For nearly a decade, a small but growing group of analysts has argued that American foreign policy needs a massive course correction. With the unveiling of President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy yesterday, that broad-based course correction is at hand and clearly articulated.

While the United States cannot, and should not, retreat into isolationism, it has desperately needed a reorientation toward the world as it actually is. For too long, Western intellectuals, policy wonks, and political leaders bought into the “End of History” and “Unipolar Moment” framing of how the world would operate after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Instead of continuing to act as if the United States could perennially play the role of Atlas holding up the world, a consistent theme emerged in realist policy analysis: the United States could no longer afford a foreign policy driven by ideological aspiration, institutional inertia, or the comforting illusions of unipolarity. The United States needed a realism fit for a new competitive age—not the caricature of realism that pretends America can withdraw behind its oceans, but a realism grounded in material strength, strategic triage, and an unsentimental view of how great-power politics actually works.

With the release of the 2025 National Security Strategy, it is fair to say that an American administration has finally produced a strategic document that fully embodies this worldview and does so unapologetically. The NSS contains a strategic sensibility that realists and America First-oriented analysts have been advancing for years—one that places geopolitical balance, economic resilience, and clear prioritization at the center of US statecraft, while discarding the moralistic overreach that defined the post-Cold War era. The result is a document that, while not perfect, marks the most significant intellectual advance in American grand strategy since the Nixon administration.

The first point of alignment is prioritization, something that has been the Achilles’ heel of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The 2025 NSS does not mince words: China is the pacing challenge, and the Indo-Pacific is the priority theater. This is precisely the analytic structure outlined in some of my own

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