Less than six months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration’s foreign policy has generated widespread dismay and confusion at home and abroad. The use of tariffs against allies and adversaries; the threats to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama; and the unusually blunt criticism of Washington’s closest partners appear both arbitrary and destructive, especially to policymakers who have spent their professional lives managing the U.S.-led international order. They believe that creating order in a world full of complex transnational challenges requires alliances, credibility, and soft power—precisely what the Trump administration seems bent on destroying.

Aspects of its policies may be difficult to understand, but there is a logic at the core of the administration’s national security strategy. The Trump administration sees the previous U.S. strategy—which aimed to build and maintain a global order led by the United States—as a misguided effort that has sapped U.S. power. It views Washington’s moves to cultivate soft power as leading to meddling and overstretch, and it perceives highly credible American security guarantees as encouraging most of the United States’ allies to reduce their defense efforts and rely on its protection.

Instead of trying to create global order, the Trump administration now appears to be pursuing a more focused strategy: prioritization. Its reasoning is simple. The United States has limited resources and China is its greatest geopolitical threat, so Washington must energize recalcitrant allies around the world to manage their own regions, freeing the United States to concentrate on Asia.

At this early stage, prioritization is only one of several approaches the Trump administration may pursue. But for now, signs of prioritization are evident in the administration’s words and actions. In the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance, circulated at the Pentagon in March, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described China as “the Department’s sole pacing threat” and the “denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan—while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland” as “the Department’s sole pacing scenario.” This echoed ideas promoted for years by Elbridge Colby, who is now the undersecretary of defense for policy and whose 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, contended that the top priority of U.S. foreign policy was to assemble an “anti-hegemonic coalition” in Asia to prepare for the possibility of “a war with China over Taiwan.”

In practice, the logic of prioritization clarifies many of the Trump administration’s actions with regard to Europe. Tough talk to NATO allies is meant to convince them that they can no longer rely on Washington and must do more for themselves. Ending the war in Ukraine quickly and bringing peace to the continent would enable the United States to reduce its military presence there and focus its resources on Asia. Even the schisms between the United States and Europe over the terms of a settlement between Russia and Ukraine are connected to prioritization. European leaders insist that the U.S. military play a major role in monitoring a peace deal because they desperately want to keep the United States in Europe; the Trump administration wants those responsibilities to rest on European shoulders because it wants out.

The principles of prioritization predate the Trump administration, and they will likely endure beyond it. Every U.S. president since Barack Obama has tried to “pivot” U.S. national security focus from Europe to Asia, because they have all understood that the greater threat to the United States lies in Asia and that U.S. allies in Europe have more capacity to defend themselves. If Trump’s team can make this titanic shift happen—if it can draw down U.S. forces in Europe and concentrate U.S. military strength in Asia—future presidents are unlikely to shift back.

When the United States faced another rising great-power rival, the Soviet Union, in the late 1940s, it adopted a strategy that became known as containment to counter the threat. That strategy was initially flawed but refined over time. The first version of prioritization, too, has important weaknesses. Although the strategy is built on the recognition that U.S. resources are limited, the Trump administration has requested higher defense spending. And although prioritization is designed to prevent China’s domination of East Asia, some of the Trump administration’s policies may be courting unnecessary danger in pursuit of that objective. Policymakers will now have to work through these tensions in the new U.S. strategy. In one form or another, prioritization is here to stay.

For more than three decades, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has pursued a highly ambitious objective: to create, expand, and lead a liberal international order. But for the Trump administration, that order is a fantasy. Efforts to transform global politics have sapped American power and left the United States with near-constant wars, an overextended military, and free-riding allies. Liberal principles such as free trade and the right to asylum, although appealing in theory, robbed the United States of the ability to preserve its domestic industrial power and control its border. Maintaining the international order, prioritizers say, has meant putting the United States second.

Prioritization reframes U.S. national security policy by focusing on the safety, prosperity, and social cohesion of the United States. But prioritizers are not isolationists who want to concentrate only on homeland defense. Instead, this strategy offers a middle position between isolationism and the longtime U.S. strategy of global leadership. It narrows the goals of U.S. foreign policy to focus on the country’s most urgent threat—the rise of a rival regional hegemon, China—in order to avoid overstretching the United States’ finite resources.

A reckoning with the end of U.S. primacy has driven this shift in strategy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States faced no superpower rivals and could therefore act as what former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the “indispensable nation,” the country that would solve conflicts and lead multilateral efforts around the globe. Those days are gone. Prioritizers condemn that kind of global activism as producing what Colby has described as “overextension” in pursuit of “wildly ambitious goals” predicated on “a gauzy conception of the ‘sacredness’ of alliances without real strength or prudence to back it up.”

Fiscal constraints reinforce the call for greater discipline in U.S. foreign policy. The United States has amassed $29 trillion in public debt, roughly equal to the country’s GDP. To make matters worse, the federal budget deficit, at more than six percent of GDP, is higher today than at any time in the past century (except for periods of war or severe economic downturn), pushing the national debt ever higher. And as the U.S. population ages, federal spending on Medicare and Social Security will also increase. As Americans face difficult tradeoffs between spiraling debts, higher........

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