After living on life support in the last half of the post-Cold War, Pax America is now a memory. It was relegated to the dustbin of history with the “Trump” National Security Strategy published earlier this month. President Donald Trump and his clique are not solely responsible for the reduced ambitions of the United States global empire. The world—including the United States—has changed. The strategy is the answer of a right-wing billionaire sector of the US elite to tectonic economic, military, and technological changes.

Eighty years ago, when the US emerged as the world’s dominant power nation, it possessed 50% of the world’s wealth, the most advanced “conventional” military forces, and was the only nation possessing genocidal nuclear weapons. After European nations and Japan rebuilt their economies in the aftermath of WWII, China brought 600 million people out of poverty, and the demise of colonialism, the US share of global GDP has fallen by half to 24%. These changes have had an immense impact on what can be spent to develop and deploy “advanced” and murderous militaries, the number of engineers and scientists a nation can produce, and even the exercise of soft power.

Other forces have also been at play. Witness the emergence of the Global South as a powerful force. South Africa had the temerity to challenge the Western assisted Israeli genocide in the International Court of Justice. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and others) are contesting US economic dominance. And the Emirates have emerged as a powerful economic and political force with leverage over Trump.

The strategy is also a mutant offspring of the information revolution and of an extreme right-wing Supreme Court that played a central role in birthing an immense concentration of wealth resulting in the rise of new and anti-democratic elites reminiscent of feudal era princes, lords, and masters.

The strategy is contradictory, ignorant, and white supremacist; written in highly accessible language designed to win support of the MAGA masses.

Thus, a powerful sector of the US billionaire elite has developed a revised, destructive, and nationally self-destructive strategy to reinforce their privilege and power for the still emerging multipolar world disorder.

The Trump strategy is painful to read. It reeks of white supremacist rhetoric and policy commitments. It begins with fawning and obsequious praise of our Great Helmsman, Trump. And it is rife with braggadocio that belies observable reality, for example the boasts of having obliterated Iraq’s nuclear program and ending eight wars including Gaza, Rwanda-Democratic Republic of Congo, and Thailand-Cambodia. But the strategy does crystallize what was implicit during Trump’s first term in office and what we have witnessed and suffered in the past very painful year.

There is also the truism that foreign policies are manifestations of domestic priorities. From reinforcing white supremacy to authoritarianism and kleptocracy, this is also the case for the Trump-MAGA strategy.

Analysts across the country and foreign leaders have been stunned by the strategy’s declaration of the end of Pax Americana, the confession that global hegemony is a “fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal.” Richard Haass, formerly the president of the liberal Council on Foreign Relations, declared that the strategy is “ the biggest redirection of US foreign policy since the end of WWII and the dawn of the Cold War…” Chinese officials describe it as “moving from unipolarity to multipolarity." And Russians have not been shy about saying that it is consistent with their vision. European leaders are panicked.

Chinese leaders, since their pursuit of new great power relations in the Obama era, see the new US military and economic priorities as the logical consequence of US post-Cold War “hegemonic failures”: failed and disastrous imperial wars, its economic fragility, social and political fragmentation, and the worldwide perceptions that the US is no longer invincible.

Walden Bello, among the most inspired and inspiring Asian analysts and progressive political leaders, describes the strategy as a compromise document negotiated between three forces in Trump’s coalition: Maximalists who “still cling to the dream of American dominance," Specifists led by Elbridge Colby at the Pentagon and his allies “who believe America must retreat from Europe and the Middle East to focus single-mindedly on China,” and Continentalists or “neo-Monroeists, led by Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance, “ who advocate “an almost hermit-like retrenchment, turning the US into a fortress continent.”

In Europe, where fear has abounded that the United States would abandon its continental protectorate, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the end of Pax Americana. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, warned that the strategy places the US to the right of the extreme right in Europe. And reflecting an increasingly shared belief, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations declared that “the West as it used to be no longer exists.” And he is right.

The strategy has also sown panic among US neoconservatives and liberal imperialists. Speaking for many, Anne Applebaum remarked that it is “hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and publicly.” And for some, the New York Times eight-page special opinion section which argues that the US military has been “overmatched” by China provides a path back to “normalcy.” It urges still greater military spending, focusing on creating greater AI and cyber warfare capabilities, and returning to the era when the Pentagon had 51, not 5, primary military contractors.

The strategy is contradictory, ignorant, and white supremacist; written in highly accessible language designed to win support of the MAGA masses.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson was clear that the National Security Strategy is explicit in its goal of creating a "white supremacist country," rejecting immigration, and "'restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” We hear echoes of Nazi and Charlottesville “great replacement” rhetoric as code words and dog whistles such as “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” defending and preserving “civilization,” and “strong traditional families that raise healthy families” appear throughout the document.

While the strategy pledges the “predisposition to non-interventionism,” gunboat diplomacy continues apace with the largest US naval flotilla since the Cuban Missile Crisis assembled off the coast of Venezuela.

Its featured first goal is to establish “full control over our borders.” Why? Because “mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion… undermined national security.” This despite actual crime statistics that immigrants are one-third less likely to be imprisoned than those born in the US, that construction and agricultural employers are hurting as tens of thousands of dedicated workers are deported, that fewer young workers mean weakened Social Security and support for our aging population. And our universities and industries that depend on attracting the best and brightest from around the world are deprived of essential human capital.

If that weren’t enough, the strategy pledges to “root out” diversity, equity, and inclusion in foreign, as well as domestic, policy—one other way that Trump and MAGA are sabotaging the nation’s foundations.

And on the subject of contradictions, while the strategy pledges the “predisposition to non-interventionism,” gunboat diplomacy continues apace with the largest US naval flotilla since the Cuban Missile Crisis assembled off the coast of Venezuela that is illegally sinking boats, murdering sailors in clear contravention of international law, and enforcing a blockade to impose regime change in Venezuela, and by extension Cuba.

Soon after Donald Trump’s reelection a former senior US arms control diplomat was asked by his Russian interlocutor what Trump’s foreign policy priority would be. The answer: Trump’s first, second, and third priorities would be doing all that he can to enrich himself and his family. Not surprisingly we have been delivered the country’s most mercantile foreign policy agenda in more than a century. Access to other nations’ raw materials and markets are the priority, and, in another break with at least three generations of foreign policy rhetoric, the strategy is explicit that human rights concerns will not be a factor that interferes with US commercial interests and that the US won’t be imposing "democratic social change.” The New York Times: put it well when it carried a report saying, “The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make more money.”

What is its agenda? Seeking “balanced trade,” access to resources, protecting supply chains, and “reindustrialization.” Never mind that despite Trump’s devastating tariffs, which are increasing costs for Americans and alienating much of the world, offshored manufacturing is NOT returning to the US. Other commitments include maintaining the “dollar’s global reserve status,” pushing back against “Non-Hemispheric competitors'" economic inroads in “our hemisphere,” and the insistence on Latin American nations granting no-bid contracts to US companies. Taiwan’s value is boiled down to semiconductors and serving as a geopolitical cork, US forces are to maintain a "free and open Pacific” for trade purposes, and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are seen as resources for investments. “Every US Government official that interacts with these countries should understand,” US diplomats and the world are told, “that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

After conceding that the US will not seek to control developments in every corner of the world, the strategy opts to maintain US primacy via balances of power and consolidating spheres of influence, not that China is to have a sphere. Consistent with its Biden and Obama predecessors, we are to be reassured by the Trumpian commitment to building the “world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military,” ostensibly to “protect our interests” and to maintain the world’s “most advanced economy.” It allows no light to shine between the Trump agenda and the New York Times’ call for increased US military spending to modernize the US military industrial base, to maintain the world’s most deadly nuclear arsenal, and to divert hundreds of billions of dollars to military contractors to build Trump’s “Golden Dome” of missile defenses that will never work.

The strategy is consistent with the Jesse Helms-John Bolton insistence on sovereignty—personal and national. This should be read as white individualist sovereignty and rejection of international law, the United Nations, and foreign aid on which millions of human lives have depended. Moreover, the order in which the strategy addresses geopolitical regions is telling. First the Western Hemisphere, then Asia, then Europe, then the Middle East, and finally Africa

But let me begin with antecedents to the Trump-MAGA animus toward Europe. More than 200 years ago, as he retired from the presidency, George Washington warned the newly independent nation to avoid dangerous European entanglements. Prior to World Wars I and II, powerful isolationist movements opposed the US entering those wars. Decades later, in 2003, anger in response to French resistance to joining the US in its Iraq War for oil led to congressional dining rooms renaming French fries as “freedom fries!”

Since 1945, Western Europe has been a US protectorate. When NATO was founded in 1949, Lord Ismay, the alliance’s first secretary general, observed that its purpose was to keep Russia out, Germany down, and the US in. Now, after NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, European economic competition as well as collaborations with the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the reelection of a president more aligned with Russian authoritarianism that European liberal and social

© Common Dreams