The Revolutionary New Dynamics of the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States |
A blunt assertion of political intent that rides roughshod over the sensibilities of friend and foe alike, the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States marks a sea change in U.S. foreign policy. The most controversial foreign policy statement in decades, the NSS has produced an extraordinary reaction across the diplomatic world. Reaction has been particularly pointed in Europe. The European Council President Antonio Costa has condemned as unacceptable those parts of the Strategy that he describes as a threat of American interference in European affairs. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has also stressed the unacceptability of American interference in European affairs and has concluded that the lesson of the Strategy for Europe is the need for greater independence in security policy. A dismayed Alice Rufo, the French director general of international relations and strategy, described the NSS as ‘an extremely brutal clarification’ of the Trump administration’s ideology. Even the Pope, Leo XIV, has been moved to describe the changed attitude towards the alliance with Europe as unfortunate and the exclusion of Europe from attempts to bring about peace in Ukraine as ‘not realistic.’ By contrast, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave the NSS a guarded welcome, with Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova finding particularly significant the Trump administration’s ‘revision of Washington’s previous commitment to hegemony.’
An American security strategy that renounces hegemony certainly marks a significant moment in U.S. foreign policy and global politics. The refusal of hegemony should not, however, be read as a rejection of American primacy. The NSS is clear throughout that although the U.S. no longer intends to exert its influence and authority everywhere it has no intention of relinquishing its status as the world’s most powerful state and in fact insists on its determination to remain the dominant power on Earth. Donald Trump personally avows that the NSS is ‘a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history’ and that ‘[i]n the years ahead, we will make America safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before.’ Exploring the difference between hegemony and primacy goes some way to understanding the strategic logic of the NSS and why the Trump administration is excoriating its existing allies and attempting to woo Russia. In short, the NSS reveals that the USA is preparing for superpower competition with China and it is shedding what it regards as the political and conceptual dead weight of hegemony to ensure that it prevails over its rival and remains the primary power on Earth.
A Partial Shrug of the American Atlas
The authors of the NSS lay great emphasis on the rejection of the strategic aim of permanent American hegemony as one of their doctrine’s most significant innovations. Democrat and Republican “elites” alike are criticized for having ‘badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens’ and for expanding ‘the definition of America’s “national interest” such that almost no issues or endeavor is considered outside its scope.’ The U.S. now ‘rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination,’ the NSS authors insist, and instead proposes a focus on a more narrowly defined protection of core security interests. ‘The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas,’ the NSS assures us, ‘are over.’
The benefit of Atlas putting aside its hegemonic ambitions is the decoupling from onerous responsibilities and commitments for an America anxious to downsize its involvements with regions that are no longer considered a priority so that it can prepare for an elemental struggle with its Chinese rival. Now that America is ‘once again a net energy exporter,’ for example, it does not need to prioritize a Middle East that is ‘no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.’ Africa, also, will have to adjust to a transition from ‘an aid-focused relationship … to a........