular without being 'hawkish,' and restrained without being 'dovish' (p. 8).

The backdrop to this is the denunciation of the elite consensus at the Cold War's end, following which successive administrations:

lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty (p. 2).

NSS 2025 accepts the imperative to prioritise competing regions and goals in a world of limited resources, instead of presenting a comprehensive laundry list of all the good-to-have objectives. It makes the obvious and common-sense point that the principal US strategic interest is the defence of the homeland and its own hemisphere, with special emphasis on preventing extra-hemispheric powers such as China, Russia, and Iran from meddling. But it also reaffirms the need for a 'free and open Indo-Pacific' (p. 19). The region that accounts for almost half the world's GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars and one-third in nominal GDP, is critical to the world's economic development and political stability.

The Logic of Geography

The NSS should put to rest the notion that Trum...