US NSS adapts to multipolarity

🔸The publication of the new National Security Strategy of the US outlines a new course, driven by the understanding that the world is moving towards multipolarity. It completes the withdrawal from liberal internationalism and multilateralism. The document caused a shock but in reality this is not at all out of the blue. The first Trump administration (2017-21) already made some initial steps towards economic nationalism and foreign policy realism. Joe Biden changed the narrative and the ideology around most issues but on substance he did not make a U-turn; he managed to impose US national interest in a way that was more acceptable for many international partners, starting with the Europeans. When Trump returned in January 2025, the mask slipped, and with the publication of the NSS the mask has been burned.

🔸 The flexible realist approach of the new NSS recognises power and accommodates the holders of global power. Consequently, as compared to the previous edition (2022), the new NSS reduces the heat on China, which is the main economic rival of the US and also on Russia which is the main military opponent. It does not focus primarily on China or mark competition with Beijing as the top challenge for the US, at least not explicitly. Building an economic coalition against China is an endeavour, but a war around Taiwan is far from being a matter of fatality, and Trump will continue to try to peel off Russia as well as India (a “critical partner”) from the Chinese alliance. The NSS frames immigration in a securitised context, to provide more ammunition to the far right nationalists in Europe, and to make the US—Latin-America relations even more conflictual.

🔸The NSS confirms the will do restore the 19th century Monroe Doctrine (1823) which originally was about excluding Europeans from colonisation or even interference in Latin-America. Now the main question is to push back China. Such an enclosure of the Western Hemisphere today represents a declaration of domination with a particular attention to access to resources. Fight against drug cartels has been developed as an ideological framing and a feeble legal foundation for this endeavour. Historically, it has never been good news for Latin-America when the US administration moved towards „isolationism”, and this time they again appear as prime targets of US „resource imperialism”.

🔸Importantly for Europe, the NSS stresses that the Middle East is no longer the top strategic priority for the US. This can be seen as a de facto end of the Carter Doctrine (1980), which declared the U.S. would use military force, if necessary, to defend its vital interests in the Persian Gulf. This was announced primarily to deter Soviet expansion following the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution. With Arab nationalist states (Iraq, Libya, Syria) have been destroyed in the recent decades, the US can afford a step back in this region, which surely will not mean abandoning Israel as a key ally and sometimes proxy.

🔸The NSS provokes Europe with the vision of „civilisational erasure”. It offers not only encouragement but also support to far right nationalist forces intending to weaken and perhaps even destroy the European Union. Deforcing regulation within the Single Market opens up the EU to US corporations, similarly to the UK which went through this in the 1980s (the Thatcher years). Trump wants to take advantage of the weakness of the EU to accelerate European decline. Europe as a continent being in relative economic and demographic decline is the inconvenient truth from an economic point of view (and, in recent years, the EU has also been burning its soft power too). Mario Draghi and many others have warned about such trends. The NSS is just another warning to take all that seriously.

🔸 The first Trump administration triggered thinking about strategic autonomy in Europe. In the face of their renewed American hostility towards our continent, the strategy of European sovereignty must be confirmed and further developed. The US made it clear in the course of 2025 that it will not help Europeans winning a war against Russia in Ukraine. Europeans need to draw conclusions from this for the short as well as the long-run. The EU can reemerge as a defender of international law as long as this is done consistently (i.e. in all contexts and geographies). If Europeans think of the EU as a force of freedom, social justice and democracy, these should not remain just words. This program requires more unity and more strength. Closer defence cooperation in the EU is part of the answer to Trump’s nationalist and unilateralist agenda, but it is insufficient. Big leaps in the fields of technological, economic and financial sovereignty are also needed, together with more serious work on intra-European cohesion and risk-sharing between the member states.

🔸The NSS is not a security strategy but a domination strategy with a differentiated approach regarding the Western and the Eastern hemispheres. Europeans need to take note that the era of missionary liberal internationalism in US foreign policy is over. Those with a crush on the image of a cruisading US need to absorb that the US does not want to cruisade any more. US foreign policy has moved away from conventional dichotomies. Trump broke away from the warmongering neoconservatives, but he does not identify with the liberal multilateralist school either. Here comes a flexible realism with the aim to stabilise American primacy and exploit asymmetric power relations through unilateralist methods including bilateral economic agreements (deals). Trump is neither a hawk nor a dove, but a vulture.