I. Paradigms, New and Old

For weeks, an armada of US warships floated off Venezuela’s shores. Then, in the early hours of 3 January, a group of more than 200 US Special Forces operators broke into the military fortress of Nicolás Maduro, the dictator who has ruled Venezuela since 2013. Reinforced by at least 150 aircraft dispatched from twenty different bases on land and sea, Delta Force operators captured Maduro and by 4:29 a.m., Caracas time, he and his wife were aboard the USS Iwo Jima bound for New York to be arraigned in federal court.

In a time of growing great-power rivalry on both sides of Eurasia, this spirited revival of 19th-century-style gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean Basin has taken many by surprise. The raid in Caracas has spurred some on the Right to lament the demise of “America First” foreign policy, while others have welcomed these developments, arguing that Maduro’s capture has put the global authoritarian axis on its heels. But the judgment from each faction may be premature. The most surprising feature of this aggressive American operation in the western hemisphere is not that the Trump administration has chosen to confront a hostile regime in the Americas, but rather that it has done so, by all appearances, as part of a wider scheme to cede strategically vital domains to more formidable hostile regimes farther afield.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has understood that the historical custom of carving out spheres of influence among rival great powers would, in the modern era, pose a direct threat to global security and the American way of life. It has been readily apparent to America’s postwar leaders and policymakers that strategically significant regions—Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East—are vital theatres of global competition, and that general peace and prosperity depend on deterring revanchist powers from dominating any of them. Moreover, it has generally been recognised in Washington that America’s unique position in the international system leaves no other nation or coalition equipped to perform this essential role.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, there has been a steady erosion in support among the American people and their elected representatives for America’s activism abroad in defence of the established order. For these domestic critics of an outsized American global role, the best strategy for the United States is to retrench its position and serve, at most, as a distant offshore balancer. This new strategic modesty would entail granting China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia and Europe while focusing the attention of the United States on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans.

With the advent of the second Trump administration, now less restrained by the internationalist old guard, the oft-anticipated revolution—or counter-revolution—in US foreign policy away from global hegemony has well and truly arrived. It’s hardly a secret that President Trump has no fondness for the tradition of strong and assertive world leadership, and has always regarded America’s global engagement as exorbitant. But by the end of the first year of his final term, he seems determined to abandon that international orientation once and for all. In adopting a dramatically more crabbed view of US interests in what is heralded as a new multipolar world, adversaries have reason to be sceptical of America’s will, and allies have reason to be anxious about America’s reliability. The prestige of American power has already been grievously diminished.

With a semblance of order returning to the Middle East after two years of war, the Trump administration has evidently decided that the other two regions long identified as strategically crucial to global stability are of only secondary interest to the United States. In its reluctance to discharge old commitments in Europe and the Pacific Rim, it has fixed its attention much closer to home, on the presence of drug traffickers and despots in the Caribbean Basin. This radical revision of US foreign policy has alarmed traditional allies and emboldened traditional adversaries, causing many observers—including the German Chancellor—to speculate that the Pax Americana is over. And if history is any guide, the decline of American hegemony will have the gravest implications for the character of the world order. A dramatically more chaotic and pitiless world is about to return.

It’s important to understand that this looming abdication was not forced on the United States by forces beyond its control. It has been wilfully chosen by its highest officials, as the administration’s recent National Security Strategy makes plain. Until quite recently, such an insouciant announcement of a reduced American place in the world would have been hard to fathom. It was only eight years ago that President Trump, guided by seasoned foreign-policy hands and a clutch of Republican internationalists, laid out a National Security Strategy that acknowledged the need for vigorous global activism to check the authoritarian bloc of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. A world of great-power rivalries threatened to bring down the liberal order and replace it with one that, it was still assumed, would be far less conducive to American interests and American ideals. 

II. Beginner’s Luck

The first Trump administration’s NSS was not without flaws, but it was a serious document, ambitiously conceived and carefully crafted. If it ultimately foundered as a result of its attempt to combine incompatible worldviews into a single doctrine—a narrowly construed “America First” nationalism with the more orthodox internationalism of the foreign-policy establishment—it generally conformed to a traditional Republican view of the world. The document’s strategic dissonance was largely muffled by its recognition of a fact hiding in plain sight: that the United States was entering a new era of great-power competition. 

The initial Trump NSS indicated that the kinds of conflict—protracted counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions in the broader Middle East—that had consumed the attention and resources of the US military in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 would no longer be fought. It argued that “wars of choice” cut into the overriding goal of preventing the outbreak of a war of necessity. It chastised the foreign-policy establishment when it discarded imprudent assumptions about the durability of the liberal order in favour of a new realism about the implacable enemies of international stability. It identified a rising China and a revanchist Russia as great dangers, and pledged to deter them by returning to a single-minded focus on traditional power politics.

The 2017 National Security Strategy called attention to the fact that Russia is “using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments.” It further noted that China is “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats” to coerce its neighbours and intimidate others. The Trump team back then signalled that a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order” had already begun.

This ignited a heated debate over whether or not a belated recognition of emerging great-power threats would be undercut by an erratic and brutal Washington administration. Trump’s use of public power for private gain and his fixation on irrational economic nostrums seemed to indicate that the American president would be fatally inhibited in his management of a global system of alliances. No matter how assiduously his deputies sought to reassure allies and deter adversaries, the recurrent defects in the president’s character necessarily made the United States an untrustworthy hegemon.

After more than a decade spent trying to coax China into becoming a responsible member of the community of nations, the core contention of the original Trump NSS—namely, that the People’s Republic of China was an unambiguous adversary of the liberal order—was rapidly and broadly accepted in the governing class. However, the notion that the Trump administration was sufficiently steadfast and adroit to shore up that flagging order remained in doubt. Under the insistent hand of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, the NSS declared that “America First” did not mean “America alone.” But everything about Trump’s personality and the lack of strategic thinking in his orbit belied such happy talk.

III. See No Enemies

Eight years later, the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy has settled that dispute once and for all. The product of various factions within the Trump coalition, this incongruous document reflects the disordered personality of the commander in chief. Notwithstanding its internal contradictions, it’s a full-throated declaration of the operating principles of “America First.” Without explicitly renouncing the need to engage in global competition, its overall register reflects the assumption that strategic competition is passé. It proposes instead that, henceforth, the priority of US foreign policy ought to be business. It directs the national-security apparatus to exert “control over our borders” and prevent “unfair trading practices” and “job destruction and deindustrialization.” Worthy goals to be sure, but hardly equal to the gravity of the threats now arrayed against the American order.

With revisionist powers collaborating in both word and deed to mount a strategic challenge to American hegemony, the meaning of the new NSS is that America will prematurely bow out of that contest. Henceforth, Washington will have little inclination to cooperate with our erstwhile friends to prevent military aggression. It will not forswear destructive tariffs that encourage a beggar-thy-neighbour mercantilism. Instead, global territory and interests will be demarcated between and among great powers, divvying up this geopolitical harvest on the basis of spheres of influence. As Anne Applebaum has observed, a striking feature of the emerging Trump doctrine is “its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill.” Competition is out, collusion is in.

This illusion of safety breeding a laissez-faire foreign and defence policy is by no means a new phenomenon in American history. It flows from what the historian C. Vann Woodward described as the quintessentially American expectation, residing on a continent insulated from a violent external world, of “free security.” Discrete events—the British siege of Washington in 1814, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and al Qaeda’s assault on New York and Washington in 2001—have on occasion conspired to rouse Americans from their military slumbers and convinced them that their security cannot be taken for granted. But after the guns fall silent, the historical pattern reverts to complacency and self-absorption until the next clear and present danger reveals itself. More than a century ago, this insular and optimistic spirit was captured by a British historian. “Safe from attack, safe even from menace,” James Bryce wrote of the United States in 1888, “she hears from afar the warring cries of European races and faiths, as the gods of Epicurus listened to the murmurs of the unhappy earth spread out beneath their golden dwellings.” For the moment, Bryce wrote, “she sails upon a summer sea.” 

By paying no heed to the hostile ambitions and designs of our near-peer adversaries, the Trump strategy resembles the NSS of the Clinton administration, published in December 1999. In his shrewd book Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, historian John Lewis Gaddis points out that President Clinton’s lack of a compelling grand strategy was rooted in the popular post-Cold War notion that globalisation would cause global national interests to converge on democracy and free-market capitalism. The Clinton NSS failed to recognise the manifold dangers in the international system that threatened international progress, and the administration therefore formulated no credible strategy to contain, deter, or defeat them. As Gaddis observes, it “seems simply to assume peace.”

The Clinton NSS’s unspoken belief in the inexorable progress of the American order was not an outlier at the time. It was also expressed by a pair of President Clinton’s national security advisers. Anthony Lake suggested that the United States need only “engage” with the rest of the world in order to “enlarge” the sphere of progress. Resistance to the American project was apparently unworthy of consideration. Later, Samuel Berger echoed this extravagant optimism in a speech titled “American Power: Hegemony, Isolationism or Engagement.” Berger opposed American hegemony and decried Republican calls for increased defence spending. The true test of leadership, he argued, is not whether or not the United States can remain militarily dominant, but whether or not it is in compliance with international conventions and enjoys the sanction of the United Nations. He even derided those who worry about the threat of great-power conflict as “nostalgic” for the Cold War. It was as if the United States—and a growing portion of the Earth—were comfortably ensconced in their golden dwellings, and no enemies threatened them.