Foreign policy announcements during the second Trump administration are often like mortar shells; they disappear into the air for a heartbeat, then crash down with enough force to rattle everyone in range. The release of the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) at 10 pm on a Thursday earlier this month was a perfect example of this.
It was immediately obvious that this particular NSS was not meant for the foreign policy crowd. It’s not the usual lengthy and jargon-laden document that wonks are used to. The strategy’s authors went to great lengths to write a short, clear, easy-to-understand strategy accessible to ordinary Americans. To quote one analyst, it has “a clear layout saying, ‘This is what we want. This is why we have a strategy. What are the ends, ways, and means? What does that mean?’”
Shocking, I know.
Similarly, it is neither the pure, neo-isolationist manifesto that many hawks feared would be printed. There is no call to form Americanistan, no demand to pull out of every military base and let the world burn. At the same time, the strategy also isn’t the total denunciation of all overseas interventions that hard-line restrainers long for in their heart of hearts. If anything, read in a certain way, much of the document suggests that America will continue to meddle in the foreign affairs of other nations for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps most eyebrow-raising is how the NSS downplays the sort of high-drama, military-centric confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific that defined the previous two administrations, instead viewing the Sino-American rivalry almost entirely through an economic prism. For both hawks and prioritizers who were gearing up for a Taiwan-centered showdown, this is something of a shock.
Overall, to many, the NSS is a messy synthesis that refuses to sit neatly in any of the usual ideological boxes. Quite a few experts were left blindsided. I was not.
This is because I laid out almost this exact general blueprint for this strategy earlier this year, arguing in Marchand July that long-standing structural forces—the accumulated cost of decades of foreign over-extension, the hollowing out of the US industrial base, the rise of a peer competitor, and so on—have been compelling the American system toward a much-needed geopolitical and economic reckoning. For those of us tracking the raw, structural logic of American power, all this NSS does is state the obvious: the fiction that the United States can perpetually fund a hegemonic rules-based and values-based liberal international order, without domestic consequence, is over. The time, instead, has come for a drastic course correction.
America is now transitioning to an explicit and unapologetic consolidation-oriented imperial phase. The new approach will be hard-edge transactionalism, prioritizing raw power and national interest over ideological pretense—a radical departure from the previous “liberal imperial” model, where the ideology of liberal internationalism was both the central policy driver and the enduring justification for decades of global intervention. The NSS openly indicates that, in the pursuit of its goals, to borrow from the analyst cited earlier, “We reserve the right to do whatever we want. The ‘flexible realism’ section is a fancy way of saying we’ll do whatever is convenient.”
This shift towards naked strategic transactionalism with an imperial flavor should surprise no one; a security-minded, economically-driven, hemispheric-focused empire has long been America’s default geopolitical posture since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine. My own reading of this new strategic framework, after proper consideration and reflection, confirms three fundamental shifts that will define the coming era of US foreign policy:
First, a firm and formal repudiation of the liberal worldview—the set of progressive assumptions that underpinned the much-vaunted rules-based liberal international order (LIO)—and replacing it with an explicitly transactional, power-based framework.
Second, an affirmation of the United States’ deepest structural instinct for ensuring regional primacy as a top priority, necessitating an aggressive modernization of the Monroe Doctrine (with a “Trump Corollary”). This requires a pullback from other regions and demands a drastic increase in burden-sharing from allies.
Third, a hard pivot away from reliance on raw military strength and ideological conviction toward economic statecraft. The future contest for power will be waged over energy dominance, techno-industrial capacity, and innovation potential, as success in these arenas is needed to restore domestic prosperity and underwrite the legitimacy of America’s political system.
Each of these is worth consideration.
The LIO, in brief, was predicated on the belief that American security and prosperity hinged on the global dissemination of two key elements: liberal ideological norms—things like liberal democracy, rule of law, demographic and religious pluralism, an expansive understanding of human rights, and so forth—and neoliberal economic policies. Both ideological and economic schools of thought have been constantly presented together as nominally sensible and ideologically neutral. Taken together, the result is a belief system that holds that all other nations and peoples must be gradually convinced to look and act like Western liberal capitalist democracies, and that this constitutes both necessary and inevitable teleological “progress” for humanity toward a better (and implicitly utopian) world.
The issue, as it were, is that though this worldview cloaks itself in the language of tolerance, its core premise—that progress hinges on every society ultimately conforming to the same liberal-Western template—is patently intolerant. Thus, the LIO is an evangelizing force that brands ideological and cultural resistance of every stripe as a kind of moral heresy, thereby justifying endless pressure, sanctions, regime change, or outright war against nations and cultures that refuse to convert into “good” liberal democracies.
It is this ideological project of US-led enforced global socio-ideological convergence that the 2025 NSS formally abandons. This is a decisive philosophical break in thinking about the very purpose of America and its people, and thus US foreign policy.
The strategy does so by revising the historical narrative of the post-Cold War era as a hubristic disaster, arguing that American foreign policy elites “convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” and that the liberal, universalist approach is actively destructive to the domestic foundation of American power, as said elites “undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.”
It identifies a litany of structural crimes committed by the LIO, including: miscalculating America’s willingness to sustain global burdens; placing “hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the middle class and industrial base”; allowing allies to offload defense costs; and lashing American policy to a transnationalism that “explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”
By defining the LIO’s guiding vision as an “undesirable and impossible goal” and listing out the consequences of its pursuit, the NSS moves beyond mere policy critique to deliver a total, structural, and philosophical rejection of the post-Cold War and even post-World War II liberal consensus. This is replaced with an open call to subordinate all US foreign policy to the restoration of America’s own material, demographic, cultural, and even spiritual health. This is most visible toward the end of the subsection on what the United States wants, with the strategy’s authors writing:
Finally, we want the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.
This point merits further discussion. In the eyes of the authors—and many others—the LIO was fundamentally “unnatural” because it very much went against human nature. While it was driven by a nominally well-intentioned desire to catalyze the inevitable, universal progress of humanity toward liberal-democratic perfection, the LIO’s ideal human was homo economicus—self-maximizing and unmoored, unmarked by history, identity, or inheritance. This is “human capital” in the most literal sense; human beings as a resource, nothing more than raw, interchangeable capital, to be optimized and deployed for maximum return on investment within a frictionless global market.
By seeking to erase all differences, including the ones that give life meaning, the LIO detaches individuals from the organic bonds of family, faith, and community that sustain civilizations. In exalting individual autonomy above all else, the moral and biological imperatives on which any enduring social order depends are corroded. It is no surprise then that the United States (and other Western countries) is beset by “epidemic levels” of loneliness, large declines in religious identity, collapsing trust in government, mass fear for the future, and, most damning of all, falling fertility rates.
After all, in a society that conditions individuals to behave as economically self-maximizing units, children are a costly consumption choice whose returns are impossible to price. They cease to be regarded as the very fulfillment of human life, as so eloquently described by science fiction author Orson Scott Card:
And you’ll never draw a secure breath until you have grandchildren, a double handful of them, because then you know that your line won’t die out, your influence will continue. Selfish, isn’t it? Only it’s not selfish, it’s what life is for. It’s the only thing that brings happiness, ever, to anyone. All the other things-victories, achievements, honors, causes-they bring only momentary flashes of pleasure. But binding yourself to another person and to the children you make together, that’s life. And you can’t do it if your life is centered on your ambitions. You’ll never be happy. It will never be enough, even if you rule the world.
The LIO’s revaluation of children—from the telos of life to something of a luxury good—does not, however, eliminate society’s underlying economic demand for human beings as inputs. Even as native fertility collapses, countries still require a constant flow of “raw human capital” to sustain growth, service debt, and prop up aging welfare states.
The “solution” to this problem has been the encouragement of large-scale migration in recent decades, working under an assumption that a Somali migrant or a Syrian war refugee is simply undifferentiated raw material—plug-and-play labor units—that can be dropped into Minneapolis or Stockholm or Cologne and, with the right incentives and a few language classes, reliably turned into secular, tax-paying, rule-of-law-abiding Americans or Swedes or Germans. It is a worldview that refuses to acknowledge that, as Christopher Caldwell put it, nations are “not just arbitrarily bounded zones that can be expected to remain always the same, no matter who lives there.”
The NSS, in short, utterly rejects the afore-described spreadsheet mentality, providing instead an unapologetic declaration that the highest strategic imperative of the United States is the survival, preservation, and renewal of its own distinct national culture and people. This is a profoundly nationalist vision, arguing for a confident, spiritually and culturally healthy citizenry whose work provides meaning rather than just wages and whose families are seen as the essential base unit of national power.
It is a total rejection of the notion that patriotism, tradition, and cultural inheritance are disposable relics to be traded for economic efficiency, demographic-cultural integration via illegal mass migration, and, ultimately, an eternal utopia that was supposed to emerge from forced liberal-democratic uniformity.
This philosophical shift naturally has massive implications for the country’s foreign policy, which we will now explore.
This nationalist reorientation of America’s self-understanding is what informs the geopolitical core of the NSS. Marshaling the resources needed to renew national greatness, as it were, necessitates a hard reckoning with the country’s various structural vulnerabilities. These, in turn, cannot be addressed without ruthless prioritization, which means downgrading, conditioning, or even abandoning peripheral commitments in now “non-essential” strategic theaters. The result is a policy of strategic consolidation, with an intense focus on the Western Hemisphere as the indispensable core security zone where the United States can secure unchallenged primacy.
Critically, this strategic pullback doubles as a restructuring process; it compels the United States to reorient its economic foundations toward relative self-sufficiency by securing, within its own hemisphere, privileged access to the energy supplies, critical minerals, and other industrial inputs necessary to rebuild resilient supply chains and restore national productive capacity, while simultaneously restricting rival powers from exploiting those same regional assets.
I myself saw this coming, noting months ago that “the emerging polycentric system has reinforced the Western Hemisphere’s position as the cornerstone of America’s empire, with the Atlantic Ocean as its natural strategic backyard — the domain it must secure at all costs, where its dominance remains non-negotiable.” The NSS is more even explicit, declaring that Washington “will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
Despite what some critics might contend, this shift is actually quite sensible. Historically, during periods of great power competition, American foreign policy has had a narrow, unsentimental focus on securing trade access, controlling geographic chokepoints, and ensuring no external power attains a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The NSS’ proposed “Trump Corollary” merely enshrines that older, harder tradition.
President Donald Trump’s various Western Hemisphere-oriented pronouncements and policies—wanting to acquire Greenland, eyeing Canadian real estate, reestablishing authority over the Panama Canal, expressing interest in Venezuelan oil and South American critical minerals, and so forth—should be understood as him possessing an instinctual understanding of what is needed to bolster this position. Even the rechristening of the Gulf of Mexico into the “Gulf of America” serves to convey rhetorical and psychological US dominion over what it regards as its own near abroad.
In the months and years ahead, the Trump administration will work to secure this sphere in a manner that is familiar to anyone who knows the history of US policy toward Latin America—though those who want solid introductions should read a Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions (detailing the recurring cycles of intervention to protect US economic dominance) and Lars Schoultz’s Beneath the United States (analyzing the persistent shadow of American hegemony over the region).
We’re already witnessing the administration’s selective engagement, which is rewarding political alignment and cooperation with US interests: Washington is openly bolstering Javier Milei’s government in Argentina with financial and diplomatic support, strengthening ties with Paraguay under Santiago Peña, enjoying a strong relationship with Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and pushing to label José Jerí’s Peru a “Major Non-NATO ally.” Conversely, left-wing governments are facing intense pressure: Venezuela is the current primary target for military intervention, Cuba’s sclerotic regime is next on the docket for renewed involvement, and Honduras is now under the microscope.
This pattern—rewarding the compliant, punishing the defiant—aims to gradually ensure that no peer competitor can plant a flag in Washington’s backyard, and that every country is aligned on key aspects of security policy (including on drug cartels), economic policy (especially regarding critical minerals), and so forth.
The lavish attention on the Western Hemisphere obviously comes at a price: the rest of the world is being deprioritized. Having (reluctantly) accepted that its resources and strategic attention are fundamentally limited, US strategists now realize that a whole slate of overseas commitments can no longer be justified by the marginal security or even economic returns they offer. Thus, limited resources must be repatriated—immediately and without apology—to focus on what matters. As a result, what the NSS is signaling to the rest of the world is that other states should also adjust to new geopolitical realities.
In practice, this means that Washington has initiated a de facto partition of the global order into spheres of influence, with the United States staking its claim to the Western Hemisphere while ceding (or conditioning) primacy elsewhere to other powers.
Various analysts have anticipated this geopolitical evolution and framed it, whether positively or negatively, as the beginning of a mature multipolar order. Stacie Goddard, writing in Foreign Affairs this past April,described the dynamic as the end of doctrinal shell of great-power competition—meant to focus US foreign policy into constraining and “out-competing” China and Russia simultaneously, the default strategy of both the Biden and first Trump administrations—and the beginning of “great-power collusion,” which is in effect a new Concert of Powers in which each major player polices its own neighborhood and avoids stepping on the others’ toes.
However, putting aside the fact that word choice is pejorative—the word “collusion” is loaded with negative feeling, evoking conceptions of criminal conspiracy—this conclusion suffers from a problem that I identified in August in the Italian geopolitical journal Limes:
We are indeed exiting the era of liberal hegemony, with its presumption of universal norms and indefinite expansion. But we are not yet entering a new age of great-power concert. We are in a liminal phase—a geopolitical interregnum—where the leading powers are focused on addressing their own particular circumstances. […] No one is (yet) in a firm position to define a new international order. […] This struggle is most visibly playing out through the slow—though accelerating—delineation of spheres of influence. This is what is really happening in Ukraine, Taiwan, Syria, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and beyond. Each of these contests is a local manifestation of the larger geopolitical sorting process at play.
In other words, all three of the major global powers are contending with numerous internal issues, and none of them has yet fully established the precise contours of their respective spheres of influence. The process of determining these is manifesting as a cascade of overlapping conflicts, each a microcosm of the larger geopolitical re-sort. The war in Ukraine is being fought over whether the country belongs in the American sphere or the Russian one. Tensions over Taiwan are effectively the same; does the island belong to the Sinic sphere, or does its fate lie in the Western sphere? So on and so forth.
As a consequence, one of the LIO’s cardinal rules—no territorial revision by force—has been thoroughly discarded. Great and middle powers—for the game is not just being played by America, China, and Russia—will intervene selectively, picking winners and losers in proxy wars, border skirmishes, and regime change operations that will quite literally redraw the geopolitical map, piece by piece. We should expect border changes and (potentially) new countries to appear in the coming years.
This unfolding reality necessitates a reconceptualization of US geostrategic thinking away from bipolarity toward multipolarity. Consider, for example, the still-significant sway that Zbigniew Brzezinski’s still-popular bipolar “Grand Chessboard”—at its base, it sees strategic competition as a zero-sum game between two players vying for Eurasian dominance—holds over geopolitical thinking. This sort of framing must give way to something messier and more unpredictable, but more in line with observable reality: former National Interestmanaging editor and geopolitical theorist Damjan Krnjević Mišković’s “Grand Card Table,” as outlined in his 2023 analysis of the Silk Road region.
In this understanding, geopolitics is like playing a high-stakes game of poker, with multiple players sitting at the table, coming and going as hands unfold. Bluffing, misdirection, and concealed strength in this game matter as much as actual material power, as the goal is to manipulate the expectations of multiple competitors, aiming to either coax them into backing down or lure them into overextension. The game is fluid and multipolar: there can be no single victor unless one is extremely lucky for multiple consecutive rounds. And a winning hand in one regional round—say, in Central Asia—offers no guarantee of advantage in another, such as the Indo-Pacific, given that the cards, players, and stakes are constantly reshuffled.
For the United States, the immediate imperative in this “card game” remains defining and locking down its own sphere of influence—a process that, interestingly, the Biden administration began, albeit tentatively. As I wrote in March, the previous administration’s proposed Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation was a broad, if skeletal, framework to knit economic, technological, and security ties across the Atlantic. Curiosity, it includes Latin America, Western Europe, and the west coast of Africa.
Although the partnership still exists as a rather empty memorandum awaiting real funding and commitments, it nonetheless traced something of an initial demarcation line: an implicit expansion beyond the classic Monroe Doctrine, redefining America’s vital zone as the entirety of the Atlantic basin. The Trump administration’s various moves in its first year seem to double down on this conception. We can thus define this new north-south transatlantic framing, for now, as the current iteration of America’s sphere of influence.
This is where the implications of the current strategic rethink start to become radical and disconcerting for many: an expanded conception of the US sphere of influence to include much of Europe means that Europe is part of the US sphere of influence. The continent, in the eyes of high-level thinkers, is being downgraded from a strategic autonomous subject of international order into an object of great power competition.
A careful reading of the NSS reveals as much. It emphasizes that the continent is “strategically and culturally vital to the United States. Transatlantic trade remains one of the pillars of the global economy and of American prosperity. European sectors from manufacturing to technology to energy remain among the world’s most robust. Europe is home to cutting-edge scientific research and world-leading cultural institutions. Not only can we not afford to write Europe off—doing so would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve.”
Having established that, the NSS then delivers an extraordinary and open criticism of the continent’s current trajectory under the European Union, denouncing outright the continent’s ongoing “civilizational erasure” through harmful migration policies, declining birthrates, and “regulatory suffocation.” The strategy states that, if these trends hold, then “over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” And in response, the NSS says, the United States should go as far as “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Translation: Europe is vital to the United States for cultural/civilizational reasons and fundamentally material/security-related reasons, and thus necessitates its inclusion in the US sphere of influence. The United States cannot afford to “lose” it to any other geopolitical, civilizational, or ideological force. As such, Washington believes it is justified in undertaking actions it deems necessary to “secure” Europe.
This, perhaps, is the crowning irony of the document: it takes a core assumption of the previous liberal paradigm and aggressively turns it inward against its originators.
Once again, it must be emphasized that the LIO worldview is ultimately Manicheanism masquerading as morally correct pluralism. It holds that any refusal to adopt the liberal-Western societal model, however peaceful or sovereign, is an existential threat and therefore demands correction, whether by sanction, subversion, or force. Look no further than the oversimplified “democracies vs. autocracies” framing of the Biden era, which treated an assortment of non-liberal regimes as a single bloc merely because they rejected the one true faith, even though “autocracy” is obviously not a unified, coherent ideology. To borrow the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The Trump NSS, in turn, is saying to LIO advocates, “You’re right: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And that includes you.” It seizes upon that same uncompromising, zero-sum logic and turns it back on the liberals who forged it: the self-dissolution now underway in Europe (and elsewhere) is brutal injustice being committed against its own peoples and their ostensibly democratic political systems. The strategy’s authors are arguing that the LIO’s liberal ideology is itself a threat to Western civilization, and perhaps the entire world, that must be resisted and destroyed.
It is worth repeating this, given how seismic it is: an official American strategy document has declared the regnant ideology of its own elite class, and that of most Western allied capitals, is an active threat to US national security that must be contained, rolled back, and ultimately defeated. It is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” in reverse: the containment doctrine once aimed at communism abroad is now turned inward against the liberal-globalist elite itself, especially since doing so is deemed necessary to shore up Europe (a part of the US sphere of influence) and deny geopolitical rivals access to its industrial base, markets, and experts.
The foreign policy implications of this shift are massive: nationalist and sovereigntist movements across Europe, and beyond, will begin to enjoy active material, diplomatic, and cultural support from the US government. These likely include both active national conservative-aligned governments—Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, and so forth—and individuals and parties seeking to attain power in the old continent, especially in France and Germany, as they remain the beating hearts of the European Union. And it also means that a variety of European/EU officials will likewise be targeted by the US government.
The opening shots have already been fired: Washington has imposed visa bans on five Europeans, including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, accusing them of pressuring tech firms to censor and suppress, in the words of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “American viewpoints they oppose.” The fight over the knotty (and very real) issue of EU regulations (the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, etc.) affecting US social media companies is being elevated to an active front in this new kulturkampf between America and Europe.
In short, moving forward, Washington will treat nationalist and sovereigntist parties as strategic assets in a broad fight against what remains of the LIO and its ideological foundations. The age of funding color revolutions to spread ideological liberalism is finished; the age of bankrolling “color liberations” to tear it down has begun.
So far, everything I’ve discussed addresses what is inside the US sphere of influence. But what about all that lies outside of it?
The Trump administration’s strategy here, it seems, is to shape peripheral arrangements into stable or manageable configurations that prevent China, and to a lesser degree Russia, from turning any region into a consolidated anti-American platform.
In the Indo-Pacific, that means bolstering the Quad, AUKUS, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework to “contain” China without overcommitting limited military resources. In the Middle East, AI-focused partnerships with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the Abraham Accords, and the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC)—a framework that I see evolving into a “corridor of corridors” that I call “the New Golden Road”—will be leveraged to outsource stability to local actors. Along the Silk Road belt—from Central Asia to the Caucasus—the mix of TRIPP, the Middle Corridor, and the upgraded C5+1 (now C6+1with Azerbaijan’s inclusion) will aim to fragment Russian and Chinese influence without risking direct confrontation. So on and so forth.
As a consequence of this, extant commitments will be dramatically reshaped, especially military commitments. The NSS’ section on strengthening the First Island Chain and deterring aggression over Taiwan exhorts allies like Japan and South Korea to take far more responsibility, namely in the form of increased defense spending.
Likewise, there is the “Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and which our NATO allies have endorsed and must now meet.” The Middle East—America’s long-standing fixation—is similarly being reconsidered, as the strategy declares that there is “less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe,” owing to the partial collapse of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” the (frankly under-discussed) developmental efforts of Turkey and Gulf states, and that US partners are “demonstrating their commitment to combating radicalism.”
In short, allies and many “partners” must now “assume primary responsibility for their regions” and make the requisite budgetary and policy changes necessary to make this work.
All of these myriad regional re-orderings, and others not mentioned, will be hammered out in the coming years through the full arsenal of statecraft: proxy wars and ceasefires, backchannel diplomacy, sector-specific economic pacts (energy, rare earths, semiconductors, et al), financial incentives and sanctions, and the occasional show of force.
This brings us to the final major shift that the NSS makes clear is happening: economic statecraft is now becoming the decisive instrument of American power.
In the NSS’ list of the United States’ strategic priorities, around half relate to economic security: balanced trade, critical mineral access, supply-chain independence, reindustrialization, a revival of the defense industrial base, energy dominance, and the preservation of financial preponderance. The document, in other words, is an official acknowledgment that American strength depends on its own productive capacities, and that the ability to project military power across oceans exists primarily to serve that higher goal of keeping factories running and supply chains out of hostile hands.
This is the shift I described as forthcoming in July, where I argued that the accumulated weight of US debt, the industrial hollowing-out of the United States, and strategic peer competition has finally made the neoliberal economic model unsustainable, meaning that the only path left is a deliberate turn toward state-directed economic nationalism justified by the language of security, since national security now begins with whether the country can still make what it needs to survive.
To reiterate, neoliberalism has spent four decades convincing Western elites that prosperity could be permanently borrowed and that manufacturing could be offshored without consequence. Likewise, elites have been convinced that sovereign, corporate, and even household debt could theoretically rise forever, so long as certain underlying fundamentals (the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the Federal Reserve’s willingness to keep on buying US government bonds, and so on) remained stable.
The result is a country whose government debt is already on a trajectory to 143 percent of GDP and climbing (ie, “going broke,” per JP Morgan), whose corporations finance stock buybacks with borrowed money, whose households live on revolving credit, and whose industrial base has been dismantled and shipped overseas, with strategic vulnerabilities are now concentrated in the hands of a single competitor that never believed neoliberalism’s promises in the first place.
That competitor now builds ships faster than the United States can build shipyards. It controls the processing capacity for the minerals that every advanced economy requires. And most disturbingly for war hawks, it fields weapons and strategems that make US legacy platforms look obsolete. To quote one senior Biden national security official who received a classified, multiyear assessment of how a war with China would actually play out: “every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy.”
This means that the macroeconomic position of the United States—stagnant productivity, rampant financialization and speculation at the expense of productive industries, labor-participation rates that never recovered from 2008, households drowning in liabilities, and so on—makes any prolonged high-intensity military conflict impossible, because the country cannot sustain the industrial mobilization such a conflict would demand.
To quote one noted commentator, “Manufacturing is a war now.”
Moreover, circumstances will likely worsen; if the 2000s were the “China Shock,” which resulted in the hollowing out of manufacturing in advanced economies, there are signs of a China Shock 2.0 in the future, which will do the same to high-tech industries. The reality is that China’s manufacturing might and trade surplus are so massive, and Beijing is so focused on maintaining this advantage, that its own growth will come at the expense of others. A recent Goldman Sachs report found that “China’s growth will likely come at the expense of other high-tech producers such as Europe and Japan […] In other words, it may not generate net-positive growth spillovers elsewhere. A previous analysis by the team has shown that for 1 percentage point of export-driven boost to Chinese GDP, other economies may see a 0.1 to 0.3 percentage point drag, with high-tech producers like Europe and Japan facing particularly acute pressures” (emphasis mine).
US government analysts agree. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s latest annual report to Congress, chapter 8, states that “as China floods global markets with its goods, it will gain a more dominant share of key markets, gutting foreign competitors and propelling them into a downward spiral of deindustrialization. This in turn will lead to greater control over critical supply chain chokepoints.”
This breaks both economic neoliberalism’s assumptions and the unwritten rules of development, preventing other, less developed nations from ascending the value chain because Beijing insists that it maintain a stranglehold on industry. One can dive into this subject further, but the ultimate result is that China, through the execution of its development strategies like Dual Circulation and Made in China 2025, is grasping toward unstated and de facto economic hegemony. Moreover, success in this will come at the expense of others, especially the United States. As per aNew York Times commentary on the subject, “the social consequences of the second China shock around the world are likely to be as profound as the first in the West. We’re starting to get a glimpse of what they might look like.” This will mean lost jobs, slow growth or stagnation, economic instability, then political instability, polarization, and, eventually, radicalization.
The worst-case scenario, which is quite possible, is economic catabolization, which is when the cost of maintaining existing complex infrastructure and systems exceeds the available economic resources. Put another way: can Western democracies, including the United States, sustain their complex and prohibitively expensive welfare states—the cost of which is continuously increasing, owing to fraud, non-productive immigrants, a growing number of retirees, and so on—even as the productive base necessary to sustain these systems breaks down? Common sense indicates no; something has to give.
The only option that remains for Western economies, but especially the United States is to turn inward and rebuild their material bases of power through what I call “national capitalism”: a systematic program of economic and financial reforms along with state-directed industrial policy—a mix of protectionism, anti-monopoly enforcement, subsidies for strategic sectors, and (quietly, through a variety of means) the deliberate subordination of finance to production. And, unique for the United States, the recalibration of existing alliances and diplomatic arrangements into mechanisms for extracting capital and technology from partners who want continued access to American markets and American protection.
This program is already being implemented, albeit slowly and haphazardly, given the sheer size and scale of the task and the corresponding scale and complexity of the US economy, its government, and so forth. And this is without factoring in resistance, both current and expected, from various economic and institutional actors, who stand to lose from sweeping reform programs.
Nonetheless, there are some signs of progress. For instance, the Trump administration’s tariff policy is forcing foreign firms to swallow increased costs to retain market access. As per a recent article:
Tariffs have changed the game. German automobile manufacturers, facing 25% duties on vehicles shipped to American ports, have quietly absorbed much of the cost rather than price themselves out of the lucrative US market. The same pattern emerges across other industries. South Korean electronics firms appear to have trimmed margins rather than pass costs on to American retailers, while even Chinese manufacturers, despite Beijing’s bluster, have found ways to absorb tariff costs through reduced profits rather than abandoning market access. Especially in Asia, many of the major exporters into the US market are privately owned, so there is very little publicly available data on what kind of profit margins they are making. But the clues are all over the place if you care to look. Only a small fraction of each tariff has been passed on to the American consumer, and that must mean it is being absorbed somewhere else.
Likewise, these tariffs—along with US government pressure—are pushing firms to reconsider their investment strategies. Per the same article:
We are already seeing a huge rise in investment in American manufacturing as European and Asian conglomerates realize that is the only way to circumvent US tariffs. The British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca hasannounced a $50 billion investment to build plants in the US. Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC hasannounced a $100 billion investment to start making chips in America. There have even been reports that Swiss chocolatier Lindt may shift production of itsEaster Bunnies to America. Over the next couple of years, we will see a wave of tariff-driven foreign investment, and that will both boost growth and lower the prices here at home.
The more interesting response, however, will be from American start-ups. If the Vietnamese or Polish exporter now faces significant tariffs, there is an opportunity for a new American company to step into the market instead. Sure, they will have to figure out ways to compete on cost. But with tariffs coming alongside advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, that might well be a lot easier than it has been for most of the last 20 years. Economic history tells us that when a market opportunity opens up, entrepreneurs will very quickly find ways of exploiting it. As tariff-protected domestic markets become profitable, new entrants will appear. Innovation will accelerate, and efficiency will improve.
In defense, there are rumors that the administration is considering putting out an executive order that limitsshare buybacks, dividends, and executive pay for defense contractors whose projects are over budget and behind schedule. The Department of Defense is likewise pushing a thorough overhaul of its procurement process, aiming to reduce bureaucracy to boost capacity, capabilities, and more.
This wave of change extends to supply chain security and critical minerals, with the US government—acting through the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital—putting together what increasingly appears to be, and could be called, a de facto critical minerals sovereign wealth fund. This includes investments in MP Materials, Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, Korea Zinc, and other firms, all of which cover a variety of critical minerals at different stages of development.
In diplomacy, especially economic and business diplomacy, the shift towards national capitalism will have a dramatic effect on the conduct of US foreign policy, highlighting the more imperial nature of the ongoing transformation. Essentially, since the United States stands as both the core of the Western system and its largest debtor, serving simultaneously as the guarantor of global security and a nation pressed to rebuild its own industrial capacity to sustain that role, it can leverage its position to enlist others in its own renewal, transforming allied capital into a kind of imperial tribute through the promise of market access and security guarantees.
By doing so, Washington can cajole investment from partners, steering this capital toward American factories, infrastructure, and strategic industries under the banner of collective security. Consider Japan’s pledge to invest $550 billion in the United States, with the stated goal of helping “rebuild and expand core American industries,” as part of a deal in return for lower tariffs on Japanese imports. Similarly, see Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel, which was openly pitched on the basis that it would “create a free-world champion in an industry dominated by China.”
Time and space prohibit further exploration of the vast suite of reforms being considered and implemented by the US government. But the crux of the matter is that the NSS has formalized the afore-described turn toward national capitalism, elevating geoeconomic objectives to the core of American statecraft because the old neoliberal model is breaking down under its own contradictions, leaving the United States vulnerable to a competitor that played the game on entirely different terms.
The transition process will be slow and contested, and likely inflationary, given the requisite surge in government spending. This will lead to battles over monetary policy, possibly ending the independence of the Federal Reserve, and various other efforts to shift resources toward rebuilding factories and refineries at home. Ultimately, though, this is Imperial America recalibrating power on a sustainable material foundation, holding the view that sheer economic productive capacity is the core of American strength from which everything else flows.
There exists in this world the opposite of suicide; when one is seized by a fanatical, monomaniacal desire to survive, to live, at all costs.
The United States, for all its sins, is utterly possessed of this sentiment. It was born in struggle—first against an unforgiving wilderness, then against its mother empire—and has never ceased to define itself through sheer defiance. From colonists braving hunger and storm to revolutionaries who would rather risk annihilation than submission, from pioneers pushing west through hardship to inventors reshaping nature itself, the nation’s story is one long, breathless assertion of life over entropy. It believes, almost religiously, that survival is triumph.
Thus, when forced to recognize the reality of its own mortality, America rages against the dying of its light, breaking against its own contradictions and reinventing old myths to justify its continuance. It would rather burn itself clean and pure than surrender to stillness. Even in decay, it imagines resurrection; even at the edge, it insists there must be another frontier. It is a nation that would reverse the setting of the sun if it could, just to live one more glorious day.
It is this relentless spirit, this distinctly American fury, that pulses throughout the 2025 National Security Strategy. When confronted with its own relative decline, with the exhaustion of its old pretensions, the document’s stark prose describes a nation cornered yet unbowed, driven by the same primal instinct that has always demanded survival at any cost. And so, it embraces the open reality of what the country has become: an empire that will no longer apologize for existing.
What will follow in the coming years will be ugly in places, especially if this NSS is heeded. We should expect tariffs, inflation, debt fights, technological disruption, cultural backlash, migration crackdowns, deportations, cartel wars, proxy interventions, regime pressures, burden-sharing rows, and so much more. And beneath it all, a steady erosion of the old rules-based veneer as spheres of influence harden into reality.
Yet this is the price of refusing to die. America, under this administration, has chosen the path of consolidation over dissipation, betting everything on the conviction that a nation bold enough to declare its core interests plainly—and be ruthless enough to defend them without sermon or pretense—can still rip its future back from the cold hands of death.
The Western powers have failed to effectively manage the increasing threat of proliferation in the Middle East. While the international community is concerned with Iran’s nuclear program, Saudi Arabia has moved forward with developing its own nuclear program, and independent studies show that Israel has longed possessed dozens of nuclear warheads. The former is a member of the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), while the latter has refused to sign the international agreement.
On Middle East policy, the Biden campaign had staunchly criticized the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal and it has begun re-engaging Iran on the nuclear dossier since assuming office in January 2021. However, serious obstacles remain for responsible actors in expanding non-proliferation efforts toward a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
This panel will discuss how Western powers and multilateral institutions, such as the IAEA, can play a more effective role in managing non-proliferation efforts in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Peggy Mason: Canada’s former Ambassador to the UN for Disarmament
– Mark Fitzpatrick: Associate Fellow & Former Executive Director, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
– Ali Vaez: Iran Project Director, International Crisis Group
– Negar Mortazavi: Journalist and Political Analyst, Host of Iran Podcast
– David Albright: Founder and President of the Institute for Science and International Security
Closing (5:45 PM – 6:00 PM ET)
What is the current economic landscape in the Middle East? While global foreign direct investment is expected to fall drastically in the post-COVID era, the World Bank reported a 5% contraction in the economic output of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries in 2020 due to the pandemic. While oil prices are expected to rebound with normalization in demand, political instability, regional and geopolitical tensions, domestic corruption, and a volatile regulatory and legal environment all threaten economic recovery in the Middle East. What is the prospect for economic growth and development in the region post-pandemic, and how could MENA nations promote sustainable growth and regional trade moving forward?
At the same time, Middle Eastern diaspora communities have become financially successful and can help promote trade between North America and the region. In this respect, the diaspora can become vital intermediaries for advancing U.S. and Canada’s business interests abroad. Promoting business diplomacy can both benefit the MENA region and be an effective and positive way to advance engagement and achieve foreign policy goals of the North Atlantic.
This panel will investigate the trade and investment opportunities in the Middle East, discuss how facilitating economic engagement with the region can benefit Canadian and American national interests, and explore relevant policy prescriptions.
Panelists:
– Hon. Sergio Marchi: Canada’s Former Minister of International Trade
– Scott Jolliffe: Chairperson, Canada Arab Business Council
– Esfandyar Batmanghelidj: Founder and Publisher of Bourse & Bazaar
– Nizar Ghanem: Director of Research and Co-founder at Triangle
– Nicki Siamaki: Researcher at Control Risks
The Middle East continues to grapple with violence and instability, particularly in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Fueled by government incompetence and foreign interventions, terrorist insurgencies have imposed severe humanitarian and economic costs on the region. Meanwhile, regional actors have engaged in an unprecedented pursuit of arms accumulation. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have imported billions of both Western and Russian-made weapons and funded militant groups across the region, intending to contain their regional adversaries, particularly Iran. Tehran has also provided sophisticated weaponry to various militia groups across the region to strengthen its geopolitical position against Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.
On the other hand, with international terrorist networks and intense regional rivalry in the Middle East, it is impractical to discuss peace and security without addressing terrorism and the arms race in the region. This panel will primarily discuss the implications of the ongoing arms race in the region and the role of Western powers and multilateral organizations in facilitating trust-building security arrangements among regional stakeholders to limit the proliferation of arms across the Middle East.
Panelists:
Luciano Zaccara: Assistant Professor, Qatar University
Dania Thafer: Executive Director, Gulf International Forum
Kayhan Barzegar: Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Science and Research Branch of Azad University
Barbara Slavin: Director of Iran Initiative, Atlantic Council
Sanam Shantyaei: Senior Journalist at France24 & host of Middle East Matters
The emerging regional order in West Asia will have wide-ranging implications for global security. The Biden administration has begun re-engaging Iran on the nuclear dossier, an initiative staunchly opposed by Israel, while also taking a harder line on Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen. Meanwhile, key regional actors, including Qatar, Iraq, and Oman, have engaged in backchannel efforts to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia to the negotiating table. From a broader geopolitical perspective, with the need to secure its energy imports, China is also expected to increase its footprint in the region and influence the mentioned challenges.
In this evolving landscape, Western powers will be compelled to redefine their strategic priorities and adjust their policies with the new realities in the region. In this panel, we will discuss how the West, including the United States and its allies, can utilize multilateral diplomacy with its adversaries to prevent military escalation in the region. Most importantly, the panel will discuss if a multilateral security dialogue in the Persian Gulf region, proposed by some regional actors, can help reduce tensions among regional foes and produce sustainable peace and development for the region.
Panelists:
– Abdullah Baabood: Academic Researcher and Former Director of the Centre for Gulf Studies, Qatar University
– Trita Parsi: Executive Vice-President, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
– Ebtesam Al-Ketbi: President, Emirates Policy Centre
– Jon Allen: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Israel
– Elizabeth Hagedorn: Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor
Military interventions, political and economic instabilities, and civil unrest in the Middle East have led to a global refugee crisis with an increasing wave of refugees and asylum seekers to Europe and Canada. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has, in myriad ways, exacerbated and contributed to the ongoing security threats and destabilization of the region.
While these challenges pose serious risks to Canadian security, Ottawa will also have the opportunity to limit such risks and prevent a spillover effect vis-à-vis effective humanitarian initiatives in the region. In this panel, we will primarily investigate Canada’s Middle East Strategy’s degree of success in providing humanitarian aid to the region. Secondly, the panel will discuss what programs and initiatives Canada can introduce to further build on the renewed strategy. and more specifically, how Canada can utilize its policy instruments to more effectively deal with the increasing influx of refugees from the Middle East.
Panelists:
Erica Di Ruggiero: Director of Centre for Global Health, University of Toronto
Reyhana Patel: Head of Communications & Government Relations, Islamic Relief Canada
Amir Barmaki: Former Head of UN OCHA in Iran
Catherine Gribbin: Senior Legal Advisor for International and Humanitarian Law, Canadian Red Cross
In 2016, Canada launched an ambitious five-year “Middle East Engagement Strategy” (2016-2021), committing to investing CA$3.5 billion over five years to help establish the necessary conditions for security and stability, alleviate human suffering and enable stabilization programs in the region. In the latest development, during the meeting of the Global Coalition against ISIS, Minister of Foreign Affairs Marc Garneau announced more than $43.6 million in Peace and Stabilization Operations Program funding for 11 projects in Syria and Iraq.
With Canada’s Middle East Engagement Strategy expiring this year, it is time to examine and evaluate this massive investment in the Middle East region in the past five years. More importantly, the panel will discuss a principled and strategic roadmap for the future of Canada’s short-term and long-term engagement in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Ferry de Kerckhove: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Egypt
– Dennis Horak: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia
– Chris Kilford: Former Canadian Defence Attaché in Turkey, member of the national board of the Canadian International Council (CIC)
– David Dewitt: University Professor Emeritus, York University
While the United States continues to pull back from certain regional conflicts, reflected by the Biden administration’s decision to halt American backing for Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen and the expected withdrawal from Afghanistan, US troops continue to be stationed across the region. Meanwhile, Russia and China have significantly maintained and even expanded their regional activities. On one hand, the Kremlin has maintained its military presence in Syria, and on the other hand, China has signed an unprecedented 25-year strategic agreement with Iran.
As the global power structure continues to shift, it is essential to analyze the future of the US regional presence under the Biden administration, explore the emerging global rivalry with Russia and China, and at last, investigate the implications of such competition for peace and security in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Dmitri Trenin: Director of Carnegie Moscow Center
– Joost R. Hiltermann: Director of MENA Programme, International Crisis Group
– Roxane Farmanfarmaian: Affiliated Lecturer in International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa, University of Cambridge
– Andrew A. Michta: Dean of the College of International and Security Studies at Marshall Center
– Kelley Vlahos: Senior Advisor, Quincy Institute
The security architecture of the Middle East has undergone rapid transformations in an exceptionally short period. Notable developments include the United States gradual withdrawal from the region, rapprochement between Israel and some GCC states through the Abraham Accords and the rise of Chinese and Russian regional engagement.
With these new trends in the Middle East, it is timely to investigate the security implications of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. In this respect, we will discuss the Biden team’s new approach vis-à-vis Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The panel will also discuss the role of other major powers, including China and Russia in shaping this new security environment in the region, and how the Biden administration will respond to these powers’ increasing regional presence.
Panelists:
– Sanam Vakil: Deputy Director of MENA Programme at Chatham House
– Denise Natali: Acting Director, Institute for National Strategic Studies & Director of the Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University
– Hassan Ahmadian: Professor of the Middle East and North Africa Studies, University of Tehran
– Abdulaziz Sagar: Chairman, Gulf Research Center
– Andrew Parasiliti: President, Al-Monitor
